I think I have a different overall take than Ben here, but, the frame I think makes sense here is to be like: “Deontological injuctions are guardrails. There are hypothetical situations (and, some real situations) where it’s correct to override them, but the guardrail should have some weight and for more important guardrails, you need a clearer reasoning for why avoiding it actually helps.”
I don’t know what I think about this in the case of a country passing laws. Countries aren’t exactly agents. Passing novel laws is different than following existing laws. But, I observe:
it’s really hard to be confident about longterm consequences of things. Consequentialism just isn’t actually compute-efficient enough to be what you use most of the time for making decisions. (This includes but isn’t limited to “you’re contemplating crazy sounding actions for strange sounding reasons”, although I think has a similar generator)
it matters just not what you-in-particular-in-a-vacuum do, in one particular timeslice. It matters how complicated the world is to reason about. If everyone is doing pure consequentialism all the time, you have to model the way each person is going to interpret consequences with their own special-snowflake worldview. Having to model “well, Alice and Bob and Charlie and 1000s of other people might decide to steal from me, or from my friends, if the benefits were high enough and they thought they could get away with it” adds a tremendous amount of overhead.
You should be looking for moral reasoning that makes you simple to reason about, and that perform well in most cases. That’s a lot of what deontology is for.
I think I have a different overall take than Ben here, but, the frame I think makes sense here is to be like: “Deontological injuctions are guardrails. There are hypothetical situations (and, some real situations) where it’s correct to override them, but the guardrail should have some weight and for more important guardrails, you need a clearer reasoning for why avoiding it actually helps.”
I don’t know what I think about this in the case of a country passing laws. Countries aren’t exactly agents. Passing novel laws is different than following existing laws. But, I observe:
it’s really hard to be confident about longterm consequences of things. Consequentialism just isn’t actually compute-efficient enough to be what you use most of the time for making decisions. (This includes but isn’t limited to “you’re contemplating crazy sounding actions for strange sounding reasons”, although I think has a similar generator)
it matters just not what you-in-particular-in-a-vacuum do, in one particular timeslice. It matters how complicated the world is to reason about. If everyone is doing pure consequentialism all the time, you have to model the way each person is going to interpret consequences with their own special-snowflake worldview. Having to model “well, Alice and Bob and Charlie and 1000s of other people might decide to steal from me, or from my friends, if the benefits were high enough and they thought they could get away with it” adds a tremendous amount of overhead.
You should be looking for moral reasoning that makes you simple to reason about, and that perform well in most cases. That’s a lot of what deontology is for.