![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Mandevillian morality can arise in different ways. I characterize Mandevillian morality as the virtuous behaviour of groups, as a result of vicious behaviour of individual agents within the group. Mandevillian morality presents a challenge for most virtue ethical theories because it has the counterintuitive consequence that vice can sometimes be valuable or morally good. Mandevillian morality refers to stable, long-term character traits of individuals, which cause stable, long term behaviour in groups. I mean instances where the moral vices of individuals contribute to virtuous behaviour at the collective level. My definition for mandevillian morality is however more specific. Each bee acts out of self interest but this has the systemic effect that the hive functions well and keeps all the bees alive (Mandeville 1714). The spirit of mandevillian morality is closer to Mandeville’s message in the work The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices Publick Benefits, where he likens a capitalist economy to a beehive. I suggest that mandevillian intelligence has a counterpart in ethics, which I shall call mandevillian morality. Stable, long-term, epistemically disvaluable traits, or epistemic vices, if embedded in the right way within a collective or group, can lead to the collective or group to behave in an epistemically virtuous manner (Smart 2018b). However, in other cases the dynamic of a group can be such that an individual who consistently displays vicious behaviour, consistently leads the group to good epistemic behaviour. In some cases, knowledge arising out of bad epistemic character can be a lucky fluke. Other authors have also described in recent years the way individual epistemic vices contributing to emergent epistemic goods (Levy and Alfano 2019 Morton 2012). Smart describes the phenomenon as an instance of collective epistemic virtue arising out of individual epistemic vice (Smart 2018b). The experiments show that some tendencies make it less likely for an individual node to answer a question correctly, but increase the likelihood that the network they are a part of convenes on the right answer faster. He refers to studies involving groups of people and computer-simulated nodes. Smart calls this mandevillian intelligence. Paul Smart ( 2018a) argues that the suboptimal cognitive performance of individuals within a group can actually benefit the group in carrying out epistemic tasks. Is it possible that traits that help a community to flourish can sometimes differ from the traits that help an individual flourish? Recent work on epistemic traits describes how epistemic vices of individuals can sometimes lead a group to flourish epistemically. However, an important part of moral life is the way individuals can contribute to the collective flourishing of groups or communities. Virtue ethics is traditionally concerned with the character traits and flourishing of individual persons. I put forward three distinctive features that allow a virtue theory to do so: a distinction between individual and group virtues, a distinction between motivational and teleological virtues, and an acknowledgement of the normativity of “vicious” roles in groups. I argue that normative virtue theories can in fact accommodate for mandevillian emergent good. A consequence of this is that virtue theories struggle to account for the good that can emerge in a collective. However, normative virtue theories generally see vice as disvaluable. The core of the problem is that mandevillian morality implies that individual vice is, in some cases, valuable. Mandevillian morality presents a challenge for normative virtue theories in ethics. I suggest that this mandevillian morality can happen in many ways in collaborative activities. Analogically, as Mandeville has suggested, the moral vices of individuals can sometimes also lead to collective good. Studies in collective intelligence have shown that suboptimal cognitive traits of individuals can lead a group to succeed in a collective cognitive task, in recent literature this is called mandevillian intelligence. ![]()
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