Thanks! OK, so a classical deontological rule might be, “don’t lie” as an absolute. Suppose that a person has this particular rule in their ethical system. It is entirely context and consequence independent.
Since I don’t have time to read articles about meta-ethics at the moment, I wanted to guess the gist of the argument that this could be expressed in consequentialist terms.
Is it as simple as if someone tells a lie, then there is something that is now ‘bad’ about the universe and this is framed as a consequence? For example, something as simple as ‘a lie has been told’ or perhaps a little bit more subtle, that now a person is in the negative state of being a liar. So that there is a negative ‘consequence’ of the lie, but it just happens to be an absolutely immediate consequence.
Then the distinction would be that deontologists compute over consequences that are immediate results of an action or state (that is, of the action or state itself), while consequentialists will compute over the consequences of that action or state (where consequence has the usual meaning of second or third or nth effects).
Thanks! OK, so a classical deontological rule might be, “don’t lie” as an absolute. Suppose that a person has this particular rule in their ethical system. It is entirely context and consequence independent.
Since I don’t have time to read articles about meta-ethics at the moment, I wanted to guess the gist of the argument that this could be expressed in consequentialist terms.
Is it as simple as if someone tells a lie, then there is something that is now ‘bad’ about the universe and this is framed as a consequence? For example, something as simple as ‘a lie has been told’ or perhaps a little bit more subtle, that now a person is in the negative state of being a liar. So that there is a negative ‘consequence’ of the lie, but it just happens to be an absolutely immediate consequence.
Then the distinction would be that deontologists compute over consequences that are immediate results of an action or state (that is, of the action or state itself), while consequentialists will compute over the consequences of that action or state (where consequence has the usual meaning of second or third or nth effects).