Where did the idea come from that only consequentialists thought about consequences? If I’m a deontologist, and I think the rules include “Don’t murder,” I’m still allowed to notice that a common consequence of pointing a loaded gun at a person and pulling the trigger is “murder.”
Don’t consequentialists think that only consequences matter?
Don’t consequentialists think that only consequences matter?
That’s the idea.
EDIT:
If I’m a deontologist, and I think the rules include “Don’t murder,” I’m still allowed to notice that a common consequence of pointing a loaded gun at a person and pulling the trigger is “murder.”
If you follow this line of reasoning as far as it goes, I think you find that there isn’t really any good reason to distinguish “I caused this” and “I failed to prevent this”. In other words, as soon as you allow some consequentialism into your moral philosophy, it takes over the whole thing. I think...
There’s something screwy going on in your reasoning. Imagine the following closing argument at a murder trial:
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I am legally and morally innocent of the crime. Yes, I wanted to kill John. Yes, I pointed the gun at him. Yes, I pulled the trigger. Yes, John is dead. But we are all deontologists, and thus we don’t think about consequences when we do moral reasoning—so you must find me not guilty of murdering John.
Edit 1/11: Because it isn’t clear: No reasonable deontologist would find this reasoning persuasive. nyan is at risk of strawmanning the opposing position—see our further conversation below.
I claim that consequentialism is correct because it tends to follow from some basic axioms like moral responsibility being contagious backwards through causality, which I accept.
I further claim that deontologists, if they accept such axioms (which you claim they do), degenerate into consequentialists given sufficient reflection. (To be precise, there exists some finite sequence of reflection such that a deontologist will become a consequentialist).
I will note that though consequentialism is a fine ideal theory, at some point you really do have to implement a procedure, which means in practice, all consequentialists will be deontologists. (Possibly following the degenerate rule “see the future and pick actions that maximize EU”, though they will usually have other rules like “Don’t kill anyone even if it’s the right thing to do”). However, their deontological procedure will be ultimately justified by consequentialist reasoning.
I further claim that deontologists, if they accept such axioms (which you claim they do), degenerate into consequentialists given sufficient reflection.
My main objection is that this further claim wasn’t really argued in the original point. It was simply assumed—and it’s just too controversial a claim to assume. The net effect of your assumption was an inflationary use of the term—if consequentialist means what you said, all the interesting disputants in moral philosophy are consequentialists, whether they realize it or not.
It might be the case that your proposition is correct, and asserted non-consequentialists are just confused. I was objecting to assuming this when it was irrelevant to your broader point about the advantages of the label “awesome” in discussing moral reasoning. The overall point you were trying to make is equally insightful whether your further assertion is true or not.
I will note that though consequentialism is a fine ideal theory, at some point you really do have to implement a procedure, which means in practice, all consequentialists will be deontologists.
Agreed. This is usually called “rule utilitarianism” – the idea that, in practice, it actually conserves utils to just make a set of basic rules and follow them, rather than recalculating from scratch the utility of any given action each time you make a decision. Like, “don’t murder” is a pretty safe one, because it seems like in the vast majority of situations taking a life will have a negative utility. However, its still worth distinguishing this sharply from deontology, because if you ever did calculate and find a situation in which your rule resulted in lesser utility – like pushing the fat man in front of the train – you’d break the rule. The rule is an efficiency-approximation rather than a fundamental posit.
The point of rule utilitarianism isn’t only to save computational resources. It’s also that in any particular concrete situation we’re liable to have all sorts of non-moral motivations pulling at us, and those are liable to “leak” into whatever moral calculations we try to do and produce biased answers. Whereas if we work out ahead of time what our values are and turn them into sufficiently clear-cut rules (or procedures, or something), we don’t have that option. Hence “don’t kill anyone even if it’s the right thing to do”, as nyan_sandwich puts it—I think quoting someone else, maybe EY.
(A tangential remark, which you should feel free to ignore: The above may make it sound as if rule utilitarianism is only appropriate for those whose goal is to prioritize morality above absolutely everything else, and therefore for scarcely anyone. I think this is wrong, for two reasons. Firstly, the values you encode into those clear-cut rules don’t have to be only of the sort generally called “moral”. You can build into them a strong preference for your own welfare over others’, or whatever. Secondly, you always have the option of working out what your moral principles say you should do and then doing something else; but the rule-utilitarian approach makes it harder to do that while fooling yourself into thinking you aren’t.)
The above may make it sound as if rule utilitarianism is only appropriate for those whose goal is to prioritize morality above absolutely everything else, and therefore for scarcely anyone.
However, its still worth distinguishing this sharply from deontology, because if you ever did calculate and find a situation in which your rule resulted in lesser utility – like pushing the fat man in front of the train – you’d break the rule.
But the moment you allow sub-rules as exceptions to the general rules like in the quoted part above, you set the ground for Rule-consequentialism to collapse into Act-consequentialism via an unending chain of sub-rules. See Lyons, 1965.
Further, as a consequentialist, you have to think about the effects of accepting a decision-theory which lets you push the fat man onto the train tracks and what that means for the decision processes of other agents as well.
A consequentialist says: “Death is bad. Person A could have donated their income and saved that child, but they didn’t. The consequence was death. Person B killed a child with a gunshot. The consequence was death. These two situations are equivalent.”
The deontologist says “It was not the duty of person A to save a stranger-child. However, it is the duty of every person not to murder children. Person B is worse than person A, because he did not do his duty.”
The virtue ethicist says—“By his actions, we deduce that Person A is either unaware of the good he could have done, or or he lacks the willpower, or he lacks the goodness to save the child. We deduce that person B is dangerous, impulsive, and should be locked up.”
I think the crux of the divide is that virtue and deontological ethics are focused with evaluating whether an agent’s actions were right or wrong, whereas consequentialist ethics is focused on creating the most favorable final outcome.
Personally, I use virtue ethics for evaluating whether my or another’s action was right or wrong, and use consequentialism when deciding which action to take.
A consequentialist says: “Death is bad. Person A could have donated their income and saved that child, but they didn’t. The consequence was death. Person B killed a child with a gunshot. The consequence was death. These two situations are equivalent.”
Only an extremely nearsighted consequentialist would say this. Whoever’s saying this is ignoring lots of other consequences of Person A and Person B’s behavior. First, Person A has to take an opportunity cost from donating their income to save children’s lives. Person B doesn’t take such an opportunity cost. Second, Person B pays substantial costs for killing children in some combination of possible jail time, lost status, lost allies, etc. Third, the fact that Person B decided to murder a child is strong evidence that Person B is dangerous, impulsive, and should be locked up in the sense that locking up Person B has the best consequences. Etc.
Personally, I use virtue ethics for evaluating whether my or another’s action was right or wrong, and use consequentialism when deciding which action to take.
Truth be told at the end of the day those three moral systems are identical, if examined thoroughly enough. This type of discussion is only meaningful if you don’t think about it too hard...once the words get unpacked the whole thing dissolves.
But if we don’t think too hard about it, there is a difference. Which moral philosophy someone subscribes to describes what their “first instinct” is when it comes to moral questions.
From wikipedia:
a consequentialist may argue that lying is wrong because of the negative consequences produced by lying—though a consequentialist may allow that certain foreseeable consequences might make lying acceptable. A deontologist might argue that lying is always wrong, regardless of any potential “good” that might come from lying. A virtue ethicist, however, would focus less on lying in any particular instance and instead consider what a decision to tell a lie or not tell a lie said about one’s character and moral behavior.
But—if the deontologist thinks hard enough, they will conclude that sometimes lying is okay if it fulfills your other duties. Maximizing duty fulfillment is equivalent to maximizing moral utility.
When a virtue ethicist is judging a person, they will take the intended consequences of an action into account. When a virtue ethicist is judging their own options, they are looking at the range of there own intended consequences...once again, maximizing moral utility.
And, as you just illustrated, the farsighted consequentialist will in fact take both intention and societal repercussions into account, mimicking the virtue and deontological ethicists, respectively.
It’s only when the resources available for thinking are in short supply that these distinctions are meaningful...for these three moral approaches, the starting points of thought are different. It’s a description of inner thought process. Conclusions of these different processes only converge after all variables are accounted for...and this doesn’t always happen with humans.
So in answer to your question, when planning my own actions I first begin by taking possible consequences into account, whereas when judging others I begin by taking intentions into account, and asking what it says about that person’s psychology. Given enough time and processing power, I could use any of these systems for these tasks and come to the same conclusions, but since I do not possess either, it does make a practical difference which strategy I use.
While my personal values tend to align with the traditional consequentialism you affirm (e.g. denial of the doctrine of double effect), note that caring solely about “consequences” (states of the four-dimensional spacetime worm that is the universe) does not exclude caring about right or wrong actions. The “means” as well as the “ends” are part of the worldstates you have preferences over, though non-timeless talk of “consequences” obscures this. So you’re far too quick to get the standard consequentialist norms out of your approach to morality.
The “means” as well as the “ends” are part of the worldstates you have preferences over, though non-timeless talk of “consequences” obscures this.
Totally agree. When I figured this out, everything clicked into place.
So you’re far too quick to get the standard consequentialist norms out of your approach to morality.
I don’t think I’m doing anything hasty. We should care about possible histories of the universe, and nothing else. This follows from basic moral facts that are hard to disagree with.
In a strict sense, we care enough about who does what and how that it can’t be fully thrown out. In a more approximate sense, it gets utterly swamped by other concerns on the big questions (anything involving human life), so that you approach “classical” conseqentialism as your task becomes bigger.
Where did the idea come from that only consequentialists thought about consequences? If I’m a deontologist, and I think the rules include “Don’t murder,” I’m still allowed to notice that a common consequence of pointing a loaded gun at a person and pulling the trigger is “murder.”
Don’t consequentialists think that only consequences matter?
That’s the idea.
EDIT:
If you follow this line of reasoning as far as it goes, I think you find that there isn’t really any good reason to distinguish “I caused this” and “I failed to prevent this”. In other words, as soon as you allow some consequentialism into your moral philosophy, it takes over the whole thing. I think...
There’s something screwy going on in your reasoning. Imagine the following closing argument at a murder trial:
Edit 1/11: Because it isn’t clear: No reasonable deontologist would find this reasoning persuasive. nyan is at risk of strawmanning the opposing position—see our further conversation below.
This is a result of screwy reasoning within Deontology, not within nyan_sandwich’s post.
Sounds like a shoe-in for an insanity plea...
I think perhaps there’s something screwy going on with that person’s reasoning.
As a good consequentialist, I would not take such an argument seriously.
Neither should a good deontologist.
Ok, I wonder what we are even saying here.
I claim that consequentialism is correct because it tends to follow from some basic axioms like moral responsibility being contagious backwards through causality, which I accept.
I further claim that deontologists, if they accept such axioms (which you claim they do), degenerate into consequentialists given sufficient reflection. (To be precise, there exists some finite sequence of reflection such that a deontologist will become a consequentialist).
I will note that though consequentialism is a fine ideal theory, at some point you really do have to implement a procedure, which means in practice, all consequentialists will be deontologists. (Possibly following the degenerate rule “see the future and pick actions that maximize EU”, though they will usually have other rules like “Don’t kill anyone even if it’s the right thing to do”). However, their deontological procedure will be ultimately justified by consequentialist reasoning.
What do you think of that?
My main objection is that this further claim wasn’t really argued in the original point. It was simply assumed—and it’s just too controversial a claim to assume. The net effect of your assumption was an inflationary use of the term—if consequentialist means what you said, all the interesting disputants in moral philosophy are consequentialists, whether they realize it or not.
It might be the case that your proposition is correct, and asserted non-consequentialists are just confused. I was objecting to assuming this when it was irrelevant to your broader point about the advantages of the label “awesome” in discussing moral reasoning. The overall point you were trying to make is equally insightful whether your further assertion is true or not.
Agreed. This is usually called “rule utilitarianism” – the idea that, in practice, it actually conserves utils to just make a set of basic rules and follow them, rather than recalculating from scratch the utility of any given action each time you make a decision. Like, “don’t murder” is a pretty safe one, because it seems like in the vast majority of situations taking a life will have a negative utility. However, its still worth distinguishing this sharply from deontology, because if you ever did calculate and find a situation in which your rule resulted in lesser utility – like pushing the fat man in front of the train – you’d break the rule. The rule is an efficiency-approximation rather than a fundamental posit.
The point of rule utilitarianism isn’t only to save computational resources. It’s also that in any particular concrete situation we’re liable to have all sorts of non-moral motivations pulling at us, and those are liable to “leak” into whatever moral calculations we try to do and produce biased answers. Whereas if we work out ahead of time what our values are and turn them into sufficiently clear-cut rules (or procedures, or something), we don’t have that option. Hence “don’t kill anyone even if it’s the right thing to do”, as nyan_sandwich puts it—I think quoting someone else, maybe EY.
(A tangential remark, which you should feel free to ignore: The above may make it sound as if rule utilitarianism is only appropriate for those whose goal is to prioritize morality above absolutely everything else, and therefore for scarcely anyone. I think this is wrong, for two reasons. Firstly, the values you encode into those clear-cut rules don’t have to be only of the sort generally called “moral”. You can build into them a strong preference for your own welfare over others’, or whatever. Secondly, you always have the option of working out what your moral principles say you should do and then doing something else; but the rule-utilitarian approach makes it harder to do that while fooling yourself into thinking you aren’t.)
Isn’t that the awesomest goal? ,:-.
But the moment you allow sub-rules as exceptions to the general rules like in the quoted part above, you set the ground for Rule-consequentialism to collapse into Act-consequentialism via an unending chain of sub-rules. See Lyons, 1965.
Further, as a consequentialist, you have to think about the effects of accepting a decision-theory which lets you push the fat man onto the train tracks and what that means for the decision processes of other agents as well.
Let’s use examples to tease apart the difference.
A consequentialist says: “Death is bad. Person A could have donated their income and saved that child, but they didn’t. The consequence was death. Person B killed a child with a gunshot. The consequence was death. These two situations are equivalent.”
The deontologist says “It was not the duty of person A to save a stranger-child. However, it is the duty of every person not to murder children. Person B is worse than person A, because he did not do his duty.”
The virtue ethicist says—“By his actions, we deduce that Person A is either unaware of the good he could have done, or or he lacks the willpower, or he lacks the goodness to save the child. We deduce that person B is dangerous, impulsive, and should be locked up.”
I think the crux of the divide is that virtue and deontological ethics are focused with evaluating whether an agent’s actions were right or wrong, whereas consequentialist ethics is focused on creating the most favorable final outcome.
Personally, I use virtue ethics for evaluating whether my or another’s action was right or wrong, and use consequentialism when deciding which action to take.
Only an extremely nearsighted consequentialist would say this. Whoever’s saying this is ignoring lots of other consequences of Person A and Person B’s behavior. First, Person A has to take an opportunity cost from donating their income to save children’s lives. Person B doesn’t take such an opportunity cost. Second, Person B pays substantial costs for killing children in some combination of possible jail time, lost status, lost allies, etc. Third, the fact that Person B decided to murder a child is strong evidence that Person B is dangerous, impulsive, and should be locked up in the sense that locking up Person B has the best consequences. Etc.
What’s the difference?
Truth be told at the end of the day those three moral systems are identical, if examined thoroughly enough. This type of discussion is only meaningful if you don’t think about it too hard...once the words get unpacked the whole thing dissolves.
But if we don’t think too hard about it, there is a difference. Which moral philosophy someone subscribes to describes what their “first instinct” is when it comes to moral questions.
From wikipedia:
But—if the deontologist thinks hard enough, they will conclude that sometimes lying is okay if it fulfills your other duties. Maximizing duty fulfillment is equivalent to maximizing moral utility.
When a virtue ethicist is judging a person, they will take the intended consequences of an action into account. When a virtue ethicist is judging their own options, they are looking at the range of there own intended consequences...once again, maximizing moral utility.
And, as you just illustrated, the farsighted consequentialist will in fact take both intention and societal repercussions into account, mimicking the virtue and deontological ethicists, respectively.
It’s only when the resources available for thinking are in short supply that these distinctions are meaningful...for these three moral approaches, the starting points of thought are different. It’s a description of inner thought process. Conclusions of these different processes only converge after all variables are accounted for...and this doesn’t always happen with humans.
So in answer to your question, when planning my own actions I first begin by taking possible consequences into account, whereas when judging others I begin by taking intentions into account, and asking what it says about that person’s psychology. Given enough time and processing power, I could use any of these systems for these tasks and come to the same conclusions, but since I do not possess either, it does make a practical difference which strategy I use.
While my personal values tend to align with the traditional consequentialism you affirm (e.g. denial of the doctrine of double effect), note that caring solely about “consequences” (states of the four-dimensional spacetime worm that is the universe) does not exclude caring about right or wrong actions. The “means” as well as the “ends” are part of the worldstates you have preferences over, though non-timeless talk of “consequences” obscures this. So you’re far too quick to get the standard consequentialist norms out of your approach to morality.
Totally agree. When I figured this out, everything clicked into place.
I don’t think I’m doing anything hasty. We should care about possible histories of the universe, and nothing else. This follows from basic moral facts that are hard to disagree with.
In a strict sense, we care enough about who does what and how that it can’t be fully thrown out. In a more approximate sense, it gets utterly swamped by other concerns on the big questions (anything involving human life), so that you approach “classical” conseqentialism as your task becomes bigger.