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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.
The only reason Deontologists even function is because they're Consequentialists in denial.
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.
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.
Basically this, which in turn brings us back to the old Heinlein line in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress...
If a law is tolerable, I will obey it. If it is intolerable I will ignore it. If Earth really cared about the law as much as they say they'd either make their laws more tolerable or they'd have arrested me by now.
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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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