Bluntly: You don’t know what you’re talking about.
You’re reasoning about deontology as if it were consequentialism. Deontology is primarily concerned with means, not ends, and your reasoning is based on the ends of non-interventialism (which is not, in fact, even the ethics of deontology), rather than the means taken to achieve this. The state of the switch, or of past actions, doesn’t matter to deontology; it’s what you do that matters.
A deontologist may think the consequentialists’ actions in this scenario are unethical. This is not the same as desiring to undo those actions. What you miss is that the deontologist, just as much as the consequentialist, desires the end state where fewer people die, NOT the end state that is unchanged from a “natural” state—the deontologist, however, don’t see the means as justifying the ends, and indeed don’t see ends as justifications whatsoever. The deontologist sees it as wrong to sacrifice a person, even to save several; likewise, it would also be wrong to sacrifice several people, regardless of the justification, including your extremely contrived justification of undoing somebody else’s actions.
In short, your caricature of a deontologist is merely a bad consequentialist, and doesn’t follow deontology at all.
Seconded.
A deontologist is not worried about the results insofar as determining their decision. They have a constraint against “making that call,” “judging who should or shouldn’t live,” or “playing with peoples’ lives/playing God.”
If you violate one of those by flipping the lever, you done wrong.
If they flip it back, they’d be making that same call, and do wrong.
Each successive purposeful flip of the lever would be an additional sin.
You make it sound like the deontologist values the lever being left in its original position, and they don’t. They just value not interfering with the lever, in whatever series of states it’s been in the past.
Deontologists don’t see these questions and consider the opposite answer to be the right choice, but rather they give no answer as their choice, like the Zen monk’s MU.
They don’t make different decisions because they value different ends, but because their means figure into the value equation, no matter what the ends are. Some means have enormous negative value for them even if locally they seem to work just fine.
Saying things like “some means have enormous negative value for them” misunderstands how deontology (and similar ethical systems) work.
Basically they work by considering the action as a particular thing which can be good or bad, completely distinct from the effects. The effects may be good, or they may be bad.
Given this analysis, if an action is bad, it is bad. That is a tautology. The effects of that action can be infinitely good, and it will not change the fact that the action is bad, just like if an object is red, that will not change just because everything else is green. This means that in a deontological system, the universe can end up better off after someone does something wrong. It is still wrong, in that system. It does not have anything to do with an enormous negative value; the total value of the universe after the action may have increased.
This sounds like what I mean. They aren’t just worried about the ends being good or bad, the means themselves (sometimes) have negative values, i.e., are wrong.
I said enormous negative value because I’m not positive whether a real deontologist could be eventually persuaded that a forbidden means would be permissible if the ends were sufficiently positive, i.e., steal something to literally save the entire world.
I don’t imagine that there’d be many deontologists who’d accept all of my arguments. But I’m sure there are deontologists who’d accept some of them. Like deontologists in favour of reversing the lever pull would probably accept my argument on why it is important to reverse the lever.
It appears that you’re in the no undoing whatsoever category. What is your opinion on the Obama problem? Does he have a right to rescind his drone attack order? If so, what is the principled difference between this scenario and the Trolley Problem?
I’m a virtue ethicist, not a deontologist, and I don’t find that the trolley problem is ethically difficult; leaving the trolley pointed at six people is ethically acceptable, as I don’t regard situations arising outside one’s own decisions to have ethical importance, and switching it to the one person is also ethically acceptable, as you’re changing reality for the better.
There isn’t a single deontological answer to the “Obama problem”. What is and is not acceptable or desirable depends on the rules that make up Obama’s theoretical deontology. Deontology is a descriptive model for ethics systems, not an ethics system in and of itself.
Ethically acceptable. “Good” implies a relative “Bad”, and again, I don’t regard situations arising outside one’s own decisions to have ethical importance.
Bluntly: You don’t know what you’re talking about.
You’re reasoning about deontology as if it were consequentialism. Deontology is primarily concerned with means, not ends, and your reasoning is based on the ends of non-interventialism (which is not, in fact, even the ethics of deontology), rather than the means taken to achieve this. The state of the switch, or of past actions, doesn’t matter to deontology; it’s what you do that matters.
A deontologist may think the consequentialists’ actions in this scenario are unethical. This is not the same as desiring to undo those actions. What you miss is that the deontologist, just as much as the consequentialist, desires the end state where fewer people die, NOT the end state that is unchanged from a “natural” state—the deontologist, however, don’t see the means as justifying the ends, and indeed don’t see ends as justifications whatsoever. The deontologist sees it as wrong to sacrifice a person, even to save several; likewise, it would also be wrong to sacrifice several people, regardless of the justification, including your extremely contrived justification of undoing somebody else’s actions.
In short, your caricature of a deontologist is merely a bad consequentialist, and doesn’t follow deontology at all.
Seconded. A deontologist is not worried about the results insofar as determining their decision. They have a constraint against “making that call,” “judging who should or shouldn’t live,” or “playing with peoples’ lives/playing God.”
If you violate one of those by flipping the lever, you done wrong. If they flip it back, they’d be making that same call, and do wrong.
Each successive purposeful flip of the lever would be an additional sin. You make it sound like the deontologist values the lever being left in its original position, and they don’t. They just value not interfering with the lever, in whatever series of states it’s been in the past.
Deontologists don’t see these questions and consider the opposite answer to be the right choice, but rather they give no answer as their choice, like the Zen monk’s MU.
They don’t make different decisions because they value different ends, but because their means figure into the value equation, no matter what the ends are. Some means have enormous negative value for them even if locally they seem to work just fine.
Saying things like “some means have enormous negative value for them” misunderstands how deontology (and similar ethical systems) work.
Basically they work by considering the action as a particular thing which can be good or bad, completely distinct from the effects. The effects may be good, or they may be bad.
Given this analysis, if an action is bad, it is bad. That is a tautology. The effects of that action can be infinitely good, and it will not change the fact that the action is bad, just like if an object is red, that will not change just because everything else is green. This means that in a deontological system, the universe can end up better off after someone does something wrong. It is still wrong, in that system. It does not have anything to do with an enormous negative value; the total value of the universe after the action may have increased.
I wish I had been clearer.
This sounds like what I mean. They aren’t just worried about the ends being good or bad, the means themselves (sometimes) have negative values, i.e., are wrong.
I said enormous negative value because I’m not positive whether a real deontologist could be eventually persuaded that a forbidden means would be permissible if the ends were sufficiently positive, i.e., steal something to literally save the entire world.
I don’t imagine that there’d be many deontologists who’d accept all of my arguments. But I’m sure there are deontologists who’d accept some of them. Like deontologists in favour of reversing the lever pull would probably accept my argument on why it is important to reverse the lever.
It appears that you’re in the no undoing whatsoever category. What is your opinion on the Obama problem? Does he have a right to rescind his drone attack order? If so, what is the principled difference between this scenario and the Trolley Problem?
I’m a virtue ethicist, not a deontologist, and I don’t find that the trolley problem is ethically difficult; leaving the trolley pointed at six people is ethically acceptable, as I don’t regard situations arising outside one’s own decisions to have ethical importance, and switching it to the one person is also ethically acceptable, as you’re changing reality for the better.
There isn’t a single deontological answer to the “Obama problem”. What is and is not acceptable or desirable depends on the rules that make up Obama’s theoretical deontology. Deontology is a descriptive model for ethics systems, not an ethics system in and of itself.
Would you say that switching it to the one person instead of the six constitutes a “good” or is just “ethically acceptable”?
Ethically acceptable. “Good” implies a relative “Bad”, and again, I don’t regard situations arising outside one’s own decisions to have ethical importance.