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Once you start placing different values of different types of "helping nazis" you're back to consequentialism but with extra steps, for how do you decide what types of helping nazis are worse than others?
Consider a case where a Nazi soldier asks you for the passcode to a safe which contains some amount of money inside. The Nazi wants to take the money inside and use it for general Nazi purposes. You can lie and tell him you don't know the passcode in which case he won't get the money or give him the passcode by telling the truth. I think it is clearly worse to tell him the passcode if the safe contains $1 billion vs if the safe contains 50 cents plus a used chewing gum wrapper.
In the latter case it might very well be worth just giving the password instead of lying, but in the former case you really shouldn't do it.
How do you decide how much worse handing $1 billion to the Nazis is vs handing them 50 cents under a deontological system to see if the "badness" is more or less than telling the lie "I don't know the passcode to the safe" if not for some form of consequentialism?
See my comment here. Moral philosophies in general are consequentialist, in the sense that they do consider consequences.
Literally just google it and the top result says:
Consequentialism asserts consequences are all that matters. Disagreeing with that assertion doesn't mean ignoring consequences entirely, nor does considering consequences necessarily mean you cannot consider anything else.
You're familiar with timeless decision theory right? That's deontology, not consequentialism.
Moral theories tend to merge at the complex end imo. In practice a timeless decision theory supporter will not be commonly referred to as a deontologist, even though his theory is on the surface similar to the categorical imperative, with the law being less universal (eg, the action of lying is divided instead of being considered in whole, and allowed/ordered in the particular nazi cases).
The common understading of deontology is absolutism : “Absolutists assert that there are exceptionless moral rules or intrinsically wrong actions that are absolutely wrong and may never be performed, whatever the consequences. “
The TDT guy (for the record, close to my own position) can, and will, claim that his theory results in the best outcome (as opposed to doing your duty for duty’s sake), making him a consequentialist again, for real this time.
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Have I been deontologing wrong this whole time? I didn't think deontologists were incapable of considering consequences, I thought they just also considered other things as well, like duty, rules, rights etc. The difference between a deontologist and a consequentialist, I thought, was that the consequentialist doesn't beat himself up for taking necessary but unfortunate actions.
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