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Virtue goals: Week 10

To think more before I speak; I found myself saying things this week which I immediately regretted expressing in that particular situation.

Have the courage and stamina to face my current challenges and survive my current trials with my head up.

Be more excellently for the good of my best friend. Offer her more emotionally.

I'm going to be disciplined and for once do more than the minimum amount of work this week.

There is something that does not exactly sit right with Adams's description of virtue as something that we should admire. (p. 19) Adams states that virtue could be partially described as perspectives in thinking about what kind of person "we would want to be."
I do not believe this is a reliable method of identifying moral virtue. People are capable of admiring the wrong things, and often do: someone might admire the promiscuous accomplishments of his friend, or his capacity while binge drinking, though these behaviors are clearly not virtuous.
People are also capable of scorning what would normally be considered virtuous (or at any rate, moral) actions, and again, they often do: One can hate another's honesty and initiative when the results mean he will learn the unpleasant truth: if this were not the case the scenario of "shooting the messenger" would not exist.
Adams, fortunately, does not make this the central or even an overall important factor for determining a moral virtue; it is more supplementary than anything else. Though it is ideal that one admires what is good and scorns what is bad, this is not always the case. Thus, this method is not a reliable one for determining moral virtue simply due to the fact that people are fallible.

More than one way to be right

On page 11, Adams states that there is probably only one thing to do that is truly right, whereas there are many things that are good. This seems like a very different take from Taylor’s, who discussed the idea of supereragatory virtue: virtue that goes above and beyond the concept of rightness, in an effort to maximize the good. The two ideas are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but Taylor’s view seems to set the bar higher for goodness, whereas Adams’s view seems to set the bar higher for rightness. Adams seems to argue that the right action is the one that fulfills someone’s duty and obligation, but this seems to assume that there will always be only one right action, no more, and no less, when in fact obligations cannot always be fulfilled and there can be more than one way to fulfill an obligation (for instance, you may owe someone a favor, and a valid way of paying back that favor might be taking them out to the movies or taking them out to the restaurant). Contrast this with Taylor’s idea of virtue, which doesn’t view virtue as a binary thing, but rather, as something that can occur in greater and lesser amounts. This scale of virtue should apply to rightness to, with actions being more and less right, not simply right or wrong.

Morality and the Good Person

I am not sure that I agree with Adams' insistence that moral goodness should not tyrannize over other sorts of value in terms of what we should prize (26). I think this claim would make more sense if we were talking about value in general, but he limits this claim to persons. I think moral goodness can plausibly be said to be more important for persons than other kinds of goodness. The examples of other kinds of human goodness Adams says should not be tyrannized over include physical beauty, graceful movement, and mathematical intelligence. It might not sound that strange to say these things have value for persons. If these things are valuable for persons as persons, I would say they are valuable because some things like beauty and knowledge are part of the good for persons and thus contribute to well-being. But Adams does not seem to be talking about goods for persons, but instead what makes a good person. I would not say that a person is a good person because her well-being is high. Whereas a painting can be good as a painting because it is beautiful, I do not think a person is good as a person because she is beautiful. Personhood brings something new into existence which makes moral value something we should prize over other types of value like aesthetic value. At the same time, I agree with Adams that moral virtue does not make you "worth more" in terms of elevating your moral status. But suppose we were going to include desert in our theory, and it was shown to be inconsistent with changes in moral status. I think the most relevant thing to consider to determine the desert of persons would be moral goodness and not beauty or knowledge.

Good and Morally Virtuous

Adams defines moral virtue as persisting excellence in being for the good. That is to say he believes virtuous character traits are instilled because they are intrinsically good. He will also separate being a good person and being a morally good person. While I can see the distinction he makes, there seems to be something counter intuitive about this.
The distinction made by Adams’s is that a life filled with non-moral excellence like dance is a good life, because dance is excellent but not moral. A morally good person would have moral virtues as their focus but it would not tyrannize over other excellences. Being morally virtuous is being a morally good person (26). But couldn’t a life fulfilled with dance also be a morally virtuous life? Adams’s seems to imply it can only be one or the other and never both. I find that the person whose life is focused on dance would also have some amount of dedication, hard work, and self-sacrifice. These are virtues which would leave to a morally virtuous life. Adams’s will argue since it is not the intent behind the virtues to be virtuous then the dance cannot lead a morally virtuous life. But, isn’t it possible for there to exist two of the goals, being morally virtuous and a good dancer.
Therefore, it would seem that if a person is living a good life, then his life would also be a morally virtuous life. So, I don’t necessary see how it is important to make this distinction. I’m unsure how much of this would change the groundwork of Adams’s argument. But I’m assuming since he makes a note to tell us this, there is some kind of relevance behind it.

Obligation of Virtue

It seems Adams wants to make a distinction between ethics centered around virtues and ethics centered around actions. This distinction is that while virtue ethics deals with a commitment of character, ethics based on the moral rightness and/or wrongness of actions is committed to obligation. His example is of a shopkeeper who is honest because morality obliges him to do so, not because honesty is a part of his character. Although Adams, acknowledge that these concepts intertwine at times, I think for the most part he wants to keep these two notions separate. He says on page 7 that guilt and the feeling of owing something to someone is not a trait that comes from “excellent personal character” or virtues. But in the very next paragraph Adams groups the concept of “respect[ing] the rights of others” along with other virtues such as justice and conscientiousness. My complaint is that aren’t these the same? Is it really not a virtue to feel remorse or guilt for one’s actions because you respect them and wronged them in some way? If Adams feels that way because he believes the virtuous person would never put themselves in a position to feel guilt for an action, then I think that his arguments on virtue ethics are a moot point because no one is 100% virtuous and perfect all the time; which is why I feel obligation and virtue are more closely connected that Adams wants to believe. When a person is born into this world, they are obliged to have certain intentions in order to be virtuous by Adam’s account and pretty much every other author’s account we read so far. If someone wants to be totally good whether it be through virtues or actions then they are obliged to do so at some point because no has had the “perfectly right” intentions and/or made the “perfectly right” choices all throughout his or her life.

What is Adams trying to say?

There are two statements that Adams makes on pages 28-29 that seem to directly conflict with each other. I am not sure if I simply misunderstand what he is talking about, but when he says it can be excellent "to care more about the good of one person or project than about the good of other similar persons or projects" and then on the next page talks about how it would be completely vicious to favor one child over the other and says "the deepest appreciation of anything that is excellent is noncomparitive", it seems that he is saying two things which go against each other. It is excellent to care more about one thing than another because we as humans are limited in the amount we can care and love, and thus if we tried to care equally for all things our love would be stretched thin and could not be excellent. But he also says that it is excellence is noncomparitive.
How can he say both of these things? It seems to love someone more than another because that person is your spouse or child is in a sense comparing that person with strangers whom you do not love as much because they are not so closely connected with you. He does admit that there is some good that comes of rank-ordering, but there "is something unappreciative about the exercise". How can he think dividing up your love with more going to those who are closer is excellent but also think that rank ordering is inappropriate? Isn't dividing up your love and giving more to those who are more important to you considered rank-ordering?

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Motives Make Rightness

On page 224-225, Hurka argues that a person who accidentally kills someone, though with good intentions, can be morally wrong. I would like to extend this example: rather than simply trying to save someone's life via a drug that kills someone, an individual has a choice: give a drug to someone, where it is known that the drug will either save the life of a patient or kill that patient. The individual administering the drug is, for whatever reason, led to believe that the patient does in fact need the drug. If the individual administering the drug has every reason to believe that the patient needs the drug, then administering the drug seems like a moral imperative and the right thing to do, even if the action turns out to end up taking a life.

Rightness comes from doing what one genuinely believes should be done to cause good in the world. Even if this action ends up being harmful, as long as the individual had good intentions, the individual was doing something morally right. Doing both what seems morally right and what actually causes good in the world is, perhaps, the virtuous thing to do. Defining the two adjectives, virtuous and right, in these ways shows proper appreciation for both good intentions and good actions.

Vicious Intent

Though I beleive Hurka has taken the correct standpoint with regards to this aspect of virtue theory in the final chapter of Virtue, Vice and Value, I also feel that Hurka is mistaken on pp. 236-237 when he states that rationality is crucial to one's beliefs, or how one "perfoms an intentional action." While this line from Hurka's book, by itself, seems acceptable, Hurka later states on p. 238 that "goodness is the proper aim of desire, and practical rationality is directed to this aim." It is when these two quotes are read together that makes me beleive Hurka is incorrect, since intention, and therefore rationality, does not necessarily lead to virtue.
Taken together, one can infer from Hurka's quotes that one who acts with an intention is using his or her sense of rationality, however developed. Additionally, according to Hurka's requirements, one would have to assume that since one is using their sense of rationality, then he or she is working toward goodness. Thus, anyone who acts with an intention is acting towards goodness.
I do not agree with this reasoning, since I feel this rules out the possibility of vice. One can most certainly carry out vicious actions with the exact intention of doing so. One can attack someone with the vindictive intent of hurting him or her; of causing them pain, a fact in which the attacker will delight. Though intention is certainly involved in the performance of such a vicious action (maybe even under a rationality that hittting someone will give the attacker pleasure), one can hardly argue that the attacker is working towards goodness.
When one acts with intention, they do not necessarily act rationally, and by no means do they necessarily work towards goodness. However, according to Hurka, one who acts with intent would have to be acting with rationality, and therefore also towards goodness. Though I agree with Hurka on his overall argument (in which this particular conflict was found, regarding substantive flourishing), this inconsistency between lthese two wuotes and the rest of Hurka's work is one that requires addressing.

Base Goods

Hurka in this last chapter explains why his recursive account of the theory of the good is much more complete than virtue theory. He says on page 246 that they cannot give people any reason to act rightly. But I would like to note that Hurka never makes any arguments regarding why the base goods are base goods.
He, in fact, lists three: pleasure, knowledge, and achievement. It would seem to complete his theory of the good; he would need to explain these are the base goods. In chapter seven, he extended his account as to showing how other base values, or perhaps values could be added to the machinery without much work. So, perhaps Hurka does not care about what are in the base goods and only needed there to be base goods. This is because nearly any argued upon good could be added from chapter 7.
But, I don’t believe this to be the case. I believe when Hurka made his selection of the base goods, he told care to pick certain ones. This is important; otherwise, how would the reader know that pleasure, knowledge, and achievement are base goods and evil isn’t a base good.
I’m not sure if there is an underlying premise which states this is the furthest it goes. But I do believe there needs to be some kind of argument for why these are base goods, much like Taylor explains in her book. She explains why vice is an evil thing. Or even what are qualifications for base goods, because I don’t think it can be assumed that at least knowledge and achievement are base goods. But once again, I’m not entirely sure that in matters. However, in earlier chapters, Hurka makes it clear that he is not a hedonist.

What Would Hurka Say

When I was reading the chapter I began to wonder what Hurka would think about Gabrielle Taylor’s virtue-ethical theory. Taylor’s account can be categorized into Hurka’s definition of a substantive flourishing account. According to Hurka a flourishing account “defines virtue as those traits a person needs to flourish or live well and the vices as traits destructive of flourishing.” He separates the flourishing account into two versions, one being the substantive one which uses “one fundamental good F to explain simultaneously what unifies the virtues”. Taylor’s theory uses the fundamental good of the self to unify the virtues.
Hurka than mentions the obstacles facing this account and there were three main ones; virtuous actions must provide evidence of the self as having that aim, the account must have plausible judgements about the degrees of virtues and it must justify the priority it gives virtue over other elements of flourishing by “showing [the self] is not instantiated by other states of persons.” It seems that Taylor certainly did not do the second. I don’t remember anywhere in her book where she clearly defines the degrees of virtues or vices. In fact it seems that she focused mostly on the extremely vicious actions and never mention any degree and the relation to harming of the self. And it also seems that the last obstacle was not overcome by Taylors theory either, for it seems there are other things that provide evidence of the self aside from just virtue.
Because she does not “pass” the later two obstacles, it seems that Hurka would see Taylor’s theory as incomplete and flawed.

While attempting to decipher Anscombe and Hursthouse’s virtue theories (mainly Anscombe’s), Hurka sees a flaw. Anscombe doesn’t necessarily include morality in her theory of virtue but instead opts to center virtue around rationality. I think Hurka sees this as false because he wants to believe there is some moral rightness and goodness by following virtues as well as some form of moral wrongness by following vices. Hurka claims that someone living through Anscombe’s theory of virtue can’t decipher what is right or wrong through morality, but instead what someone should or shouldn’t do through rationality. But there is a kind of obvious premise that Hurka’s claim implies. The premise Hurka is proposing is that someone cannot use rationality to come to a conclusion about morality, which I think is false. And I definitely think it’s untrue since Hurka does acknowledge that virtue plays a role in Anscombe’s thinking. How could someone use virtues in rational thinking and not be able to come to some moral conclusion? An example I bring up is the virtue of generosity. Someone can think generosity is a virtue because logically they come to the conclusion that being generous leads to others being happy and the more people that are happy then the more pleasure exists in the world. Using more rational thinking, that person can then come to the conclusion that if generosity leads to pleasure then generosity is morally good because (according to Hurka) pleasure is morally an intrinsic base good. I might just have misunderstood what Hurka was trying to get at with Anscombe’s theory, but I don’t see how he can say morality has no role in it at all.

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Virtue goals: Week 9

Time is infinite until you have something to do. Time manage better.

Be the ball, Danny.

Deontological Recursive Clauses?

My major objection to Hurka’s implementation of the recursive clauses is that it focuses too much on goodness and maximizing it. He focused little on whether an action is right or wrong, and I was left believing that he would always give precedence to maximizing good rather than preserving moral rightness. Hurka anticipated this objection and sought to redeem his theory to someone with my objection; however, I’m left feeling unsatisfied with the way he presented it.  
From 212-217, Hurka briefly describes how someone who believes right and wrong have some place in ethics might go about applying his recursive clauses. The whole section feels very lackluster and empty-hearted: Hurka speaks in a lot of hypotheticals and does little in the way of argumentation. If he had put some more effort into rounding out this section I would be a lot more open to his view. However all he does in this section is state that once you allow conscientiousness into the game, you can apply the recursive clauses to loving morally right actions and hating morally wrong ones (and taking pleasure in someone else loving right actions, etc).  
While this isn’t unacceptable, it does little to persuade that his recursive clauses are really necessary for someone with this view. It seems obvious that if an agent is always concerned with acting morally, he will inherently love acts that are right and hate acts that are wrong. In the interest of parsimony, it seems that if you accept moral rightness and wrongness as a part of ethics, it’s redundant (and unnecessary) to apply the recursive clauses to them. 

Problem with Desert

The theory that lends to distribution of goods according to desert is definitely an attractive view. It seems just to proportion goods according to degrees of virtue and vice. The most virtuous should be given greater pleasure causing goods than the most vicious. Further, pain inflicted upon the virtuous seems much worse than pain inflicted on the vicious. However, given Hurka's recursive account, I wonder how plausible a theory based on desert actually is. It seems that the most virtuous people in history have been those surrounded by the most amount of pain. Hurka claims that virtue is partially external and thus one may not be able to be as virtuous as another given one's environment. It seems that part of what made people such as Mother Theresa and Ghandi virtuous was the harsh conditions that they lived through. If they were given the goods that they deserved, they may not have had such harsh environments and then in turn may not have had the opportunity to be as virtuous as they were. Although this may not happen in all cases, it seems that Hurka claims that one should love distribution of goods according to desert. Thus, one should want the greatest pleasure to go to the most virtuous. However, this great pleasure may cause a decrease in possible virtue for the most virtuous, which seems to be a vicious thing. It seems funny to think that rewarding the virtuous would be vicious, but if virtue and vice are a product of one's environment, it seems this could potentially be the case. I don't have an answer for Hurka here, but it seems to be a problem.

I have a dilemma and im not sure how Hurka would answer it, i might find myself quite in agreement with Hurka or quite the opposite depending how he would asnswer my concern. When he is talking about loyalties he says that in order to ground loyalties they must be from something good. his example is that nazi soldiers guarding a concentration camp would not have a loyalty to each other because they did horrific acts together. Now my question is "can a persons self delisions cause them to have loyalties which are real but falsely placed." For example of those two nazis were convinced that what they were doing was going to make the world a better place would they feel a sense of pride by guarding the final solution? another example is couldnt a jew living in america, who has never left the country feel a connection with isreal, however she would not actually go there and connect with those people for fear of being hurt. i feel as though this would be a real connection to something which is not considered real for one reason or another. I think that both these cases would have a real loyalty, in the firse case the nazis would have loyalty to each other and see each other as crusaders in a war to make the world better. This is based on twisted logic and wrong opinions however but the loyatly would remain the same. In the second case the jew would have a real connection to her people and to isreal despite that she has never been. She would have jews as friends in the united states but they are a completely different kind of people because they grew up in the united states and not isreal. So she would have a true connection to a group because they share the same religion but nothing else. I feel as though Hurka would claim that the first case is not true loyatly because it is based on something that is false, however the case of the jew would be true because that loyalty is based on shared values.

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Hurka makes it clear that his view of fantasy values, though they still hold value towards virtue and vice, do not have same moral weight. I may have misread some of the rest of the chapter but I do not see any attempt to decide how the intensity of fantasy values relate to real values. Hurka states on pg. 165 "Someone who takes pleasure in a merely fantasized rape has a less vicious attitude than if he took equal pleasure in a real rape". If someone takes great pleasure in a fantasized rape and other take small pleasure in a real rape, is the first person more vicious? If I am not mistaken, I believe Hurka would say that the first person was more vicious due to the largeness of the pleasure taken in an intrinsic evil. If I were to be persuaded by Hurka's argument, I would need him to make the claim that all reality based beliefs will always carry more moral weight, regardless of the intensity of the belief.

An anti-consequentialist belief from Hurka

Contrary to most other days, I found myself agreeing with Hurka at the beginning of this chapter; after some thought I realized it’s because he expressed anti-consequentialist belief. Found early in the chapter, Hurka makes the claim that belief in false knowledge is not worse than having true knowledge as long as the “beliefs did not result from self-deception or thoughtlessness.” The distinction from consequentialism is that he is adding intent into his scale of values. This is non-consequentialist in nature because it entails that we can be committed to something that brings about negative consequences and not be worse morally than someone bringing about better consequences. As long as we are not acting on beliefs that are self-deceptive AND would be willing to change our beliefs when sufficient evidence shows us we believe in something wrong, we are morally equivalent to someone acting on knowledge which is by chance more true than ours.
I will now offer an alternative concrete example so we can see an entailment of this belief. Suppose that I have been told that eating some specific food will be good for me, so I alter my diet to focus largely around that food. It turns out that getting too much of the good produced by the food is detrimental to my health, as well as possibly neglecting other foods (which is also detrimental to my health). Once I notice that bad things are happening because of my limited knowledge, I should notice something is wrong and stop my bad (but good intentioned) eating habits.  

Ok, so this is really nitpicky, but I had nothing else to write about since the whole first section was about rape fanatasies and I didn't get to the third section yet...so here we go:

Pages 175 to 177 Hurka talks about intellectual love and emotional love and which is better. He discusses and seems to settle on the idea that perhaps one is better in certain cases while the other is favorable in others. For instance, intellectual love is favorable towards knowledge, while welfarist goods and pleasures are better loved by emotional love. He then switches gears and states that they are equally good and claims that they should be proportionally distributed in all cases. I was about to argue against that when he in parentheses states in passing that if one love is favorable over another than it should than the distribution should be favored to it by the degree of betterness in the given case. That seemed to clear up the mess, and I agree with his fix and his assessment of the two types of love.

However, he then briefly discusses how one arrives at the desired state and distribution of loves towards an object. He mentions an Aristotelian view in which one exhibits emotional love and then intellectualizes about it after the fact and an anti-Aristotelian view in which one intellectually loves a good but then later arrives at an additional emotional attachment. He claims that given the same endpoint of the views, neither is preferable. Here is my nitpicky-ness. It seems to me that if a particular kind of love is favored towards an object than one should experience that love first and adopt the second sort of love after the fact. That is, in the case of knowledge in which intellectual love is favored, it seems that the distribution of loves should be arrived at in an anti-Aristotelian manor. For one to emotionally love knowledge first and then only intellectualize about the good after the fact seems to be showing improper consideration for knowledge as a good. It seems that one should first love knowledge as a good and then gain the emotional attachment afterwards. Likewise, pleasure and welfarist goods should attract an Aristotelian method of the distribution of loves. One should first have an emotional attachment to the goods and then later intellectualize about the goods and gain that type of love. To intellectually love pleasure first seems to not be proper.

I feel that Hurka would most likely agree with this assessment but simply did not wish to complicate the matter further. It is not really an argument that he couldn't easily adopt, rather I just wanted to note that it seems how one ends up at the proper distribution of loves seems to be relevant if different loves are favored in different situations.

on page 165 Hurka states that a fantasy should be less vicious or virtuous than the actual action itself. On the previous page he goes into a description that a person who finds pleasure in an imaginary rape could be disgusted by an actual rape, so in such a case that would mean his imaginary scene would not be vicious at all as it does not hurt anyone and does not reflect his actual desires. By this consiquentialist logic it would seem better for Hurka to claim that a persons thoughts are free from vice or virtue. if a thought is not vicious because it does not reflect an actual vice, then why should it be vicious because it does reflect a vice. It is as though a though merely amplifys an associated trait or action. If someone heard that someone they care about lost a loved one, would it be virtuous to think to theirself "it would be really nice if i did something for that person" but then never actually followed up with that idea? in addition, if 2 people commit rape, but one of them was thinking about commiting rape than that person would be the more vicious one, however they are still both rapists. If a thought reflects a vicious nature than it is the nature that is evil. thoughts should be neither vicious nor virtuous.

Pain & Compassion

On page 170, Hurka presents objections to the claim that the existence of real pain is justified because it leads to virtues such as compassion. He contends this is not necessarily true because a.) falsely-believed pain can still lead to compassion and b.) one can feel compassion for self-conciously imagined pain (for example, products of creativity like King Lear which, though ficitonal, evoke very real emotions). In this way, Hurka says, a world could reap the moral benefits of compassion without actually containing pain.

Firstly I find it hard to believe that in a world without pain the members could successfully imagine scenarios of pain for which to feel sympathy. That is to say, tragedies like King Lear can only be written and recieved in worlds where pain really exists. How else would Shakespeare be inspired to write such a play? How else would the audience find the story emotionally believable and compelling? If people knew that pain could not/did not exist, they would not be saddened by its represenation in theater. We cease to fear the Boogey Man under the bed once we realize he's not there, never has been there, and never will be.

That was a response to claim "b." To claim "a." I would point out that compassion is, by definition, really the act of feeling "pain" at another's pain. When you are hurt or pained by the hurt or pain of another, that is compassion. Hurka says that in a world without pain, people could (through lack of knowledge) believe that there is pain. They would then feel compassion and gain virtue points. But the moment they feel compassion, that world is no longer pain-free: their pain at the "falsely-believed" pain is very real. Compassion itself is a manifestation of pain, so compassion cannot exist in a pain-free world.

Virtue goals: Week 8

I want to make sure my attitude toward competition is always friendly.

My goal is to be more reliable and consistent. It’s a two part guy –but I think they go hand in hand.

Show/feel less indifference, especially with regards to other people’s opinions.

Be less callous and indifferent, and talk in a way that shows that I'm not callous and indifferent.

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The Growth of Evil?

From the parts we have read from Hurka, it seems to me that there always more evil than there is good. He goes on to argue in this chapter on page 157, that evil is necessary for good. He mentions a few objections, but I would like to add my own.

The greater the evil, the stronger the virtue or good that must come to meet it. And so, for evil to win this battle over the world there must continue to be an evil that is greater than the previous good. Because, good and evil are not stagnant nor do they remain the same. Otherwise, the good and evil will have reached its limit. And so there is this perpetual growth of evil and good. I feel as though Hurka would not mind this claim. I think he believes that as long as the balance is maintained between the good and evil, it will be the same world, but the scale is magnified. This seems to be problematic.

Even if it isn’t the case, and that the evil and good remains the same. The machines and weapons created have allowed individuals and countries to cause more damage, for the sake of ending wars. And although there is no more evil in the world, there are new inventions which allow for more pain, and vice. Technology will not end, and the invention for a weapon that will end all wars will not stop. Does pleasure, virtue, rise to meet this challenge? In the wake of 9/11 was there enough good to balance out these evils? The scams that arose, conspiracy theories, the patriot act, charities, and patriotism. Perhaps, Hurka would call me a cynic.

In both cases, it seems that the progression of evil will always continue. However, will the virtues that balance these out continue in intensity? It seems that for every one virtue there seems to be at least three vices which in some way demolish it. Also, with the inclusion of pleasure at a small evil, there exists evil in pleasure. Although, I don’t believe this impacts Hurka’s argument, but I think it should be something that he addresses.

...What?

On page 132 of Hurka's Virtue, Vice, and Value, he makes the statement that any ratio one creates regarding a scale of value for properties such as pleasure and knowledge would be an arbitrary one (implying that it is thus useless), and that no comparison can actually be made between the two properties since one is not lexically greater than the other.
Soon afterward in the chapter, however, Hurka seems to make a similar "arbitrary" comparison himself, validating it because of the graphs he mentioned two chapters previous. On p. 134 Hurka explicitly states that "Whether a good is great or small, the positive value of loving it cannot exceed one-half its value, nor can the negative value of hating it." After justifying this by citing Fig. 3.7, Hurka states that "We need not commit ourselves to any such mathematically precise formulation...but it will help us to understand the principle if we take it to limit the values of attitudes in some such constant way."
I cannot help but find it odd that Hurka condemns the use of creating units by any standard just two pages prior to making this statement, especially considering that Hurka is trying to devise a method for measuring a comparison between things that are supposedly non-lexical. If we are not to commit to mathematical precision, then what is going on if not creating arbitrary units by which to compare by? And what exactly is the problem with using arbitrary units, provided they are used consistently?
Although Hurka's main idea regarding the intrinsic goodness or evil of virtue (that it is always less than the degree of goodness or virtue of the thing itself, p. 133) is understandable, he attempts to support it by creating a method he himself says is impractical, which is a major stumbling block to his argument.

A simpler view?

Hurka supports the view (CP): The degree of intrinsic goodness or evil of an attitude to x is always less than the degree of goodness or evil of x. He favors this view over that of lexical view which states that virtue or vice outweighs even the greatest quantity of any non-moral value. He goes on to explain some of the difficult implications of the comparative principle, but concludes that even with these difficulties, the view (CP) should not be abandoned. One implication which really worries me, was the implication that giving a gift, which one spent hours and time finding because one thought the recipient would love it, does not have more value than the pleasure it produces. According to Hurka's view, it's "the gift that counts." This worries me, for it not only is counterintuitive, it seems to remove all sentimental value from giving gifts.
Hurka adopted this view, even with all the difficulties the theory faces. I think it would be much simpler if he were, instead, to include virtue as a base good and vice as a base evil. This would seem to remove all awkward implications of the comparative principle but still show the relation of virtue and vice with other goods and evils.

Virtue goals: Week 7

Virtue Goal : To be more understanding.

Control "I-desires" in an attempt to have better relationships.

Exercise temperance when it comes to temptations of coffee and dessert.

My virtue goal for this week is to be kind and friendly to strangers.

Temper my cynicism.

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Virtue goals: Week 6

Work harder. And stop fooling myself that less work equals more happiness.

Vitam Impendere vero. –Rousseau

I’ll go with the famous saying “patience is a virtue.” So patience.

Be more honest with others and myself, careful not to deceive through omission.

I have a voice, so I guess I should use it. This week, I'm going to be courageous and vocalize my opinion on some matter, any matter, instead of simply standing by.

I plan to do more exercise or sport-like activities is an attempt to ward off the grip of sloth/inactive joys.

Fulfill my dharma instead of stressing out about things that are not my dharma. That would virtuous because it would be good for me and everyone around me.

I tend to close myself off from others, and this week I will aim to remain more open, especially to those who love and care about me.

In the first chapter I could kind of see how Hurka’s number scale of good and evil when applied to an agent could work. But I feel the system becomes too complicated for its own good when he adds intensity and value to the equation in chapter 2. Intensity and value are two variables, or wildcards in a way, that can equal out a lot of loving “goods” and hating “bads” which I think isn’t really fair. For example, loving a good with the same value as a bad you hate with the same intensity makes those equal and I don’t necessarily think that’s true. If someone hates stealing so much that they lock everything in their possession up, I don’t feel that action as an equal to donating charity to people who don’t have as much as you. Now those two might not correlate, but you get the picture. Also, with intensity and value there adds a certain mix of evening off goods. I don’t think Hurka really goes into this scenario which makes me wonder exactly how practical this system actually is when applied to real world events, situations and actions. For example, if someone loves a good of great value with little intensity then that is the same as someone loving a good of little value with great intensity. So let’s say someone volunteers at a soup kitchen once a month, is that the same as someone who just donates food to the soup kitchen four times a month? I don’t think so. Mathematically Hurka’s system works out, but I just don’t think it does when applied to the real world.

Intent vs. Outcome

Hurka pretty clearly takes the side that virtue comes not from one's second order desires, but rather takes the position on page 46 that virtue and vice result from one’s dispositions and actions, regardless of whether or not those dispositions and arguments are voluntary. I don’t have a particular problem with this idea, and I might even change my mind about this, but, considering that the rest of his argument is built around sentences with words like “appeals” and “has value,” it seems weird to me that he stated this so definitively, and I tend to disagree. He states that adding voluntariness into the mix is a mere refinement to his core approach, and seems to be open to the idea that actively pursuing the good through choice might itself be a virtue worth noting. To Hurka, voluntariness is nothing but the icing on the cake, a mere addition.
To me, a virtue is barely worth the letters in its name unless it’s voluntary. In the same sense that it appeals to Hurka that pleasure, achievement, and knowledge are base goods, so too do I think that the pursuit of virtue is a base good in itself. Voluntarily being virtuous is not just adding on to something already great; it’s being twice as virtuous. Hurka himself calls knowledge a virtue, so I’m surprised he doesn’t sympathize with this view more, as ignorant virtue seems to almost be an oxymoron by his definition of base goods.