Most advocates of a MacIntyrian or Aristotelian virtue-ethics might not immediately agree. But consider: Most of our behavior, according to the virtue-ethicist, is in fact predetermined by previous determinations of the will, which usually result in observable patterns of repeated action, eventually becoming habits. These habits significantly determine, and even allow others to predict, a given individual’s actions. So oddly, virtue-ethics as an explanation of human behavior can hold its own among competing determinist accounts of human behavior.
Wednesday, May 2, 2012, 10:55 AM
May 2nd, 2012 | 11:24 am
“So oddly, virtue-ethics as an explanation of human behavior can hold its own among competing determinist accounts of human behavior. The only difference is that virtue-ethics preserves free will”
Well, yeah. But isn’t that the difference which makes it non-determinist?
May 2nd, 2012 | 12:53 pm
Can’t it be asked, however, whether the choices to attempt to form our own habits are themselves determined? And even if they are, what about our successes and particularly failures to form the habits we freely choose. On 60 Minutes this week there was a profile of a woman who studies addiction, and it all pretty much seems to boil down to brain chemistry. One might ask whether addiction and habit are not fundamentally the same, and how much control we have in forming or breaking habits. I have read fascinating stories of people becoming compulsive gamblers as a result of taking drugs (generally for Parkinson’s) that regulate dopamine. One was about a man who had never been interested in gambling, but became such a compulsive gambler that his wife divorced him and he lost his job. When he stopped taking the drugs that affected his dopamine levels, he stopped gambling immediately and had no interest in it again. How do we know that there are not naturally occurring changes in brain chemistry that affect our behavior disastrously the way dopamine agonists affect people like this unfortunate man?
May 4th, 2012 | 5:41 am
The main idea, of course, is that it’s not human virtue, but the virtue of a universe subject to the same causality as we humans, and therefore also without a free will (barring a logic-transcending first cause, of course).
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