Luckily, humans have lived for centuries under these constraints, and we’ve developed ideas of what is “good” that turn out to be a solid guide to typical situations. Moral systems around the world don’t agree on everything, but on questions of how to live your daily life they’re surprisingly close: patience, respect, humility, moderation, kindness, honesty. I’m thankful we have all this learning on makes for harmonious societies distilled into our cultures to support us in our interactions.
In a sense, deontology is nothing if not well-tested consequentialism. Just rules selected for (sometimes even by quite literal evolutionary processes) because they work in terms of making societies thrive, turned into broad heuristics. That still doesn’t mean they’re always right, especially in such an out-of-distribution world as the modern one we’ve created, but yeah, for trivial stuff they work.
One thing to note though is that the review question you pose actually can be seen as a conflict between two very basic common sense principles. One is to be helpful and friendly to someone you’ve directly interacted with and that maybe was helpful and friendly to you, even though perhaps not a great cook. The other is to be truthful to perfect strangers, even if it means hurting slightly that person. Different moralities and cultures actually tend to produce different answers to these questions. There’s an expression that was coined to describe a certain flaw widespread in some parts of Italian culture, “amoral familism”—the tendency to prefer simply helping your own, your tribe (family, friends, acquaintances) over any other value. That’s overly skewed towards one end and often actively harmful for a healthy social fabric. At the other end though, even being always strictly rule-bound and never moved by sympathy can make for a fundamentally cruel demeanor. So in many ways there’s still some balancing to do, probably based on weighing a sense of immediate consequences at least. Though of course trying to go too deep down the rabbit hole of multiple orders of effects leads to infinite recursion and paralysis.
In a sense, deontology is nothing if not well-tested consequentialism. Just rules selected for (sometimes even by quite literal evolutionary processes) because they work in terms of making societies thrive, turned into broad heuristics. That still doesn’t mean they’re always right, especially in such an out-of-distribution world as the modern one we’ve created, but yeah, for trivial stuff they work.
One thing to note though is that the review question you pose actually can be seen as a conflict between two very basic common sense principles. One is to be helpful and friendly to someone you’ve directly interacted with and that maybe was helpful and friendly to you, even though perhaps not a great cook. The other is to be truthful to perfect strangers, even if it means hurting slightly that person. Different moralities and cultures actually tend to produce different answers to these questions. There’s an expression that was coined to describe a certain flaw widespread in some parts of Italian culture, “amoral familism”—the tendency to prefer simply helping your own, your tribe (family, friends, acquaintances) over any other value. That’s overly skewed towards one end and often actively harmful for a healthy social fabric. At the other end though, even being always strictly rule-bound and never moved by sympathy can make for a fundamentally cruel demeanor. So in many ways there’s still some balancing to do, probably based on weighing a sense of immediate consequences at least. Though of course trying to go too deep down the rabbit hole of multiple orders of effects leads to infinite recursion and paralysis.