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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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You always knew something was off, but chalked it up to having a slightly different moral code to everyone else. You figured you were just unusually utilitarian and well, every society can use some deontologists

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..)