My point wasn’t “Utilitarians are good actually.” It was “Given the concerns you’re expressing, deontologists are at least as bad as utilitarians, so it’s weird that you’re preferring them.”
Also, there’s another word for “the sort of cognitive habits that keep them safely far away from the error of believing that a murder is what the world needs right now”.
That word is “virtue”.
The criterion to care about, given your expressed concerns, is not whether a person assents to one ethical theory over another, but whether that person is virtuous; whether they have habits of thought and behavior that lead them to do good and shun evil.
(Oh, and being virtuous is different from “believing in virtue ethics”. There are virtuous people of every ethical theory and none.)
Fair enough. I’m preferring them based on personal experience, which is not something you have access to. Generally, most people don’t think about ethics and morality at all, but deontologists IME (mostly Christians) do. That makes them, generally speaking, better than average at morality while being “normal people.” Utilitarians on the other hand I have mostly encountered online, and particularly on this site there is the explicit endorsement of the Repugnant Conclusion as “Just Multiply.” That’s what I’m pushing back against: be more like a normal person and think about morality using your judgement, don’t “Just Multiply” because the results will be terrible.
My point wasn’t “Utilitarians are good actually.” It was “Given the concerns you’re expressing, deontologists are at least as bad as utilitarians, so it’s weird that you’re preferring them.”
Also, there’s another word for “the sort of cognitive habits that keep them safely far away from the error of believing that a murder is what the world needs right now”.
That word is “virtue”.
The criterion to care about, given your expressed concerns, is not whether a person assents to one ethical theory over another, but whether that person is virtuous; whether they have habits of thought and behavior that lead them to do good and shun evil.
(Oh, and being virtuous is different from “believing in virtue ethics”. There are virtuous people of every ethical theory and none.)
Fair enough. I’m preferring them based on personal experience, which is not something you have access to. Generally, most people don’t think about ethics and morality at all, but deontologists IME (mostly Christians) do. That makes them, generally speaking, better than average at morality while being “normal people.” Utilitarians on the other hand I have mostly encountered online, and particularly on this site there is the explicit endorsement of the Repugnant Conclusion as “Just Multiply.” That’s what I’m pushing back against: be more like a normal person and think about morality using your judgement, don’t “Just Multiply” because the results will be terrible.
I basically agree with you regarding virtue.