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This post is a follow-up to my previous essay on reducing suffering given long-term cluelessness. Long-term cluelessness is the idea that we have no clue which actions are likely to create better or worse consequences across the long-term future. In my previous post, I argued that even if we grant long-term cluelessness (a premise I remain skeptical of), we can still steer by purely consequentialist views that do not entail cluelessness and that can ground a focus on effective suffering reduction.
In this post, I will outline an alternative approach centered on virtues. I argue that even if we reject or find no guidance in any consequentialist view, we can still plausibly adopt a virtue-based approach to reducing suffering, including effective suffering reduction. Such an approach can help guide us independently of consequentialist uncertainty.
It can be difficult to say exactly what a virtue-based approach to reducing suffering would entail. Indeed, an absence of clear and simple rules, and responding wisely in conditions of ambiguity based on good practical judgment, are all typical features of virtue-based approaches in ethics.
That said, in the broadest terms, a virtue-based approach to suffering involves having morally appropriate attitudes, sentiments, thoughts, and behaviors toward suffering. It involves relating to suffering in the way that a morally virtuous person would relate to it.
Perhaps more straightforwardly, we can say what a virtue-based approach would definitely not involve. For example, it would obviously not involve extreme vices like sadism or cruelty, nor would it involve more common yet still serious vices like being indifferent or passive in the face of suffering.
However, a virtue-based approach would not merely involve the morally unambitious aim of avoiding serious vices. It would usually be much more ambitious than that, encouraging us to aim for moral excellence across all aspects of our character — having deep sympathy and compassion, striving to be proactively helpful, having high integrity, and so on.
In this way, a virtue-based approach may invert an intuitive assumption about the implications of cluelessness. That is, rather than seeing cluelessness as a devastating consideration that potentially opens the floodgates to immoral or insensitive behavior, we can instead see it as paving the way for a focus on moral excellence. After all, if no consequentialist reasons count against a strong focus on moral excellence under assumed cluelessness, then arguably the strongest objections against such a focus fall away. As a result, we might no longer have any plausible reason not to pursue moral excellence in our character and conduct. At a minimum, we would no longer have any convenient consequentialist-framed rationalizations for our vices.
Sure, we could retreat to simply being insensitive and disengaged in the face of suffering — or even retreat to much worse vices — but I will argue that those options are less plausible.
There are various possible justifications for the approach outlined above. For example, one justification might be that having excellent moral character simply reflects the kind of person we ideally want to be. For some of us, such a personal desire might in itself be a sufficient reason for adopting a virtue-based approach in some form.
Complementary justifications may derive from our moral intuitions. For instance, all else equal, we might find it intuitive that it is morally preferable to embody excellent moral character than to embody serious vices, or that it is more ethical to display basic moral virtues than to lack such virtues (see also Knutsson, 2023, sec. 7.4). (Note that this differs from the justification above in that we need not personally want to be virtuous in order to have the intuition that it is more ethical to be that way.)
We may also find some justification in contractualist considerations or considerations about what kind of society we would like to live in. For example, we may ideally want to live in a society in which people adhere to virtues of compassion and care for suffering, as well as virtues of effectiveness in reducing suffering (more on this in the next section). Under contractualist-style moral frameworks, favoring such a society would in turn give us moral reason to adhere to those virtues ourselves.
A virtue-based approach might likewise find support if we consider specific cases. For example, imagine that you are a powerful war general whose soldiers are committing heinous atrocities that you have the power to stop — with senseless torture occurring on a large scale that you can halt immediately. And imagine that, given your subjective beliefs, your otherwise favored moral views all fail to give any guidance in this situation (e.g. due to uncertainty about long-term consequences). In contrast, ending the torture would obviously be endorsed by any commonsense virtue-based stance, since that is simply what a virtuous, compassionate person would do regardless of long-term uncertainty. If we agree that ending the torture is the morally right response in a case like this, then this arguably lends some support to such a virtue-based stance (as well as to other moral stances that imply the same response).
In general terms, we may endorse a virtue-based approach partly because it provides an additional moral safety net that we can fall back on when other approaches fail. That is, even if we find it most plausible to rely on other views when these provide practical recommendations, we might still find it reasonable to rely on virtue-based approaches in case those other views fall silent. Having virtue ethics as such a supportive layer can help strengthen our foundation and robustness as moral agents.
(One could also attempt to justify a virtue-based approach by appealing to consequentialist reasoning. Indeed, it could be that promoting a non-consequentialist virtue-based stance would ultimately create better consequences than not doing so. For example, the absence of such a virtue-based stance might increase the risk of extremely harmful behavior among moral agents. However, such arguments would involve premises that are not the focus of this post.)
One might wonder whether a virtue-based approach can ground effective suffering reduction of any kind. That is, can a virtue-based approach ground systematic efforts to reduce suffering effectively with our limited resources? In short, yes. If one deems it virtuous to try to reduce suffering in systematic and effective ways (at least in certain decisions or domains), then a virtue-based approach could provide a moral foundation for such efforts.
For instance, if given a choice between saving 10 versus 1,000 chickens from being boiled alive, we may consider it more virtuous — more compassionate and principled — to save the 1,000, even if we had no idea whether that choice ultimately reduces more suffering across all time or across all consequences that we could potentially assess.
To take a more realistic example: in a choice between donating either to a random charity or to a charity with a strong track record of preventing suffering, we might consider it more virtuous to support the latter, even if we do not know the ultimate consequences.
How would such a virtue-based approach be different from a consequentialist approach? Broadly speaking, there can be two kinds of differences. First, a virtue-based approach might differ from a consequentialist one in terms of its practical implications. For instance, in the donation example above, a virtue-based approach might recommend that we donate to the charity with a track record of suffering prevention even if we are unable to say whether it reduces suffering across all time or across all consequences that we could potentially assess.
Second, even if a virtue-based view had all the same practical implications as some consequentialist view, there would still be a difference in the underlying normative grounding or basis of these respective views. The consequentialist view would be grounded purely in the value of consequences, whereas the virtue-based view would not be grounded purely in that (even if the disvalue of suffering may generally be regarded as the most important consideration). Instead, the virtue-based approach would (also) be grounded at least partly in the kind of person it is morally appropriate to be — the kind of person who embodies a principled and judicious compassion, among other virtues (see e.g. the opening summary in Hursthouse & Pettigrove, 2003).
In short, virtue-based views represent a distinctive way in which some version of effective suffering reduction can be grounded.
There are many possible moral foundations for reducing suffering (see e.g. Vinding, 2020, ch. 6; Knutsson & Vinding, 2024, sec. 2). Even if we find one particular foundation to be most plausible by far, we are not forced to rest absolutely everything on such a singular and potentially brittle basis. Instead, we can adopt many complementary foundations and approaches, including an approach centered on excellent moral character that can guide us when other frameworks might fail. I think that is a wiser approach.
