Once I understood this contemporary activism made much more sense.
1. Consequentialism requires us to model reality in order to predict consequences. Thus two consequentialists with different models of reality might prescribe different actions even if they have the same goals. From the outside, it's impossible to understand their model of reality entirely, so you can't assume that they aren't consequentialists just because they have different prescriptions from you.
2. Virtue ethics isn't always an ethical belief system in itself. Virtue ethics can be a strategy of using social pressure to reach consequentialist goals. From the outside, you can't tell whether they're using virtue ethics as the basis for there beliefs, or merely as a strategy for implementing a consequentialist ethic.
Combining these two, it's almost always premature to assume that people are virtue ethicists just because they prescribe different actions from what you would prescribe, on what appears to be a virtue ethics.
In a more general sense, that feeling of smug superiority I feel when I think someone is just virtual signaling is a sign of bias in my own thinking. To quote Scott Alexander[1]:
> I will make a confession. Every time someone talks about the stupidity of creationists, moon-hoaxers, and homeopaths, I cringe.
> It’s not that moon-hoaxers, homeopaths et al aren’t dumb. They are. It’s not even that these people don’t do real harm. They do.
> What annoys me about the people who harp on moon-hoaxing and homeopathy – without any interest in the rest of medicine or space history – is that it seems like an attempt to Other irrationality.
> It’s saying “Look, over here! It’s irrational people, believing things that we can instantly dismiss as dumb. Things we feel no temptation, not one bit, to believe. It must be that they are defective and we are rational.”
> But to me, the rationality movement is about Self-ing irrationality.
> It is about realizing that you, yes you, might be wrong about the things that you’re most certain of, and nothing can save you except maybe extreme epistemic paranoia.
TL;DR: Don't dismiss people because they appear to be implementing a virtue ethic; they may actually be implementing a consequentialist ethic.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/
More than "implementing a consequentialist ethic" that sounds as a cynic "the ends justify the means".
The only reason people view that phrase as cynical is that it is often used in a context where the complete ends aren't being considered.
When I hear "consequentialism", I think in discarding absolutes and favouring frank discusion about practical measures. So exactly the opposite.
This is an example of exactly what I mean when I say "the complete ends aren't being considered". Perhaps your ends are "I want everyone to be fed" but if part of your means to get there is lying to everyone, then part of the ends that results from that is disfranchisement and a lack of informed participation by everyone (to use your terminology: a lack of truth).
> When I hear "consequentialism", I think in discarding absolutes and favouring frank discusion about practical measures. So exactly the opposite.
I think ultimately it's pretty hard to avoid absolutes. Consequentialism at some level requires you to have some target consequence. Look at your own post: you're concerned with "truth"--that's certainly an absolute value that you're targeting. I'm sure there are situations where you'd be okay with lying, but I'd venture that's only because there's some other absolute you value more. Consequentialism doesn't avoid absolutes, it just constrains the absolutes within a framework of result-oriented actions within reality, rather than actions for their own sake.