Obviously, too far down that road lies We (or Anthem, if you prefer), but “try to offer people opportunities that are particularly well-suited to their talents” seems like a reasonably prosocial thing to do if that sort of matching can be made reliably.

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I have two complaints here, the first of which is that virtue ethics is not just the claim that we should use our intuitive moral sense.

I recently came across a great example of the sort of thing I think they have in mind:

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html

Complete rubbish, of course, but it has a very virtue=ethicist vibe. It doesn’t seem to fit with those claims you list, though, so …

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1. Ethics involves teleology, eg considering the
objectively proper ends of beings

Utilitarian ethics involves abstractions like “rational agent”,
“utility function”, “[revealed] preference”, etc. It’s not clear that
these abstractions don’t smuggle in teleology somewhere (“an agent
should follow its preferences”, or “people should try to be rational
agents”), or that they map clearly or nontrivially onto reality at
all.

2. Ethics has to be grounded in a community to make sense; individual
ethics are only a pale shadow

Is it possible for someone not to follow their goals? If not
(“revealed preference”) then utilitarianism says nothing to the
individual except for “achieve your goals” — i.e., “do what you
want, which you’re already doing anyway”. If so, then it presumably either

1. asks people to search for their “deepest” goals, to
coherently/rationally order them, etc. — which sounds awfully like
“seeking the proper end of a rational animal” to me (if these deep goals come
from what people, in general, are like), or

2. asks people to somehow “submit” their preferences to the aggregated
preferences of the community — or even of all “agents”, broadly
construed. This makes individuals slaves to the desires of the
community, including any utility monsters that happen to be floating around.

3. Ethics is role-dependent; your role as a mother or child or
employee or citizen produces your ethical obligations

This fits pretty well with whatever intuition leads people to say,
“she’s a good citizen”, “he’s a good father”, etc. Moreover, virtue
ethics as I understand it treats one’s roles in a hierarchical way:
you’re a person before you’re male or female, before you’re an
employee, before you’re an employee at so-and-so institution. So
saying “she’s a good person” trumps “she’s a good employee of US
Mail”.

4. Ethics is better thought of as about people’s character than about
the acts they perform

This makes perfect sense if the key ethical question is “how should I
live?”, rather than “how should I act in this dilemma (multilemma?)
with a discretized or manageable set of alternatives?”. Virtue ethics
is about good habits, rather than good individual actions; it is
surely virtuous (e.g. prudent) to reason in a consequentialist way in
many situations. Utilitarianism is about framing dilemmas as mathematical optimization problems (crude caricature).

5. It is useful and important to subdivide good behavior into certain
virtues like justice, wisdom, and fortitude

… so that one can say, “she’s wise” or “he’s brave”, rather than
“she’s good at maximizing good consequences”, “he’s good at maximizing
good consequences”.

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The Platonic/Socratic argument seems to be:
If you know the good, you will do it.
To prove a thing is to come to know it.
Therefore, the way to become good is to prove things to yourself about the good.

The problem with this argument is that it equivocates on the senses of “know the good.” An example: you might think that reading the Sequences on Less Wrong is helpful in becoming rational. But only reading the sequences is not sufficient for most people – you have to actually practice overcoming your bad habits, sometimes even overcorrecting with the opposite bias to break yourself from your bad habits.

It’s much the same with any other virtue. There is the kind of knowledge of the good that allows you to figure out what the obviously right answer is when sitting calmly in a safe place after the fact, and then there is the kind of knowledge of the good that allows you to do the obviously right thing when you are hungry or tired or stressed out or scared or distracted.

This is why to virtue ethicists, modern ethics seems bizarrely nitpicky, focused on edge cases that are unlikely to occur while completely neglecting the art of successfully applying the things that we do know about right action.

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If I understand virtue ethics right, a fireman is acting virtuously in fulfilling his role as a fireman, and a professional arsonist (if such things be) is acting virtuously in fulfilling his role as an arsonist, and in neither case does the fact that fire destroys property and burns people come into the equation (although on a higher level one can certainly debate the ethics of taking on either role)

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This reads like a fish not noticing water. Do you call your mother on Mother’s Day? Do you call other peoples’ mothers on Mother’s Day?

“You could cherry-pick examples of people’s behavior where it looks like they believe 4 and 5″

You didn’t give a good response to 5. Some people think of exercise in terms of muscle groups; other people have a less sophisticated view. Not only are the first group more likely to be fit, the increased sophistication of their view probably contributes to that fitness.

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I imagined using the same language to describe different ways of getting something right that’s somewhat less subjective and emotional than morality, say, writing reliable computer programs.

Some people would say “here is a list of rules, follow them”. But this approach sucks when the technology and understanding get better, because you keep writing code that saves two bytes if it’s compiled on a 1990’s 8-bit home computer, because that was a good idea at the time.

Other people would say, “choose whichever outcome will make the code more reliable in the long run”. That’s better than “follow these outdated rules”, but doesn’t really tell you what to do hour-by-hour.

In fact, the people who do best seem to be those who have general principles they stick to, like “fix the security holes first”, even if it’s impossible to truly estimate the relative plusses and minusses of avoiding an eventual security breach versus adding a necessary new feature now. But theyy don’t stick to them blindly, and are willing to update or bypass those principles when there’s an actual benefit in doing so.

My thought, which I’m not yet very sure of, is the same applies to morality.

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Speaking of which, I’m not sure 1 and 2 are required for all formulations of virtue ethics, either. For number 1 in particular, I’m not sure if its prominence in MacIntyre’s theory does come more from MacIntyre being a (theologically-minded?) Catholic rather than the inherent properties of the concept of virtue ethics.

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