Comment by tizzy
2 years ago
Close but no cigar, that deontology begs the question _why_ should we not murder people. Utilitarianism gives a consistent, albeit simple, answer.
Note that I probably agree with you, but the solution isn’t as simple as you think.
>Utilitarianism gives a consistent, albeit simple, answer.
Except it doesn't. The "simple" cases of utilitarianism (i.e. happiness-maximizing or unhappiness-minimizing) are both supportive of killing people if their expected remaining lifetime happiness is negative or if their death would result in others being happier - see the infamous organ donor problem. Worse, by following that philosophy you eventually get to the Repugnant Conclusion[0], which is a world of as many minimally-happy humans as possible. The complex cases result in complex epicycles of propagating out utilitiarian ideals to the rest of society and eventually asserting that heuristics of the moral value of actions would actually be best in most cases because the effects of actions are impossible to quantitatively evaluate for anyone. Those heuristics essentially boil down to deontological principles.
[0]: The fact that many public utilitarian philosophers are so unable to find a way out of this, yet so enamored with the idea of utilitarianism that they can't imagine it being wrong, that they signed a public statement saying that actually the Repugnant Conclusion is totally fine and people should still push for population ethics that lead to it is wild to me. See https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/utilitas/article/wha...
Yes, it's amusing that the simplest way (for atheists such as myself) to justify deontology is with a utilitarian argument; having deontology principles is good because those principles produce good outcomes. But I think my point stands, that utilitarianism without any deontological safety rails is a recipe for mass murder.