It seems to me that you’re looking for a way to model a deontologist.
And a necessary condition is that you follow a function that does not depend on states of the world. If you don’t have any fixed principles, we can’t call you a deontologist. You can call that UDT (I think I’ve seen the same thing called rule-utilitarianism.)
Is there a more complicated insight than that here?
It seems to me that you’re looking for a way to model a deontologist.
I don’t think so. I’m supposing that I’m reasonably comfortable with human deontologists, and I’m trying to use that familiarity to make intuitive sense of the behavior of a UDT agent.
Well, that’s the way the post was phrased (“a UDT agent is a deontologist.”)
But you could construct a UDT agent that doesn’t behave anything like a human deontologist, who acts based upon a function that has nothing to do with rights or virtues or moral laws. That’s why I think it’s better understood as “All deontologists are UDT” instead of vice versa.
It’s easier for me to understand an agent who acts on weird principles (such as those having nothing to do with rights or virtues or moral laws) than an agent who either
thinks that all possible worlds are equally actual, or
doesn’t care more for what happens in the actual world than what happens in possible worlds.
So, if I were to think of deontologists as UDT agents, I would be moving them further away from comprehensibility.
It seems to me that you’re looking for a way to model a deontologist.
And a necessary condition is that you follow a function that does not depend on states of the world. If you don’t have any fixed principles, we can’t call you a deontologist. You can call that UDT (I think I’ve seen the same thing called rule-utilitarianism.)
Is there a more complicated insight than that here?
I don’t think so. I’m supposing that I’m reasonably comfortable with human deontologists, and I’m trying to use that familiarity to make intuitive sense of the behavior of a UDT agent.
Well, that’s the way the post was phrased (“a UDT agent is a deontologist.”)
But you could construct a UDT agent that doesn’t behave anything like a human deontologist, who acts based upon a function that has nothing to do with rights or virtues or moral laws. That’s why I think it’s better understood as “All deontologists are UDT” instead of vice versa.
It’s easier for me to understand an agent who acts on weird principles (such as those having nothing to do with rights or virtues or moral laws) than an agent who either
thinks that all possible worlds are equally actual, or
doesn’t care more for what happens in the actual world than what happens in possible worlds.
So, if I were to think of deontologists as UDT agents, I would be moving them further away from comprehensibility.