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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.
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.
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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