Raymond's Weblog^
Virtue, Illusions, and the Tasting of Soup
This is an essay about virtue, through the metaphor of the soup ritual.
What is the soup ritual? It’s when a group of people gather around a soup and try to guess what’s in it. It’s very common in my family - I’ve been doing it since before I remember.
Someone suggests a potential ingredient, and we all nod thoughtfully, tasting the soup to check. One of us says there’s a herb - maybe parsely? Not quite. Coriander, someone else suggests, and we all agree, yes, of course, there is a hint of coriander. And the big yellow lump floating in it - could be potato? Carrot? Squash?
And the internal experience is particularly interesting - you have this wash of flavours in your mouth that you just can’t make sense of, but when somebody says “parsely”, or when you actually think to yourself “parsley”, suddenly you know it is parsley. You’re certain - it just clicks into place.
It’s like listening to a song and not being able to make out the lyrics until someone says the phrase, or looking blankly at a photograph of some leaves until someone points out the neatly camoflaged frog.
where is it? you’ll know it when you see it
The raw data of the world is presented to us by perception, but making sense of it sometimes requires an active effort on our part, of generating candidates for the complex structures and testing them against our observations.
And of course some of this is happening automatically, which is how optical illusions can make it seem like there’s something moving in a static image, or like two identical tones are actually very different colours. Our brain seems to do a lot of preprocessing in a way that we literally can’t turn off. But this has its limits - I still have to hunt for ingredients in the soup.
Virtue
I think this is what made virtue ethics click for me.
The great sleight of hand in a lot of modern moral philosophy is that you neatly abstract away all the messy details and focus your analysis on a short summary of the problem, without context.
Kant’s approach in the metaphysics of morals gives criteria for judging specific maxims - how you act, and why - but it doesn’t so much tell you which maxims might apply to a situation. Often there are several which point in different directions.
Utilitarianism, and consequentialism more generally, tell you to crunch the numbers, and add up all the terms, but the hard part is figuring out what all the terms are, and the easy mistake of a naive conequentialist is not noticing all the second-order effects.
The canonical objection against virtue ethics is that it’s not action-guiding: it doesn’t cleanly tell you what to do. But actually, all the clean ethical theories only really tell you what to do when you’ve sanitised reality into a format they can accept, which unfortunately tends to blur out a lot of key details.
For me, virtue ethics is unusual compared to the more reason-based ethics because it’s more like a dialogue with your intuitions. I take a course of action I’m considering, and I hold it in my mind and ask: “does this feel courageous?”, “is there a hint of vindictiveness in here?”, “is that cowardice? ah! no, it’s temperance!”.
And the great thing is, not only do you have this extremely powerful hardware already installed, but you can tune it with practice. You can get better at noticing some subtle note of discord: “even though this seems like the obvious thing to do, I feel like there’s a bitter taste to it that I can’t quite put my finger on”.
Of course virtue ethics has its own limits and inadequacies - it doesn’t do so well when you scale up to thorny problems where harm is unavoidable. But even then, it’s an excellent piece to have in your toolkit. And to me, taking a virtuous action is nice in the same way that eating really good soup is nice: digging into the subtleties makes you appreciate it more.
Sometimes I just make mistakes, and that’s unavoidable. But what’s more avoidable is settling on a course of action despite a little sour hint that it’s wrong, something I haven’t quite figured out how to articulate and instead have chosen to ignore.
I don’t know how much this is just a me thing, but it seems to really work for me, and I wish I’d started thinking about virtue this way sooner.