[Home]Evil/MoralityOfActions

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ChiarkPerson asks: 'is the moral quality of an action to do with its consequences or the motives of the actor, or something else?'

DouglasReay replies: this seems closer to the heart of the matter.  If someone gives a billion dollars to a vaccination program that will save the lives of millions of African children, could it be considered an evil action if they did it with petty or malicious personal motives (eg to spite a particular nay sayer)?  A pure [Utilitarian] might say that motives are only relevant as far as they set precedents or in any other way have consequences.

Vocab:
  Results-Based : consequentialism / teleological
  Standards-Based : deontological / duty
  Relativist-Based :  egoism / objectivist / intuitionism
good links / explanations for these categories anyone?

redstone - how would you classify virtue ethics such as Nietzsche if not relativist?

Nietzsche has nothing to do with [virtue ethics].
"Nietzsche's theory emphasizes the inner self and provides a possible response to the call for a better understanding of moral psychology. Swanton develops an account of self-love that allows her to distinguish true virtue from closely related vices, e.g. self-confidence from vanity or ostentation, virtuous and vicious forms of perfectionism, etc. She also makes use of the Nietzschean ideas of creativity and expression to show how different modes of acknowledgement are appropriate to the virtues." - [Encyclopedia of Philosophy] see also Hunt, Lester. 1991. Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue (London: Routledge). and Solomon, Robert C. 2001. “Nietzsche's Virtues: A Personal Inquiry,” in Schacht (2001). --DR

Good God man. The very sentence before that reads 'For example, Christine Swanton has developed a pluralist account of virtue ethics with connections to Nietzsche.' Might that qualifier not have suggested to you that mainstream virtue ethics is not pluralist? If not, maybe the sentence before that which introduces Swanson by saying that 'diverse writers [are] developing other theories of virtue' (my italics).

Go far away and come back when you don't feel quite such a need to pull quotations out of context so hideously.

but I'll grant I was being slightly playful in suggesting him as an epitome of virtue ethics, and that Aristotle would be a more usual choice.


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