I don’t agree that deontology is about intent. Deontology is about action. Deontology is about not hiring hitmen to kill someone even if you have a really good reason, and even if your intent is good. Deontology is substantially about schelling lines of action where everything gets hard to predict and goes bad after you commit it.
I imagine that your incompetent hitman has only like a 50% chance of succeeding, whereas the others have ~100%, that seems deontologically wrong to me.
It seems plausible that what you mean to say by the hypothetical is that he has 0% chance.
I admit this is more confusing and I’m not fully resolved on this.
I notice I am confused about how you can get that epistemic state in real life.
I observe that society will still prosecute you for attempted murder if you buy a hitman off the dark web, even one with a clearly incompetent reputation for 0⁄10 kills or whatever.
I think society’s ability to police this line is not as fine grained as you’re imagining, and so you should not buy incompetent hitmen in order to not kill your friend, unless you’re willing to face the consequences.
To be honest I couldn’t resist writing the comment because I just wanted to share the silly thought :/
Now that I think about it, it’s much more complicated. Mikhail Samin is right that the personal incentive of reaching AGI first really complicates the good intentions. And while a lot of deontology is about intent, it’s hyperbole to say that deontology is just intent.
I think if your main intent is to save someone (and not personal gain), and your plan doesn’t require or seek anyone’s death, then it is deontologically much less bad than evil things like murder. But it may still be too bad for you to do, if you strongly lean towards deontology rather than consequentialism. Even if the court doesn’t find you guilty of first degree murder, it may still find you guilty of… some… things.
One might argue that the enormous scale (risking everyone’s death instead of only one person), makes it deontologically worse. But I think the balance does not shift in favor of deontology and against consequentialism as we increase the scale (it might even shift a little in favor of consequentialism?).
I don’t agree that deontology is about intent. Deontology is about action. Deontology is about not hiring hitmen to kill someone even if you have a really good reason, and even if your intent is good. Deontology is substantially about schelling lines of action where everything gets hard to predict and goes bad after you commit it.
I imagine that your incompetent hitman has only like a 50% chance of succeeding, whereas the others have ~100%, that seems deontologically wrong to me.
It seems plausible that what you mean to say by the hypothetical is that he has 0% chance.
I admit this is more confusing and I’m not fully resolved on this.
I notice I am confused about how you can get that epistemic state in real life.
I observe that society will still prosecute you for attempted murder if you buy a hitman off the dark web, even one with a clearly incompetent reputation for 0⁄10 kills or whatever.
I think society’s ability to police this line is not as fine grained as you’re imagining, and so you should not buy incompetent hitmen in order to not kill your friend, unless you’re willing to face the consequences.
To be honest I couldn’t resist writing the comment because I just wanted to share the silly thought :/
Now that I think about it, it’s much more complicated. Mikhail Samin is right that the personal incentive of reaching AGI first really complicates the good intentions. And while a lot of deontology is about intent, it’s hyperbole to say that deontology is just intent.
I think if your main intent is to save someone (and not personal gain), and your plan doesn’t require or seek anyone’s death, then it is deontologically much less bad than evil things like murder. But it may still be too bad for you to do, if you strongly lean towards deontology rather than consequentialism. Even if the court doesn’t find you guilty of first degree murder, it may still find you guilty of… some… things.
One might argue that the enormous scale (risking everyone’s death instead of only one person), makes it deontologically worse. But I think the balance does not shift in favor of deontology and against consequentialism as we increase the scale (it might even shift a little in favor of consequentialism?).