Yeah, you can say something like “I want the world to be such that I follow deontology” and then consequentialism includes deontology. Or you could say “it’s right to follow consequentialism” and then deontology includes consequentialism. Understood this way, the systems become vacuous and don’t mean anything at all. When people say “I’m an consequentialist”, they usually mean something more: that their wishes are naturally expressed in terms of consequences. That’s what my post is arguing against. I think some wishes are naturally consequentialist, but there are other equally valid wishes that aren’t, and expressing all wishes in terms of consequences isn’t especially useful.
This reminds me of the puzzle: why is death bad? After all, when you are dead, you won’t be around to suffer from it. Or why worry about not being alive in the future when you weren’t alive before birth either? Simple response: We just don’t want to be dead in the future for evolutionary reasons. Organisms who hate death had higher rates of reproduction. What matters for us is not a fact about the consequence of dying, but what we happen to want or not want. (Related: this, but also this.)
I think consequentialism is the robust framework for achieving goals and I think my top goal is the flourishing of (most, the ones compatible with me) human values.
That uses consequentialism as the ultimate lever to move the world but refers to consequences that are (almost) entirely the results of our biology-driven thinking and desiring and existing, at least for now.
Yeah, you can say something like “I want the world to be such that I follow deontology” and then consequentialism includes deontology. Or you could say “it’s right to follow consequentialism” and then deontology includes consequentialism. Understood this way, the systems become vacuous and don’t mean anything at all. When people say “I’m an consequentialist”, they usually mean something more: that their wishes are naturally expressed in terms of consequences. That’s what my post is arguing against. I think some wishes are naturally consequentialist, but there are other equally valid wishes that aren’t, and expressing all wishes in terms of consequences isn’t especially useful.
This reminds me of the puzzle: why is death bad? After all, when you are dead, you won’t be around to suffer from it. Or why worry about not being alive in the future when you weren’t alive before birth either? Simple response: We just don’t want to be dead in the future for evolutionary reasons. Organisms who hate death had higher rates of reproduction. What matters for us is not a fact about the consequence of dying, but what we happen to want or not want. (Related: this, but also this.)
I think consequentialism is the robust framework for achieving goals and I think my top goal is the flourishing of (most, the ones compatible with me) human values.
That uses consequentialism as the ultimate lever to move the world but refers to consequences that are (almost) entirely the results of our biology-driven thinking and desiring and existing, at least for now.