Firstly, a deontological posistion distinguishes between directly killing people and not saving them- killing innocent people is generally an objective moral wrong. Your scenario is deceptive because it seems to lmm that innocents will be killed rather than not saved.
More importantly, Elizier’s metaethics is based on the premise that people want to be moral. That’s the ONLY argument he has for a metaethics that gets around the is-ought distinction.
Say for the sake of argument a person has a course of action compatible with deontology v.s one compatible with consequentialism and that are their choices. Shouldn’t they ignore the stone tablet and choose the deontological one if that’s what their moral intuitions say? Elizier can’t justify not doing so without contradiciting his original premise.
So, I wasn’t attempting to answer the question “Are deontologists necessarily subject to ‘pumping’?” but the different question “Are people who work entirely off moral intuition necessarily subject to ‘pumping’?”. Imm’s question—if I didn’t completely misunderstand it, which of course I might have—was about the famous framing effect where describing the exact same situation two different ways generates different preferences. If you work entirely off intuition, and if your intuitions are like most people’s, then you will be subject to this sort of framing effect and you will make the choices I ascribed to Imm in that little bit of dialogue, and the result is that you will make two decisions both of which look to you like improvements, and whose net result is that more people die. On account of your choices. Which really ought to be unacceptable to almost anyone, consequentialist or deontologist or anything else.
I wasn’t attempting a defence of Eliezer’s metaethics. I was answering the more specific question that (I thought) Imm was asking.
I did mean I was making a deontological distinction between saving and killing, not just a framing question (and I didn’t really mean that scenario specifically, it was just the example that came to mind—the general question is the one I’m interested in, it’s just that as phrased it’s too abstract for me) Sorry for the confusion.
Firstly, a deontological posistion distinguishes between directly killing people and not saving them- killing innocent people is generally an objective moral wrong. Your scenario is deceptive because it seems to lmm that innocents will be killed rather than not saved.
More importantly, Elizier’s metaethics is based on the premise that people want to be moral. That’s the ONLY argument he has for a metaethics that gets around the is-ought distinction.
Say for the sake of argument a person has a course of action compatible with deontology v.s one compatible with consequentialism and that are their choices. Shouldn’t they ignore the stone tablet and choose the deontological one if that’s what their moral intuitions say? Elizier can’t justify not doing so without contradiciting his original premise.
(Eliezer.)
So, I wasn’t attempting to answer the question “Are deontologists necessarily subject to ‘pumping’?” but the different question “Are people who work entirely off moral intuition necessarily subject to ‘pumping’?”. Imm’s question—if I didn’t completely misunderstand it, which of course I might have—was about the famous framing effect where describing the exact same situation two different ways generates different preferences. If you work entirely off intuition, and if your intuitions are like most people’s, then you will be subject to this sort of framing effect and you will make the choices I ascribed to Imm in that little bit of dialogue, and the result is that you will make two decisions both of which look to you like improvements, and whose net result is that more people die. On account of your choices. Which really ought to be unacceptable to almost anyone, consequentialist or deontologist or anything else.
I wasn’t attempting a defence of Eliezer’s metaethics. I was answering the more specific question that (I thought) Imm was asking.
I did mean I was making a deontological distinction between saving and killing, not just a framing question (and I didn’t really mean that scenario specifically, it was just the example that came to mind—the general question is the one I’m interested in, it’s just that as phrased it’s too abstract for me) Sorry for the confusion.