And if you take one of these deontic reasons, and mess with it a bit, you can be wrong in a new and exciting way: “because the voices in my head told me not to, and if I disobey the voices, they will blow up Santa’s workshop, which would be bad” has crossed into consequentialist territory. (Nota bene: Adding another bit—say, “and I promised the reindeer I wouldn’t do anything that would get them blown up”—can push this flight of fancy back into deontology again. And then you can put it back under consequentialism again: “and if I break my promise, the vengeful spirits of the reindeer will haunt me, and that would make me miserable.”)
So, if I understand this correctly, a deontologist is someone who insists that their cached applause/boo lights have some mysteriously-derived meaning, independent of how their brains physically learned or otherwise came to produce those judgments. This seems hopelessly deluded to me, though, as it requires one to assume that non-physical things exist.
Physical human brains, after all, are inherently consequentialist. They cache the goodness or badness of our acquired (as opposed to inbuilt/derived) “moral” rules. At the bottom of our moral reasoning, there is always an element of feeling, and feelings are inherently consequentialist predictions.
Because, except for our inbuilt bits of moral reasoning, we learn those feelings by experiencing consequences, like “Breaking promises is bad because mommy promised to take me to Disneyland and it made me sad when we didn’t go,” or “Thinking of my own desires is bad because when I asked daddy for something he yelled at me for being selfish.” (These are approximate examples of stuff I’ve helped people dig up and discard from their brains, btw.)
So, we can build all sorts of sophisticated reasoning on top of these basic feelings, but they’re still at the physical root of the process. Or, to put it another way, every deontological claim (AFAICT) ultimately reduces to “I would feel bad if I broke this rule.”
So, I don’t see how anyone can claim to be a deontologist and a rationalist at the same time, unless they are merely claiming to be ignorant of the source and contents of their brain’s cached consequence information.
That, of course, is the normal state of most people; it takes a fair amount of practice and patience to dig up the information behind the cached feelings, and hardly anyone ever bothers.
One reason being, of course, that if they did, they wouldn’t be able to get the good feelings cached in association with the idea that you should do the right thing regardless of consequences… which is itself a moral rule that must be learned by experience!
(IOW, if you believe that mysterious = good or ignorance = innocence where moral rules are concerned, then it’s very likely you will apply these cached feelings to deontology itself.)
Of course, to be fair, there are symmetrical moral rules that lead other people to feel that consequentialism is good, too!
My point, however, is not that either one is good or bad, just that only one of them is actually implemented in human brains. The other (AFAICT) can only be pretended to via ignorance.
So, if I understand this correctly, a deontologist is someone who insists that their cached applause/boo lights have some mysteriously-derived meaning, independent of how their brains physically learned or otherwise came to produce those judgments. This seems hopelessly deluded to me, though, as it requires one to assume that non-physical things exist.
Physical human brains, after all, are inherently consequentialist. They cache the goodness or badness of our acquired (as opposed to inbuilt/derived) “moral” rules. At the bottom of our moral reasoning, there is always an element of feeling, and feelings are inherently consequentialist predictions.
Because, except for our inbuilt bits of moral reasoning, we learn those feelings by experiencing consequences, like “Breaking promises is bad because mommy promised to take me to Disneyland and it made me sad when we didn’t go,” or “Thinking of my own desires is bad because when I asked daddy for something he yelled at me for being selfish.” (These are approximate examples of stuff I’ve helped people dig up and discard from their brains, btw.)
So, we can build all sorts of sophisticated reasoning on top of these basic feelings, but they’re still at the physical root of the process. Or, to put it another way, every deontological claim (AFAICT) ultimately reduces to “I would feel bad if I broke this rule.”
So, I don’t see how anyone can claim to be a deontologist and a rationalist at the same time, unless they are merely claiming to be ignorant of the source and contents of their brain’s cached consequence information.
That, of course, is the normal state of most people; it takes a fair amount of practice and patience to dig up the information behind the cached feelings, and hardly anyone ever bothers.
One reason being, of course, that if they did, they wouldn’t be able to get the good feelings cached in association with the idea that you should do the right thing regardless of consequences… which is itself a moral rule that must be learned by experience!
(IOW, if you believe that mysterious = good or ignorance = innocence where moral rules are concerned, then it’s very likely you will apply these cached feelings to deontology itself.)
Of course, to be fair, there are symmetrical moral rules that lead other people to feel that consequentialism is good, too!
My point, however, is not that either one is good or bad, just that only one of them is actually implemented in human brains. The other (AFAICT) can only be pretended to via ignorance.