Deontology relies on things that do not happen after the act judged to judge the act. This leaves facts about times prior to and the time during the act to determine whether the act is right or wrong.
I’m not convinced that this ‘backward-looking vs. forward-looking’ contrast really cuts to the heart of the distinction. Note that consequentialists may accept an ‘holistic’ axiology according to which whether some future event is good or bad depends on what has previously happened. (For a simple example, retributivists may hold that it’s positively good when those who are guilty of heinous crimes suffer. But then in order to tell whether we should relieve Bob’s suffering, we need to look backwards in time to see whether he’s a mass-murderer.) It strikes me as misleading to characterize this as involving a form of “overlap” with deontological theories. It’s purely consequentialist in form; it merely has a more complex axiology than (say) hedonism.
The distinction may be better characterised in terms of the relative priority of ‘the right’ and ‘the good’. Consequentialists take goodness (i.e. desirability, or what you ought to want) as fundamental, and thus have a teleological conception of action: the point of acting is to achieve some prior goal (which, again, needn’t be purely forward-looking). Deontologists reverse this. They begin with a conception of how one ought to act (e.g. in ways that would be universalizable, or justifiable to others, or respects everyone’s rights), and only subsequently derive the doppelganger’s conception of the good (as you put it: “what would the world look like if I follow theory X”).
An interesting consequence of this analysis is that so-called “rule consequentialism” turns out to be a borderline case: the good (what to want) is partly, but not entirely, prior to the right (how to act). I explain this in more detail in my post Analyzing Consequentialisms.
As I specify in my first footnote, consequentialism is wickedly hard to define. It may be that the teleological aspect is more important than the subsequence aspect, but either one leaves some things to be desired, and my post was already awfully long without going into “teleology”.
I’m not convinced that this ‘backward-looking vs. forward-looking’ contrast really cuts to the heart of the distinction. Note that consequentialists may accept an ‘holistic’ axiology according to which whether some future event is good or bad depends on what has previously happened. (For a simple example, retributivists may hold that it’s positively good when those who are guilty of heinous crimes suffer. But then in order to tell whether we should relieve Bob’s suffering, we need to look backwards in time to see whether he’s a mass-murderer.) It strikes me as misleading to characterize this as involving a form of “overlap” with deontological theories. It’s purely consequentialist in form; it merely has a more complex axiology than (say) hedonism.
The distinction may be better characterised in terms of the relative priority of ‘the right’ and ‘the good’. Consequentialists take goodness (i.e. desirability, or what you ought to want) as fundamental, and thus have a teleological conception of action: the point of acting is to achieve some prior goal (which, again, needn’t be purely forward-looking). Deontologists reverse this. They begin with a conception of how one ought to act (e.g. in ways that would be universalizable, or justifiable to others, or respects everyone’s rights), and only subsequently derive the doppelganger’s conception of the good (as you put it: “what would the world look like if I follow theory X”).
An interesting consequence of this analysis is that so-called “rule consequentialism” turns out to be a borderline case: the good (what to want) is partly, but not entirely, prior to the right (how to act). I explain this in more detail in my post Analyzing Consequentialisms.
As I specify in my first footnote, consequentialism is wickedly hard to define. It may be that the teleological aspect is more important than the subsequence aspect, but either one leaves some things to be desired, and my post was already awfully long without going into “teleology”.
I like your article, though!