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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2737 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024

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If you have a secular ethical framework that is not utilitarianism or something utilitarian-adjacent (eg consequentialism), what is it? I’m having a difficult time imagining a system that can’t be understood through some broadly-conceived utilitarian underpinning.

Consequentialism is generally misunderstood to mean "consequences matter." Really it means "only consequences matter." Pretty much all other ethical systems still care about consequences to some extent.

I think consequentialism is self-evidently wrong--why should an action's morality not take into account the mindset of the actor? If someone tries to kill you, but happens to stab you in a tumor and save your life, does their action become ethical? If someone genocides an entire race out of hatred, but due to the butterfly effect this ends up saving n+1 lives, does this render their action ethical? Actions must be judged, not based on their consequences, but based on their expected consequences, and since humans are not omniscient this necessarily leads to ethical systems such as deontology.

Consequentialism does not demand ignoring intent, because intent is frequently important and not treating it as such would lead to bad consequences in many cases.

That’s the great thing about consequentialism, when it leads to bad consequences you can adjust it to lead to better ones.

Your own thought experiments bear this out. Moral uncertainty and the fundamental randomness and contingency of future events plague all systems.

Rule utilitarianism, or something like Cowen’s “economic growth plus human rights”, attempt to strike a balance between baseline rules and considering the effects of any given act. The US constitution sets forth rules, limitations, and rights in a framework of promoting the general welfare, directly in line with rule utilitarianism.

If your god inspired the US constitution, he’s clearly a fan of rule utilitarianism.

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