Take some form of consequentialism, precompute a set of actions which cover 90% of the common situations, call them rules, and you get a deontology (like the ten commandments). Which works fine unless you run into the 10% not covered by the shortcuts, and until the world changes significantly enough that what used to be 90% becomes more like 50 or even 20.

Possible consequentialist response: our instincts are inconsistent: i.e., our instinctive preferences are intransitive, not subject to independence of irrelevant alternatives, and pretty much don't obey any "nice" property you might ask for. So trying to ground one's ethics entirely in moral instinct is doomed to failure.

There's a good analogy here to behavioral economics vs. utility maximization theory. For much the same reason that people who accept gambles based on their intuitions become money pumps (see: the entire field of behavioral econom... (read more)

I have a rant on this subject that I've been meaning to write.

Deontology, Consequentialism, and Virtue ethics are not opposed, just different context, and people who argue about them have different assumptions. Basically:

Consequence:Agents :: Deontology:People :: Virtue:Humans

To the extent that you are an agent, you are concerned with the consequences of your actions, because you exist to have an effect on the actual world. A good agent does not make a good person, because a good agent is an unsympathetic sociopath, and not even sentient.

To the extent that... (read more)

I dispute the claim that the default human view is deontological. People show a tendency to prefer to apply simple, universal rules to small scale individual interactions. However, they are willing to make exceptions when the consequences are grave (few agree with Kant that it's wrong to lie to try to save a life). Further, they are generally in favor of deciding large scale issues of public policy on the basis of something more like calculation of consequences. That's exactly what a sensible consequentialist will do. Due to biases and limited informa... (read more)

(You systematically misspell 'Eliezer', in the post and in the comments.)

Could it be possible that some peoples' intuitions are more deontologist or more consequentialist than others? While trying to answer this, I think I noticed an intuition that being good should make good things happen, and shouldn't make bad things happen. Looking back on the way I thought as a teenager, I think I must have been under that assumption then (when I hadn't heard this sort of ethics discussed explicitly). I'm not sure about further back then that, though, so I don't know that I didn't just hear a lot of consequentialist arguments and get used ... (read more)

Deontology is not in general incompatible. You could have a deontology that says :God says do exactly what eliezer yudkowsky thinks is correct. But most people's deontology does not work that way.

Our instincts being reminiscent of deontology is very much not the same thing as deontology being true.

As far as I understand Eliezer's metaethics, I would say that it is compatible with deontology. It even presupposes it a little bit, since the psychological unity of mankind can be seen as a very general set of deontologies.
I would agree thus that deontology is what human instincts are based on.

Under my further elaboration on said metaethics, that is the view of morality as common computations + local patches, deontology and consequentialism are not really opposing theories. In the evolution of a species, morality would be formed as common computations tha... (read more)

I agree; on my reading, the metaethics in the Metaethics sequence are compatible with deontology as well as consequentialism.

You can read Eliezer defending some kind of utilitarianism here. Note that, as is stressed in that post, on Eliezer's view, morality doesn't proceed from intuitions only. Deliberation and reflection are also important.

I suspect the real reason why a lot of people around here like consequentialism, is that (despite their claims to the contrary) alieve that ideas should have a Platonic mathematical backing, and the VNM theorem provides just such a backing for consequentialism.