I have discussed this point with a few people, and the two who self-identified as non-religious deontologists explicitly assigned objective rightness and wrongness to actions.
“Murder was wrong before there were human beings, and murder will be wrong after there are human beings. Murder would be wrong even if the universe didn’t contain any human beings”.
The kind of people who are using this word “deontologist” to refer to themselves actually are doing this.
I use the word “deontologist” to refer to myself. I do assign objective rightness and wrongness to things (technically intentions, not actions, though I will talk loosely of actions). There is no meaningful sense in which murder could be wrong in a universe that did not contain any people (humans per se are not called for) because there would be no moral agents to commit wrong acts or be the victims of rights violations. In such an uninhabited universe, it would remain counterfactually wrong for any people to murder any other people if people were to come into existence. (“Counterfactually wrong” in much the same way that it would be wrong for me to steal my roommate’s diamond tiara, if she had a diamond tiara, but since she doesn’t it’s a pointless statement.)
“Deontologist” and “Moral Objectivist” are not synonyms. Most deontologists are nonetheless objectivists. The reverse does not hold since, for instance, consequentiailists are not deontologists but are subjectivists.
It is sill a caricature to say deontologists conjure up Right and Wrong out of nowhere. The most famous deontologist was probably Kant, who argued elaborately for his claims.
The persistent problem in these discussions is the assumption that moral objectivism can only work like a quasi-empiricism, detecting some special domain of ethical facts. However, nobody seriously argues for it that way.
As noted by Alicorn. moral laws can apply counterfactually just as easily as natural laws.
The kind of people who are using this word “deontologist” to refer to themselves actually are doing this.
That is certainly true but for my part I attribute that to them being humans engaging in moralizing, not their deonotology per se. The the ‘objective rightness of their morals’ thing can just as well be applied to consequentialist values.
I have discussed this point with a few people, and the two who self-identified as non-religious deontologists explicitly assigned objective rightness and wrongness to actions.
The kind of people who are using this word “deontologist” to refer to themselves actually are doing this.
I use the word “deontologist” to refer to myself. I do assign objective rightness and wrongness to things (technically intentions, not actions, though I will talk loosely of actions). There is no meaningful sense in which murder could be wrong in a universe that did not contain any people (humans per se are not called for) because there would be no moral agents to commit wrong acts or be the victims of rights violations. In such an uninhabited universe, it would remain counterfactually wrong for any people to murder any other people if people were to come into existence. (“Counterfactually wrong” in much the same way that it would be wrong for me to steal my roommate’s diamond tiara, if she had a diamond tiara, but since she doesn’t it’s a pointless statement.)
“Deontologist” and “Moral Objectivist” are not synonyms. Most deontologists are nonetheless objectivists. The reverse does not hold since, for instance, consequentiailists are not deontologists but are subjectivists.
It is sill a caricature to say deontologists conjure up Right and Wrong out of nowhere. The most famous deontologist was probably Kant, who argued elaborately for his claims.
The persistent problem in these discussions is the assumption that moral objectivism can only work like a quasi-empiricism, detecting some special domain of ethical facts. However, nobody seriously argues for it that way.
As noted by Alicorn. moral laws can apply counterfactually just as easily as natural laws.
That is certainly true but for my part I attribute that to them being humans engaging in moralizing, not their deonotology per se. The the ‘objective rightness of their morals’ thing can just as well be applied to consequentialist values.
Right; I trusted them when they said it was deontology that gave them absolute values—but of course, a moralizing human would say that.