I’m not sure the example you provide is actually an example of appealing to consequences. To me it seems more like looking at an action at different levels of abstraction rather than starting to think about consequences, although I do think the divide can be unclear. I don’t do philosophy so my ideas of how things may be defined are certainly messy and may not map on well to their technical usage, but I’m reminded of the bit in the sequences regarding Reductionism, where you certainly can have an accurate model of a plane dealing just with particle fields and fundamental forces, but that doesn’t mean the plane doesn’t have wings.
This is to say I think that you can have different moral judgements about an action at different levels of abstraction, but that’s something that can happen before and/or separately from thinking about the consequences of that action.
The idea of abstraction is generaly a consequential formulation. A thing is an abstraction when its predicts the same consequences as a system produces. Abstraction of moral values would need exactly “moral judgements about an action at different levels of abstraction” to behave properly as collections.
I’m not sure the example you provide is actually an example of appealing to consequences. To me it seems more like looking at an action at different levels of abstraction rather than starting to think about consequences, although I do think the divide can be unclear. I don’t do philosophy so my ideas of how things may be defined are certainly messy and may not map on well to their technical usage, but I’m reminded of the bit in the sequences regarding Reductionism, where you certainly can have an accurate model of a plane dealing just with particle fields and fundamental forces, but that doesn’t mean the plane doesn’t have wings.
This is to say I think that you can have different moral judgements about an action at different levels of abstraction, but that’s something that can happen before and/or separately from thinking about the consequences of that action.
The idea of abstraction is generaly a consequential formulation. A thing is an abstraction when its predicts the same consequences as a system produces. Abstraction of moral values would need exactly “moral judgements about an action at different levels of abstraction” to behave properly as collections.
you can have different moral judgements about an action at different levels of abstraction
Is philosophically disputed at a deep level.
(some) Moral realists would disagree with you.