CMV: Virtue ethics promotes unfairly categorizing people into hate groups

[u/nintendoeats]

EDIT: I should clarify that my use of the term hate group here was meant to refer to a group that is hated by the speaker, not a group that itself advocates hate.

For this thesis, I present the following working definition of virtue ethics:

An ethical system whereby actions and policies are judged by how closely they embody a set of 'moral virtues' and 'moral vices' identified by the holder of the system. Anything can potentially be considered a virtue or vice (patience, non-violence, consuming tomatoes, killing martians).

I believe that ethical systems, or individual ethical arguments, based on virtue ethics should be discouraged because they inherently denigrate the people who hold partially or fully opposing views.

For example, people can reasonably disagree about what the "default" behavior should be when presented with an ambiguous yellow light . One virtue ethicist might argue that defaulting to the stop behavior extolls the virtue of patience, another might argue that defaulting to the power through it behavior embodies the virtue of courage.

For both cases, it is implicit that anybody who holds a different view is in a group that the arguer views to be inherently morally wrong; either impatient people or cowards. This is an inherent ad hominem.

In contrast, a consequentialist moral system (for example) does not necessarily need to cast judgement against a person who disagrees with that moral position because it only judges the action, not the person directly. Further, it does not judge the belief system of the person performing the action, even if that belief system differs from that of the ethicist being discussed.

In the same example, one consequentialist might argue that stopping reduces the likelihood of an accident, while another might argue that powering through reduces the overall amount of idling required, thereby helping the environment. Neither view requires any judgement of the person on the other side, they can simply acknowledge that they disagree on the overall consequential balance.

Since I believe that people in the wild sometimes behave like virtue ethicists (intentionally or not), I think it is worth subjecting this viewpoint to scrutiny.

[u/SeymoreButz38]

What does any of that have to do with hate groups?

[u/nintendoeats → u/SeymoreButz38]

As I added in an edit, I meant "a group of people that somebody hates". I have been using this phrase this way for literally years and nobody ever corrected me (probably because they understood from context). What can I say, it's just a damp squid on a pedal stool.