After Happiness, Cyborg Virtue

Posted by Peter Wicks  on  03/21  at  09:43 AM

Fascinating. I completely share your position on meta-ethics. On your ethical choice I have some misgivings, but it's certainly one of the strongest arguments so far that there is an ethical system that I might actually find more attractive than utilitarianism.

The emphasis on flourishing and virtue over "happiness" mirrors developments in my own personal approach to life, but I have usually tended to see this as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

Gradually, though, the creeping realisation has been growing in my mind that I don't actually value happiness above all else: I do actually value some virtues for their own sake, and also homeostatis, which I interpret broadly to include mental homeostatis.

There is a counter-argument, though. We might consider a future of wire-headed cyberpunks to be dystopic, even if the cyberpunks themselves are very happy (and even if one or more of them can reasonably be considered to be our future self/ves), but how much do we really like a future that in which we flourish and are supremely virtuous, but are also to some extent miserable? If ethics is indeed a matter of choice, and not of truth, then why would we want to make this choice.

In the short term the differences between these approaches is almost certainly too subtle to make much of a practical difference. The important thing is to just get on and apply them (not least by urgently increasing the resilience of the global system, which is at risk of collapse over the next two to three decades). But I agree that if we do manage to get through the bottleneck then we will need to clarify these issues. Otherwise we will end up fighting over them.

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