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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The posts for Wednesday's class (Oct. 15 - Chapter 5 of Hurka's book) are above this separator post.

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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.

Virtue: The Welfarist Approach

In Hurka’s second chapter, Merits and Implications, he again goes into the subject of intrinsic value of the virtues. He notes in his second chapter, however, that virtue “is defined entirely by references to welfarist values,” (p. 53) as opposed to virtue being good on a perfectionist scale.
I disagree with this stipulation of Hurka’s. I find that according to Hurka’s definition of virtue, which he states as “attitudes toward goods and evils that are intrinsically good,” (p.20, Chapter 1), this can only apply to a perfectionist state. If one were to be virtuous in the sense that he or she has the correct attitudes towards good and evil, wouldn’t that benefit the individual regardless of his or her viewpoints? Suppose an individual witnesses a theft and hates the theft because it is evil. This, according to Hurka, is a virtue. Now suppose the individual hates that he or she hates the theft, for whatever reason. While this hating the hatred would be classified as a vice according to Hurka (and perhaps “cancelling out” the two attitudes), I cannot see how the individual’s attitude toward the virtue of hating the theft robs that initial attitude of its virtue. The virtue, regardless of what other attitudes surrounds it, is still a virtue. Hurka should agree, since such an attitude (hating the theft) has intrinsic good, and he states that determining that intrinsic value should not depend on surrounding circumstances. Hurka states this better when he writes that “judgments about intrinsic values make no assumptions about voluntariness or choice.” (p. 45) This being said, it seems contradictory that Hurka later states that virtues can apply to welfarist values, considering that welfarist values seem to depend mostly (if not entirely) on the viewpoint and judgment of the individual involved. This contrasts sharply with the idea of an intrinsic good, which would be judged as such independent of any variable circumstances, such as what best benefits the state of the individual concerned. If such a matter were to be taken in for consideration, there would be no concrete, identifiable classification of “virtue” or “vice” that could be used to apply to more than individual, or at most a group of a few individuals whose circumstances happened to be similar.

The bad world is our world

On page 33, Hurka talks about two different worlds. One in which all the individuals are entirely self-concerned, and another where all individuals are benevolent. He argues that only individuals with base level sense of good would prefer the first world than to the second. However, it seems to me that we live in the first world. Democracy in America, or perhaps more generally capitalism, de Tocqueville claims is based upon this world of selfish individuals.
Because Americans are selfish, it allows are society to run more effectively, even a more moral world. Because selfishness does not limit itself to only evil actions, selfishness can cause benevolence. If it is in our best interest that others do not think poorly of us, otherwise it would harm our goal. And so, it is one’s best interest that one be benevolent.
Furthermore, the practicality of the second world happening seems to be slim. A world with not enough resources, where all individuals are benevolent doesn’t seem possible. Although people may want the second world, it is not possible. Also, the second world doesn’t seem that terrible.
It can also be said that we are conditioned to prefer the second world to the first one. The second world takes away one’s chances at greatness. We cannot achieve greatness because greatness requires enemies, and in a world with benevolence enemies do not happen. If we value greatness more than benevolence why wouldn’t we prefer the first world?

Unordered list of virtues vs what's on the list of intrinsic goods?

On 44-45, Hurka states that an advantage of the recursive definition is that it avoids an unordered list of good traits as virtues. Instead, one explanation is given for why virtues are virtues: namely, that they involve appropriate attitudes to intrinsic or other values. But I wonder how much of a merit this really is. While it does sound appealing to have an account that shows why virtues are connected, I think it shifts the problem such that we need an explanation of the connections between what has intrinsic value. It is not clear how the items having intrinsic value are connected unless we are a hedonist utilitarian. Even Hurka wants to put things on the list of intrinsic goods such as knowledge and achievement, so it is not obvious why certain things have intrinsic value for Hurka like it would be for the hedonist utilitarian. So I think Hurka needs a very good explanation for why these things are intrinsic goods in order to make the avoidance of an unordered list of virtues a genuine advantage and not just an instance of shifting a problem to another location.

In this chapter Hurka claims that dispositions should not be made "a condition for the value of occurent attitudes" (43). I would have to disagree with this statement. A person who simply acts virtuous by mistake, or one who only acts virtuously once, such as his example of person B, seems to lack stability in his virtuous actions. I would have to agree with Aristotle here, that virtuous actions come about from stable dispositions.

I say this because it seems logical that person A who is nice to everyone, even if it is due to a kind dispostion, is somehow better than person B who is only acts kindly on certain occasions. This betterment in A, is due to the fact that he acts virtuously on more occasions than person B. In Hurka's view, both person A and B's actions are viewed with the same moral weight, but this seems wrong. Person A's action, which is due to stable dispositions and not occurent attitudes, is "better in itself" (43). For person A knows the virtuous action, and continues to choose it regardless of other factors.

For example, a man who was generous and helped the poor one time in his life cannot be considered as acting just as virtuous as Mother Theresa. For Mother Theresa knows the virtuous and right action and continues to act accordingly, whereas the man knows what is virtuous but fails to act.

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The posts for Wednesday's class (Oct. 1 - second chapter of Hurka's book) are above this separator post.

Post because it's good, and because I'll love you for doing what's good, and because you'll love me for loving you for doing what's good.

Is it good to hate pain?

Everyone knows the problem with dividing things into good and evil; in life, most things are usually some shade of gray, so it’s hard to separate things into such distinctive categories. In the hypothetical situations that philosophy thrives upon, such a separation might work, however, I wonder if it’s necessarily a good thing to equate evil with pain. Hurka basically does by saying it’s intrinsically bad to not hate pain for oneself or others.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to minimize pain, but I wonder if hating pain is necessarily a productive or even virtuous thing to do. Hurka talks in intrinsic terms, so to merely say that hating anything is bad because the hate itself is bad, one should probably argue that hate is intrinsically, and not just instrumentally, bad. I don’t know that this is necessarily the case; I can see situations where hate is at least instrumentally good and probably not intrinsically bad (e.g. if the hate for Hitler keeps the French Resistance from giving up in World War II). However, I don’t know if hating the bad is always the most virtuous way to approach the bad. Of course, there’s probably a difference between hating “evil” agents and hating vices, and Hurka as far as I know only advocates hating vices. Still, advocating the hatred of something seems like it could be the first step on the slippery slope of a harmful “us vs. them” philosophy, and at the very least it seems that Hurka advocates a much more active form of ethics than do other philosophers, and even if I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, it’s worth noting, at least.

“Intrinsic” Good and Evil in Consequentialism

In the first chapter of Virtue, Vice and Value, Hurka states “virtue and vice are good and evil in themselves, but in a way that satisfies consequentialist assumptions.” (p. 4) Hurka then later states that according to consequentialism, “right actions are always those with the best outcomes” (p. 4)
These two assertions that Hurka makes appear to me to be contradictory. Hurka places great emphasis on what is “intrinsically” good and evil, and implies that virtues and vices have these properties simply because of, and as a part of, what they are. But most of the chapter, however, is devoted to discussing the consequences of virtues and vices, and other things that are intrinsically good and evil. What I find contradictory is how something can, according to Hurka, be “intrinsically” good or evil, and yet be characterized as such based on the outcomes they produce. While I can understand something being intrinsically good or evil based on what already exists, such as an attitude of delight in one’s pain being intrinsically evil (p. 19), I cannot see how an attitude, virtue or vice, which seem not to depend on possible outcomes in the future but rather with situations in the present, can be characterized as “intrinsically” good or evil according to the consequentialist use of possible outcomes. In other words, it seems contradictory to me to define something as “intrinsically” good or evil according to what may come of it, instead of what the property in question actually is, regardless of other circumstances that may surround it. It is for this reason that I found the first chapter of Hurka’s book difficult to grasp, particularly his arriving at how some things are intrinsically good or evil.

What makes it intrinsic?

What I don’t like about Hurka is that right off the bat he says on the first page of the chapter that he is taking virtues to be intrinsically good and vices to be bad. He doesn’t state any reasons why and just assumes that it’s true when it’s not. We have just read an entire book that tries to explain and argue why vice is bad and even then I’m not convinced. I don’t see how someone could just start with that premise when others have devoted entire books trying to prove it true. Later on in the chapter he talks about it a little in respect to subjective mental states. He says that virtues and vices are welfarist states because they better or worsen the agent whether he likes it or not, but that’s not necessarily true. Hurka hasn’t convinced me of anything. He treats subjective and objective moral views as complementary. To him, morals just fall in either category and virtues are objective. But I see subjective and objective views as contrasting. Virtues aren’t necessarily objective and Hurka uses recursive characterization to try and prove that. But he isn’t really going behind the “intrinsic” nature of good and evil. He’s assuming good is something we want and evil is something we don’t want, but he just cast aside the subjective views from both. Something isn’t intrinsic just because he says it is. He needs to prove to me why an objective view of virtues is the right one and he just assumes it is.