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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.
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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