Do you have a real example of deontology outperforming consequentialism IRL? Bonus: do you have one that isn’t just hardcoding a result computed by consequentialism?
If we look at it from a consequentialist perspective, any success for another meta-ethical theory will boil down to caching a complicated consequential calculation. It’s just that even if you have all the time in the world, it’s still hard to correctly perform that consequential calculation because you’ve got all of these biases in the way. Take the classic ticking time-bomb scenario, for an example: everyone would like to believe that they’ve got the power to save the world in their hands; that the guy they have caught is the right guy; that they have caught just in the nick of time. But nobody can produce an example where this has ever been true. So, the deontological rule turns out to be equivalent to the outside view consequentialist argument for ticking time-bomb scenarios. Naturally, other cases of torture would require more analysis to show the equivalence (or non-equivalence; I have not yet done the research to know which way it would come out).
If we look at it from a consequentialist perspective, any success for another meta-ethical theory will boil down to caching a complicated consequential calculation. It’s just that even if you have all the time in the world, it’s still hard to correctly perform that consequential calculation because you’ve got all of these biases in the way. Take the classic ticking time-bomb scenario, for an example: everyone would like to believe that they’ve got the power to save the world in their hands; that the guy they have caught is the right guy; that they have caught just in the nick of time. But nobody can produce an example where this has ever been true. So, the deontological rule turns out to be equivalent to the outside view consequentialist argument for ticking time-bomb scenarios. Naturally, other cases of torture would require more analysis to show the equivalence (or non-equivalence; I have not yet done the research to know which way it would come out).