Sometimes I believe that

• consequentialism calls possible worlds good
• deontology calls acts good
• virtue ethics calls people good

Of course, everyone uses "good" to label all three, but the difference is what is fundamental. cf Richard Chappell

My issue with deontology-as-fundamental is that, whenever someone feels compelled to defend a deontological principle, they invariably end up making a consequentialist argument.

E.g. "Of course lying is wrong, because if lying were the general habit, communication would be impossible" or variants thereof.

The trouble, it seems to me, is that consequentialist moralities are easier to ground in human preferences (current and extrapolated) than are deontological ones, which seem to beg for a Framework of Objective Value to justify them. This is borne out by the fact that it is extremely difficult to think of a basic deontological rule which the vast majority of people (or the vast majority of educated people, etc.) would uphold unconditionally in every hypothetical.

If someone is going to argue that their deontological system should be adopted on the basis of its probable consequences, fine, that's perfectly valid. But in that case, as in the story of Churchill, we've already established what they are, we're just haggling over the price.

As someone who is on the fence between between noncognitivism and deontic/virtue ethics, I seem to be witnessing a kind of incommensurability of ethical theories going on in this thread. It is almost like Alicorn is trying to show us the rabbit, but all we are seeing is the duck and talking about the "rabbit" as if is it some kind of bad metaphor for a duck.

On Less Wrong, consequentialism isn't just another ethical theory that you can swap in and out of our web of belief. It seems to be something much more central and interwoven. This might be due to the fact that some disciplines like economics implicitly assume some kind of vague utilitarianism and so we let certain ethical theories become more central to our web of belief than is warranted.

I predict that Alicorn would have similar problems trying to get people on Less Wrong to understand Aristotelian physics, since it is really closer to common sense biology than Einsteinian physics (which I am guessing is very central to our web of belief).

Deontology relies on things that do not happen after the act judged to judge the act. This leaves facts about times prior to and the time during the act to determine whether the act is right or wrong.

I'm not convinced that this 'backward-looking vs. forward-looking' contrast really cuts to the heart of the distinction. Note that consequentialists may accept an 'holistic' axiology according to which whether some future event is good or bad depends on what has previously happened. (For a simple example, retributivists may hold that it's positively good when those who are guilty of heinous crimes suffer. But then in order to tell whether we should relieve Bob's suffering, we need to look backwards in time to see whether he's a mass-murderer.) It strikes me as misleading to characterize this as involving a form of "overlap" with deontological theories. It's purely consequentialist in form; it merely has a more complex axiology than (say) hedonism.

The distinction may be better characterised in terms of the relative priority of 'the right' and 'the good'. Consequentialists take goodness (i.e. desirability, or what you ought to want) as fundamental, and thus have a tel... (read more)

The deontologist wasn't thinking any of those things. The deontologist might have been thinking "because people have a right to the truth", or "because I swore an oath to be honest", or "because lying is on a magical list of things that I'm not supposed to do", or heck, "because the voices in my head told me not to". But the deontologist is not thinking anything with the terms "utility function" [...]

Right, but what about Dutch book-type arguments? Even if I agree that lying is wrong and not because of its likely consequences, I still have to make decisions under uncertainty. The reason for trying to bludgeon everything into being a utility function is not that "the rightness of something depends on what happens subsequently." It's that, well, we have these theorems that say that all coherent decisionmaking processes have to satisfy these-and-such constraints on pain of being value-pumped. Anything you might say about rights or virtues is fine qua moral justification, but qua decision process, it either has to be eaten by decision theory or it loses.

+10karma for you!

I have a bit of a negative reaction to deontology, but upon consideration the argument would be equally applicable to consequentialism: the prescriptions and proscriptions of a deontological morality are necessarily arbitrary, and likewise the desideratum and disdesideratum (what is the proper antonym? Edit: komponisto suggests "evitandum", which seems excellent) of a consequentialist morality are necessarily arbitrary.

...which makes me wonder if the all-atheists-are-nihilists meme is founded in deontological intuitions.

I can perfectly understand the idea that lying is fundamentally bad, not just because of its consequences. My problem comes up for how that doesn't imply that something else can be bad because it leads to other people lying.

The only way I can understand it is that deontology is fundamentally egoist. It's not hedonist; you worry about things besides your well-being. But you only worry about things in terms of yourself. You don't care if the world descends into sin so long is you are the moral victor. You're not willing to murder one Austrian to save him from murdering six million Jews.

Am I missing something?

Deontology treats morality as terminal. Consequentialism treats morality as instrumental.

Is this a fair understanding of deontology? Or is this looking at deontology through a consequentialism lens?

You can then extensionally define "renate" as "has a spinal column"

But what "renate" means intensionally has to do with kidneys, not spines.

I don't think this has been covered here yet, so for those not familiar with these two terms: inferring something extensionally means you infer something based on the set in which an object belongs to. Inferring something intensionally means you infer something based on the actual properties of the object.

Wikipedia formulates these as

An extensional definition of a concept or term form

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.

For those curious about what kind of case can be made for deontology vs. consequentialism:

• The Advantages of Deontological Theories
• The Weaknesses of Deontological Theories

Deontological arguments (apart from helping with "running on corrupted hardware") are useful for the compression of moral values. It's much easier to check your one-line deontology, than to run a complicated utility function through your best estimate of the future world.

A simple "do not murder" works better, for most people, than a complex utilitarian balancing of consequences and outcomes. And most deontological aguments are not rigid; they shade towards consequentialism when the consequences get too huge:

• Freedom of speech is absolu

extensional definitions are terribly unsatisfactory

True enough, but it's worth noting that what we have here (between a deontological theory and its 'consequentialized' doppelganger) is necessary co-extension. Less chordates and renates, more triangularity and trilaterality. And it's philosophically controversial whether there can be distinct but necessarily co-extensive properties. (I think there can be; but I just thought this was worth flagging.)

What was the difference between hedonism and preferentialism again?

Typo: "prise apart" not "prize apart".

EDIT: another typo: "tl;dr" at the start of the post. Please consider getting rid of this habit. Your writing is, as a rule, improved by moving your main point to the top, and this reader appreciates your doing that; the cutesy Internetism is an needless distraction.

I think your definition of consequentialism (and deontology) is too broad because it makes some contractarian theories consequentialist. In "Equality," Nagel argues that the rightness of an act is determined by the acceptability of its consequences for those to whom they are most unacceptable. This is similar to Rawls's view that inequalities are morally permissible if they result in a net-benefit to the most disadvantaged members of society. These views are definitely deontological (and self-labeled as such), and since consequentialism and deont... (read more)

If I understand you, you're claiming that the "justification" for a deontological principle need not be phrased in terms of consequences, and consequentialists fail to acknowledge this. But can't it always be re-phrased this way?

I prefer to inhabit worlds where I don't lie [deontological]. Telling a lie causes the world to contain a lying version of myself [definition of "cause"]. Therefore, lying is wrong [consequentialist interpretation of preference violation].

This transformation throws away the original justification, but from a... (read more)

I very much appreciated reading this article.

As a general comment, I think that this forum falls a bit too much into groupthink. Certain things are assumed to be correct that have not been well argued. A presumption that utilitarianism of some sort or another is the only even vaguely rational ethical stance is definitely one of them.

Not that groupthink is unusual on the internet, or worse here than elsewhere! Au contraire. But it's always great to see less of it, and to see it challenged where it shows up.

Thanks again for this, Mr. Corn.

How about a post on understanding consequentialism for us deontologists? :-)

The Wikipedia defines deontological ethics as "approach to ethics that judges the morality of an action based on the action's adherence to a rule or rules."

This definition implies that the Scientific method is a deontological ethic. It's called the "scientific method" after all. Not the "scientific result."

The scientific method is rule based. Therefore, if there is not a significant overlap between the consequentialist and deontologist approaches, then... (read more)