It seems to me that this addresses two very different purposes for moral judgments in one breath.
When trying to draw a moral judgment on the act of another, what they knew at the time and their intentions will play a big role. But this is because I’m generally building a predictive model of whether or not they’re going to do good in the future. By contrast, when I’m trying to assess my own future actions, I don’t see what need concern me except whether act A or act B bring about more good.
It seems to me that this addresses two very different purposes for moral judgments in one breath.
A possible role for deontic morality is assigning blame or approbation. For this it is necessary to take the agent’s intent and level of knowledge into consideration. Blaming or approving people for their actions is part of the enforcement process in society.
I’m not trying to justify deontology; I’m observing that this feature and others (like the use of reference classes and the bit about keeping promises) make deontology well-suited to (or a natural feature of) prerational societies.
It’s usually a province of consequentialism to separate rightness/wrongness from praiseworthiness/blameworthiness. They come together in other accounts. Appropriating deontic rules for only the latter purpose isn’t using deontic morality proper, it’s using a deontic-esque structure for blame and praise alone.
This point seems very important to me. I wonder how much disagreement is due to this, which I see as conflation.
How should I act? and How should I assign blame/praise? are very different questions. For one thing, when asking how to assign blame/praise, the framework for deciding blame/praiseworthiness is obviously key. However, when asking how oneself should act, the agent will have any number of considerations, and how praise or blame will be assigned by others may be a small or non-existent factor, depending on the situation.
In general, it seems like praisers and blamers will tend to be in a position of advocating for society, and actors will tend to be in a position of advocating for their individual interests.
Is there some motivation for wanting to unify these differing angles under one framework?
Perhaps germane to the distinction, at least for me, is that I find myself more interested in how to avoid blame and seek praise, so conflating them lets me figure out how to do that and also how to do what I should do simultaneously.
How one should assign blame/praise and how those things will in fact be assigned, however, are almost completely unrelated. One could be both blamed and unblameworthy, or praised and unpraiseworthy.
By contrast, when I’m trying to assess my own future actions, I don’t see what need concern me except whether act A or act B bring about more good.
You are a consequentialist. Your reply is precisely accurate, complete, and well-reasoned from a consequentialist perspective, but misses the essential difference between consequentialism and deontology.
Edit: Quoting the OP:
If a deontologist says “lying is wrong”, and you mentally add something that sounds like “because my utility function has a term in it for the people around believing accurate things. Lying tends to decrease the extent to which they do so, but if I knew that somebody would believe the opposite of whatever I said, then to maximize the extent to which they believed true things, I would have to lie to them. And I would also have to lie if some other, greater term in my utility function were at stake and I could only salvage it with a lie. But in practice the best I can do is to maximize my expected utility, and as a matter of fact I will never be as sure that lying is right as I’d need to be for it to be a good bet.”… you, my friend, have missed the point.
It seems to me that this addresses two very different purposes for moral judgments in one breath.
When trying to draw a moral judgment on the act of another, what they knew at the time and their intentions will play a big role. But this is because I’m generally building a predictive model of whether or not they’re going to do good in the future. By contrast, when I’m trying to assess my own future actions, I don’t see what need concern me except whether act A or act B bring about more good.
A possible role for deontic morality is assigning blame or approbation. For this it is necessary to take the agent’s intent and level of knowledge into consideration. Blaming or approving people for their actions is part of the enforcement process in society.
I’m not trying to justify deontology; I’m observing that this feature and others (like the use of reference classes and the bit about keeping promises) make deontology well-suited to (or a natural feature of) prerational societies.
It’s usually a province of consequentialism to separate rightness/wrongness from praiseworthiness/blameworthiness. They come together in other accounts. Appropriating deontic rules for only the latter purpose isn’t using deontic morality proper, it’s using a deontic-esque structure for blame and praise alone.
This point seems very important to me. I wonder how much disagreement is due to this, which I see as conflation.
How should I act? and How should I assign blame/praise? are very different questions. For one thing, when asking how to assign blame/praise, the framework for deciding blame/praiseworthiness is obviously key. However, when asking how oneself should act, the agent will have any number of considerations, and how praise or blame will be assigned by others may be a small or non-existent factor, depending on the situation.
In general, it seems like praisers and blamers will tend to be in a position of advocating for society, and actors will tend to be in a position of advocating for their individual interests.
Is there some motivation for wanting to unify these differing angles under one framework?
Perhaps germane to the distinction, at least for me, is that I find myself more interested in how to avoid blame and seek praise, so conflating them lets me figure out how to do that and also how to do what I should do simultaneously.
How one should assign blame/praise and how those things will in fact be assigned, however, are almost completely unrelated. One could be both blamed and unblameworthy, or praised and unpraiseworthy.
You are a consequentialist. Your reply is precisely accurate, complete, and well-reasoned from a consequentialist perspective, but misses the essential difference between consequentialism and deontology.
Edit: Quoting the OP: