Sure, agreed. Consequentialism in a limited agent (which is all of us) looks a lot like deontology. With a significant distinction that the rules are internal, not external. Each agent can (and must) pick the specific rules it thinks best implement it’s preferred consequence within it’s constraints of knowledge and decisionmaking.
First, picking rules that implement your preferred consequences is hard. Is it entirely out of the question that one might defer selection of consequentialist rules to trusted authorities, or to processes that seem like they are likely to have generated good rules? I think it is not; it seems quite reasonable, to me.
But more importantly: however ‘external’ you consider any ethical rule to be, you are still the one who decides to follow it. If you think that the deontological rules that you must follow came from God himself, handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai, that is a still a judgment that you have made. If you conclude that Kant was right, and the categorical imperative is the root of all morality, you are still the one who has come to that conclusion. However much of your rule-making you surrender to any system—however external, however authority-based—you are still the one who chose that surrender.
It may feel different, introspectively. It may feel like finding rules that are true, instead of selecting rules that are useful. But the decision, ultimately, is still yours—for there is no one else who could make it.
This may be technically true in a sense, but I disagree with the connotation. If you live in an English-speaking country, there’s a sense in which you “can” “decide” to speak only Swahili instead of English, but it would be more sensible to say that that decision has already been made for you by your society. Likewise for moral rules.
It’s not obvious to me that this is true in any significant way. Specifically, I am skeptical about the “likewise for moral rules” part of your argument; can you expand on that? How, exactly, is it likewise?
After all, if I was born and raised in an English-speaking country, then I learned English effortlessly, having to make no effort in order to do so. Learning Swahili, on the other hand, takes considerable effort, and for some people it may not even be feasible (not everyone’s good at learning foreign languages, especially without immersion). Meanwhile, selecting different moral rules requires nothing remotely approaching that much effort. Furthermore, speaking Swahili to someone who doesn’t understand it (i.e., basically everyone you ever interact with, in an English-speaking country) is tremendously counterproductive and harmful to your interests, whereas following a different set of moral rules… can be harmful, but in practice it’s often totally invisible to most of the people you interact with on a daily basis (if anything, it can be less obtrusive and less detectable by third parties than merely following the moral rules you were raised with, if you do the latter more faithfully than most members of your community!).
But perhaps an even more important point is that even if what you say is true, it’s no less true for rule-consequentialist moral rules than for deontological moral rules or virtue-ethical moral rules. Your objection, even if we accept it, does not make the distinction Dagon raised any more real.
Ok, let’s take kidney sales as a specific. Whether it’s “each agent must decide whether to buy or sell a kidney today” or “each agent must decide whether to accept rules that allow buying or selling a kidney, and then must decide if that rule should apply to this specific situation”, the agent must decide, right?
Of course—but if the rule is not formulated so as to make it nigh-trivial to determine whether it applies to any given situation, then it’s not a very good rule, is it?
And then all the considerations I’ve already outlined in my previous comments apply.
Sure, agreed. Consequentialism in a limited agent (which is all of us) looks a lot like deontology. With a significant distinction that the rules are internal, not external. Each agent can (and must) pick the specific rules it thinks best implement it’s preferred consequence within it’s constraints of knowledge and decisionmaking.
This distinction is illusory.
First, picking rules that implement your preferred consequences is hard. Is it entirely out of the question that one might defer selection of consequentialist rules to trusted authorities, or to processes that seem like they are likely to have generated good rules? I think it is not; it seems quite reasonable, to me.
But more importantly: however ‘external’ you consider any ethical rule to be, you are still the one who decides to follow it. If you think that the deontological rules that you must follow came from God himself, handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai, that is a still a judgment that you have made. If you conclude that Kant was right, and the categorical imperative is the root of all morality, you are still the one who has come to that conclusion. However much of your rule-making you surrender to any system—however external, however authority-based—you are still the one who chose that surrender.
It may feel different, introspectively. It may feel like finding rules that are true, instead of selecting rules that are useful. But the decision, ultimately, is still yours—for there is no one else who could make it.
This may be technically true in a sense, but I disagree with the connotation. If you live in an English-speaking country, there’s a sense in which you “can” “decide” to speak only Swahili instead of English, but it would be more sensible to say that that decision has already been made for you by your society. Likewise for moral rules.
It’s not obvious to me that this is true in any significant way. Specifically, I am skeptical about the “likewise for moral rules” part of your argument; can you expand on that? How, exactly, is it likewise?
After all, if I was born and raised in an English-speaking country, then I learned English effortlessly, having to make no effort in order to do so. Learning Swahili, on the other hand, takes considerable effort, and for some people it may not even be feasible (not everyone’s good at learning foreign languages, especially without immersion). Meanwhile, selecting different moral rules requires nothing remotely approaching that much effort. Furthermore, speaking Swahili to someone who doesn’t understand it (i.e., basically everyone you ever interact with, in an English-speaking country) is tremendously counterproductive and harmful to your interests, whereas following a different set of moral rules… can be harmful, but in practice it’s often totally invisible to most of the people you interact with on a daily basis (if anything, it can be less obtrusive and less detectable by third parties than merely following the moral rules you were raised with, if you do the latter more faithfully than most members of your community!).
But perhaps an even more important point is that even if what you say is true, it’s no less true for rule-consequentialist moral rules than for deontological moral rules or virtue-ethical moral rules. Your objection, even if we accept it, does not make the distinction Dagon raised any more real.
Ok, let’s take kidney sales as a specific. Whether it’s “each agent must decide whether to buy or sell a kidney today” or “each agent must decide whether to accept rules that allow buying or selling a kidney, and then must decide if that rule should apply to this specific situation”, the agent must decide, right?
Of course—but if the rule is not formulated so as to make it nigh-trivial to determine whether it applies to any given situation, then it’s not a very good rule, is it?
And then all the considerations I’ve already outlined in my previous comments apply.