[CW: bestiality] Professional "moral philosopher" ponders whether it's OK to sexually assault animals, featuring AI art

Deontology and consequentialism are both cringe compared with virtue ethics. As socialists, we understand that the ultimate purpose of intellectual work is to change the world. This means that any ethical system needs to:

1. Understand how most people currently act

2. Understand how most people ought to act

3. Have a practical means of getting people to move from acting how they currently act to acting how they ought to act

Deontology and consequentialism exclusively focus on 2 to the exclusion of 1 and 3. Cool, you've definitively proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's okay to fuck animals. Too bad the rest of society thinks you're a complete pervert and the anarchovegans have organized community defense to ensure your lecherous hands will never touch an animal. Explaining your reasoning isn't stopping the anarchovegan enbie from breaking your arms and kicking your teeth in. Now what? What's the game plan, chief?

Virtue ethics does not have this problem because unlike the other two, virtue ethics is much more grounded and understands that ethics is inexorably linked with human conduct, which is often times messy and contradictory. It understands that people need both guidance and accountability, that reading a bunch of books wouldn't make you a moral person, but that you must practice what you've read out in the real world and face the many challenges of living an ethical life in this messy world, that the good aspects of a person must be cultivated with the bad aspects culled. In short, virtue ethics is dialectical while the other two are not.

i would tend to agree that virtue ethics is most compatible with socialist/marxist principles. i think the definition of virtue and the doctrine of the mean can apply aptly to the life of a socialist citizen, one that is without excess or deficiency. it would be a vice to live in excess (e.g america with cars, being filthy rich, etc) but it would also be a vice to live in deficiency (no human should live in poverty or not be able to have access to basic needs). and hopefully, a proletarian state would enforce this too, preventing the vice of excess (wealth redistribution) and of deficiency (providing to all workers).

The takes on virtue ethics are interesting to me, as I see myself becoming more and more consequentialist. Like, I'll talk to someone or overhear a conversation and it's all about doing the right thing or being a good person, all of which usually seems ineffectual and ego-focused amidst the non-existent Leftist movements of the West and the ticking time bomb that is climate change. I care less about whether an action makes any specific individual a good person than what the action accomplishes, particularly to advance working class or decolonial interests. Both virtue ethics and deontology, at least as I see them manifested in my circles, seem largely subsumed into consumer ethics.

They each have value as analytical lenses to judge difficult situations with, I suppose.