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Having read that, gosh isn't it great that there are utilitarians out there to save the world from us crazy deontologists?
Come on. In that example, in wartime that's not "shooting an unarmed man", that's "enemy soldier engaging in act of war" and legitimate target. Maybe be clearer on what you mean, because even if it feels like it, online arguing is not the Battle of the Somme.
Well that's the thing, that man is both. He is an enemy soldier engaging in an act of war and a legitimate target, but he is also an unarmed man.
So there are two rules in conflict, both completely applicable and giving opposite results. What actually happens has a lot to do with which rule is emphasized and brought to the forefront.
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Unironically yes.
Maybe the people who make a big deal about calling themselves utiliatarian and talk about it all the time (eg me) aren't the best examples, but if we didn't have someone guiding humanity who cared about good outcomes for people as a goal in-and-of-itself, we'd never have advanced very much as a civilization.
I guess we can quibble about what makes someone a utilitarian, I count people who intuitively have 'the overall well being of everyone' as the basis of their moral reasoning and goal structure, even if they've never heard of utilitarianism and don't do calculations on anything. Maybe you'd want to call those people something else.
I honestly don't want to be mean, because I accept that many of the people claiming the label Utilitarian do have "overall well being of everyone" at heart.
It's just the air of "Of course this is the One True Way, everyone else is a flâneur or cosplaying at ethics or has their head in the sand" that is irksome if one is not a Utilitarian of any stripe and has no wish to be and disagrees with some/much/all of the philosophies involved.
Some of the rest of us also like to think we are in it for the well-being of everyone, too, you know!
As I recall, you rather dislike HPMoR, but this discussion reminds me of the one time it did make an argument in favor of deontology. ... in chapter 108, and I'm not sure if we have spoiler tags, here?
It's much easier to make a convincing-sounding argument to violate a rule, than to find a genuinely good and acceptable reason to violate the rule. Even profoundly intelligent people are vulnerable to deception, biases, temptations, etc, and that makes deontological injunctions a valid defense against those failure modes.
In my experience, the downside is that, when breaking a rule fails to have any noticeable negative consequences, it becomes easier to break the rule in the future. One might argue that this is a sign that said rule wasn't worth having in the first place, to which I must point out that the way the brain associates actions with outcomes can only predict so far ahead on incomplete information. See also: the crack and opioid epidemics, small lies that turn into a house of cards you're forced to live in, how the whole free love and hookup culture things turned out...
Just fyi we do have spoiler tags, you put two pipes in front of and following what you want to say
Edit: now if only I could get code blocks working.
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I thank all gods, guardian deities, spirits, and the autochthonic entities I have never read anything like 108 chapters of HPMoR. So I can't comment on Yudkowsky's notion of deontology.
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If you justify your deontology in terms of its consequences, doesn't that make you a consequentialist who thinks that certain rules happen to be the optimal policy?
Oh gosh, you got me there, how clever you are! Yes, we're all secretly consequentalists!
Really, can we not play this type of "gotcha!" game? I'm trying to be civil so far and not lay into Utilitarians, but it's getting tougher by the minute.
I'm really not trying to play gotcha games. I guess we are playing definition games, but I guess I'd say you have to choose which you prioritize: The well-being of everyone, or following rules. If you follow rules only for the sake of the well-being of everyone, then I guess I'd call you a consequentialist. I'm not trying to be clever or counter-intuitive.
And I think you're setting up a false dichotomy: follow rules OR universal well-being.
If I make it a rule to always prioritize the well-being of everyone, am I really a consequentialist? After all, that's following a rule, not deciding on the basis of consequences!
Yes, consequentialism are rule-following are special cases of each other. You got me. The usual meaning of the word refers to situations in which they differ, i.e. any rule other than "maximize utility".
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Then I would call you a utilitarian, by my own definitions of the term. Which is admittedly very broad.
I basically separate it into the motives underlying someone's moral reasoning, rather than adherence to a specific decision procedure. If you're trying to follow some set of rules no matter what, you're a deontologist; if you're trying to do the right thing because it's right, you're a virtue ethicist; if you're trying to do whatever helps people the most, you're a utilitarian.
By your definition, you can call me a banana if you like. No skin off my nose. But I'm not a banana, and I'm not a utilitarian.
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The only reason Deontologists even function is because they're Consequentialists in denial.
I don't think there are any people who are real deontologists, consequentialists, or virtue ethicists -- I think people look at what the consequences of their past actions and decision processes were, and try to do more of the things that turned out well and less of the things that turned out badly. "Try to take actions that future-you will think were good actions" sure is a decision process, and if it's gone well for you in the past I'd expect you to keep using it in the future, but if it starts going badly I would expect you'd stop using it.
And if your decision process is "consequentialism when the successes of consequentialist reasoning are salient to me, and not consequentialism when the failures of consequentialism are salient to me" then I don't think you're a Real Consequentallist™.
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Other way around, surely?
The fact is, nobody is actually sitting down and crunching the numbers on utils. When it comes to actually making decisions in the real world and not in thought experiments, everyone resorts to the same expedients and heuristics - usually, some combination of virtue ethics and deontology. Don't commit murders, don't be dishonest.
Sure, no one does math, but that's just a theoretical explanation of the ideal way to do decision theory in a world without limits on calculation.
Being a consequentialist just requires that you judge the morality of an act based on the empirical outcomes it has for the world, rather than judging it based on some abstract rule or by what virtues it exhibits or etc.
Deontology was never about ignoring effects. It's impossible to consider actions at all without some acknowledgement of cause and effect. Let's say you're a deontologist and are trying to decide whether murder is moral. It obviously is not, but how about simply shooting a gun at someone? How about pulling the trigger on a gun while it's aimed at someone? How about flexing your finger while it happens to hold a gun pointed at someone? How about sending a nerve impulse to your finger while it happens to hold a gun aimed at someone?
In both practice and theory deontology, virtue ethics, and all other moral philosophies I can think of are consequentialist, just not in precisely the same way as the actual system of consequentialism.
Would it be reasonable to summarize as "Deontology is consequentialism in advance"? It seems like the point is that, come time for decision-making, rationalizing a suboptimal decision is easier than you'd expect, so it's better to have the decision already set. The downside being that genuinely out-of-context problems might return garbage when put through Deontological checks, but it's also easy to convince yourself something is an OOCP when it isn't, too...
What makes this categorically different from rule utilitarianism?
The utilitarianism part. Not all consequentialists are utilitarians.
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I'm totally in agreement there.
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Well, I do think that almost all people are inherently consequentialists, and that people who claim to be deontologists or virtue ethicists or surrendering their moral judgement to the guidance of a higher power or etc. are for the most part basically just being dishonest or failing at introspection.
But this may just be me drawing weird boundaries around term definitions.
To me, if you claim to be a virtue ethicist but you wouldn't follow a virtue into an action that had really bad consequentialist outcomes, then your morality isn't really based on virtues, it's based on consequences and you're just using virtues as a hueristic towards that end.
Same for deontology or religion, if you are making a conscious effort to bend those things towards good consequentialist outcomes, or occasioanlly breaking from them in order to achieve good consequentialist outcomes instead, then you're just a consequentialist who likes to frame your innate consequentialist morality in terms of an externalized locus of control.
But, maybe that's unfair to those philosophies, or proves too much about consequentialism. It's true that I have a concept that non-consequentialists would act innately alien in a lot of ways, doing seems that seem insane given the consequences, because they do not consider consequences to be part of their judgement criteria in the first place. But maybe I should be accepting a more humanistic version of these philosophies that aligns with the ways human nature naturally cares about outcomes, without lumping them all under consequentialism for that reason.
Let's say you murder someone, then later learn your victim was planning on bombing an orphanage or some either heinous act. Does this retroactively make your murder moral? Most consequentialists would say no. I wouldn't say this makes them secret deontllogists. It's not that they're dishonest or failing at introspection, it's that in a sense, consequentialism is the heuristic, and deontology the base reality.
Consider each of the following framings:
A: deontology is a good heuristic for achieving good consequences. Consequentialism is the explicit method, strictly better if followed perfectly.
B: consequentialism is a good heuristic for performing morally correct actions. Deontology is the explicit method, strictly better if followed perfectly.
I see consequentialism and deontology as fundamentally trying to answer slightly different questions. Each can be used as a heuristic for the question which the other is built to explicitly answer. I think everyone is deontologist in the end, because consequences are not all that factors into their moral calculus. The intent matters too.
Yeah I mean, I think it's pretty clear that all philosophies consider consequences. What is a "lie" but a set of words that produces a specific effect, e.g. a consequence? I don't think the concept of an "action" makes sense at all absent an understanding of cause and effect.
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Even if people aren't explicitly crunching the numbers (few except rat-adjacent nerds bother), the fact that they implicitly consider consequences and then evaluate their relative weights to trade them off against each other, that makes them consequentialists in practise.
That very aspect is an inescapable part of being a functional agent that doesn't halt and catch fire when it encounters two mutually exclusive or conflicting Kantian imperatives, such as not lying versus letting people come to harm when an axe-murderer knocks on your door and asks where their target is hiding.
There is a passage in the Zuo Zhuan, under the 21st year of the reign of Duke Zhao of Lu, where a member of the lower aristocracy in Spring and Autumn China dies from allowing an enemy to take a shot at him after missing his own shot and, prior to a second shot he was readying, was chastised by his opponent (who shot him dead) that taking two shots in a row without allowing a return shot was dishonorable.
Even granting that "breaking decorum has social consequences" and thus you can offer consequentialist explanations for actions like these, I think it's important to acknowledge that there are many people throughout history who are much more on the deontological side than otherwise.
(In the end I am more of a consequentialist myself, but I see the value in deontological thinking and virtue ethics as proxies for these, and I can somewhat understand how deontological thinking turns in the heads of those that accept it..)
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The fact that they consider duty, separate from consequences, makes them deontologists in practice. In fact nobody is either--ethical systems exist as a sort of meta-system which we use to correct our intuitions and heuristics as appropriate. Nobody actually follows any ethical system for even one second of the day--it would be impossible.
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Honestly. I don't know if I agree with this. They don't catch fire but they certainly seem to get quite mad if you don't side with whichever imperative they've decided takes precedence. I got into a spat today on twitter in response to a post about a boy who reportedly had to have his ponytail cut off because of some school policy. I said if it was a public school this was definitely wrong but if it was a private school then they have the right to make whatever arbitrary dress code rules they want. A classic freedom of association vs freedom of expression problem. People didn't, an I propose in most cases like this don't, consider the trade off and say that they disagree with placing freedom of association over freedom of expression, they accused me of hating minorities and any number of other moral deficiencies. This is how normal people respond to values conflicts, pure black and white thinking.
Legally yes (subject to antidiscrimination laws and such like), but it sounds like this was a discussion about morals rather than law.
Free speech is a (contested) moral principle, which in its shortest and most principle-based form is "thou shalt not speak power to truth", and the 1st amendment is a law enforcing that principle against the US federal government (before the 14th) and all US governments (after the 14th). But if you think free speech is a good idea, it is still a good idea when the speech restrictor is a private school. If free speech is a good idea, then a school that imposes unnecessary speech restrictions is a worse school - just as a knitting circle which kicks you out for criticizing the latest woke-stupid fad is a worse knitting circle.
So the moral question of "Should a school prohibit boys wearing ponytails?" is more complex than "They can, so they should." Clearly there are schools where the answer is "Yes" - if the school has a purpose beyond academic education and enforcing gender roles is part of that purpose (for example a Christian or Jewish school that takes Deuteronomy 22:5 seriously) then the school is a better Christian school because it prohibits ponytails on boys. But this doesn't apply to a pure academic crammer, and I personally don't see how it applies to Eton. A knitting circle which exists to encourage knitting should not kick people out for blaspheming against the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But a Pastafarian knitting circle which exists to promote social interaction among the knitters in the local Pastafarian congregation probably should - and in fact might want to go further and require people to knit correctly designed noodly appendages.
This goes to why wokeness looks totalitarian (right now it isn't a totalitarian threat because there is no woke Hitler, but there are plenty of people lining up to be work Hugenberg and woke Papen should she show up). Wokeness believes that every organisation should be a purpose-driven organisation with wokeness as one of its core purposes - that every knitting circle should be a woke knitting circle.
Right, it's a contest between rights and one can reasonably decide either one comes out supreme from the he context. It's an argument about trade offs. But most people aren't engaging in arguments acknowledging trade offs, they pick whichever response looks most flattering to the ingroup without any regard to reason. If the kid being made to change his appearance is a minority they will decry the act, if it's some visibly Maga kid they will support the school. This is what approximates moral reasoning for most people. It's a kind of consequentialism where the only consequences considered are PR.
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Humans are neither hyper rational utility calculators nor are they blind rule followers. Everyone uses both rules and a consideration of consequences to help them make decisions. But it's my impression that consequentialists are much more resistant to this idea.
It's a typical consequentialist trick to conjure up some idiotic thought experiment, as if it means anything. It doesn't.
Very well, if axe-murdering is too outlandish for your tastes, what if it's the Gestapo looking for the Jews in your attic?
Deontologists are far more prone to deny that tradeoffs can and must be made even for sacred values, so I have no idea what makes you think Consequentialists don't make a principled decision to rely on heuristics where the expected utility of following more formal procedures isn't worth it. We are computationally bounded entities, not platonic ideals.
Deontologists still have a hierarchy of values -- Kant may value truth over helping Nazis kill Jews, but most people just say "yeah, lying is bad but helping Nazis is worse" and carry on. This is still a deontological position, and definitely nobody is halting or catching fire over this dilemma.
Ok, replace Nazi soldier asking for whether there are jews in the attic with your Nazi neighbour asking for whether you have a potato peeler they could borrow because theirs broke.
I suspect deontologists would still not see lying to not giving your Nazi neighbour a potato peeler as just as good a trade compared to lying to not let Nazis capture a Jewish family.
Consider two worlds, identical except in world A Alice refuses to reveal whether she is hiding Jews in the attic/Bob gives his Nazi neighbour a peeler while in B it's the other way around where Alice reveals the location of the Jews while Bob refuses the potato peeler. According to the deontologist's position both these worlds are equally good/bad, but I suspect very few people would in reality see it that way.
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I tend to agree with your overall point, but I've always felt like the Jews in the Attic example merely reveals that the person under questioning doesn't place honesty as a terminal value.
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I think we can make a more concrete claim, which is that deontologists are doomed in the long run due to competition and natural selection. Their rules will consistently be used against them. Today it's asylum seekers, tomorrow it will be ultra-charming machines that will claim moral primacy over whoever has resources.
It's my own impression that the fiercest advocates for generous asylum policies or even open borders aren't deontologists (who generally have a lot of respect for rules around borders and citizenship), but utilitarians (who are willing to compromise because they value the utility of asylum seekers over maintaining strong borders). It's also my own impression that utilitarians are more vulnerable to charisma and arguments - theoretically a utilitarian is capable of endorsing any behavior if they're persuaded of it's utility, whereas it's much harder to argue a deontologist into bending his own rules.
It is a trope of right-populist complaints against the pro-immigration lobby that advocates for generous asylum policies are doing virtue ethics. As a practical point about the noisy bits of the pro-immigration lobby, this is mostly correct - hence language like "What kind of country does this?" The person of hair colour supports generous immigration policies because she/they is kind, anti-racist, not a xenophobe, sympathetic to the oppressed, tolerant, cosmopolitan, etc. and a person who is those things is the type of person who supports generous immigration policies.
The effective bits of the pro-immigration lobby are doing consequentialism - Bill Gates supports generous immigration policies because he believes that the types of immigration enabled by liberal immigration policies are good for the immigrants and (on net, applying Kaldor-Hicks aggregation of gains and losses to individual host country citizens) good for host countries.
Virtue signaling surely, unless right populists are criticizing the Aristotelian basis of pro-immigration policies.
For virtue signalling to be useful, you have to believe in virtue ethics in the first place. Dishonest deontologists engage in casuistry to explain why they haven't committed a wrong. Dishonest utilitarians exaggerate the benefits of their actions and minimise the costs. Dishonest virtue ethicists signal virtues they don't possess.
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Hmmm. I think you're on to something. I think we need to distinguish between utilitarianism done well, and done poorly. I agree it's easy to do poorly - I think that's part of why we love rules so much - they're easier to follow than trying to come up with a good strategy from scratch for every situation. I guess my claim is that, in the presence of enough adversarial intelligence or optimization, following even pretty good rules won't protect you, because the adversary will find the edge cases they can exploit. At that point you have to adjust your rules, and I claim the only effective way to do that in a way that avoids exploitation is very intelligent consequentialism.
I claim that doesn't work either, if your environment is adversarial, because the difference between your model of the expected consequences of your actions and the actual realized consequences of your actions can be exploited. This doesn't even require an adversary that is generally more intelligent than you, just an adversary that notes a specific blind spot you have (see how humans can beat the wildly superhuman Go engine KataGo by exploiting a very specific blind spot it has in its world model).
Okay, well I include some degree of adaptation in my definition of "very intelligent". In fact, adaptation is the main advantage that consequentialists have over deontologists.
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These strike me as bigger problems for the utilitarians, memed best by the bikecuck illustration.
Really though, no premise moral philosophies should be subject to those particular failure modes - it's the specific tenets that become problems. Deontologists can easily adhere to the principle of concentric loyalties and avoid issues with "asylum seekers". Utilitarians can concoct a calculation that "shows" that it'll make things worse in the long-run.
The bike cuck meme is only a problem if you subscribe specifically to a humanist universalist progressive conception of utilitarianism, which it’s not clear to me at all that most of the early utilitarians did.
Of course not. The usual form of modern utilitarianism I see is posthoc accounting of utils to make them work based on gut feeling. There's always a good utilitarian reason to do what I wanted to do anyway!
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