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Jack comments on Deontology for Consequentialists - Less Wrong
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I feel like I've summarized it somewhere, but can't find it, so here it is again (it is not finished, I know there are issues left to deal with):
Persons (which includes but may not be limited to paradigmatic adult humans) have rights, which it is wrong to violate. For example, one I'm pretty sure we've got is the right not to be killed. This means that any person who kills another person commits a wrong act, with the following exceptions: 1) a rights-holder may, at eir option, waive any and all rights ey has, so uncoerced suicide or assisted suicide is not wrong; 2) someone who has committed a contextually relevant wrong act, in so doing, forfeits eir contextually relevant rights. I don't yet have a full account of "contextual relevance", but basically what that's there for is to make sure that if somebody is trying to kill me, this might permit me to kill him, but would not grant me license to break into his house and steal his television.
However, even once a right has been waived or forfeited or (via non-personhood) not had in the first place, a secondary principle can kick in to offer some measure of moral protection. I'm calling it "the principle of needless destruction", but I'm probably going to re-name it later because "destruction" isn't quite what I'm trying to capture. Basically, it means you shouldn't go around "destroying" stuff without an adequate reason. Protecting a non-waived, non-forfeited right is always an adequate reason, but apart from that I don't have a full explanation; how good the reason has to be depends on how severe the act it justifies is. ("I was bored" might be an adequate reason to pluck and shred a blade of grass, but not to set a tree on fire, for instance.) This principle has the effect, among others, of ruling out revenge/retribution/punishment for their own sakes, although deterrence and preventing recurrence of wrong acts are still valid reasons to punish or exact revenge/retribution.
In cases where rights conflict, and there's no alternative that doesn't violate at least one, I privilege the null action. (I considered denying ought-implies-can, instead, but decided that committed me to the existence of moral luck and wasn't okay.) "The null action" is the one where you don't do anything. This is because I uphold the doing-allowing distinction very firmly. Letting something happen might be bad, but it is never as bad as doing the same something, and is virtually never as bad as performing even a much more minor (but still bad) act.
I hold agents responsible for their culpable ignorance and anything they should have known not to do, as though they knew they shouldn't have done it. Non-culpable ignorance and its results is exculpatory. Culpability of ignorance is determined by the exercise of epistemic virtues like being attentive to evidence etc. (Epistemologically, I'm an externalist; this is just for ethical purposes.) Ignorance of any kind that prevents something bad from happening is not exculpatory - this is the case of the would-be murderer who doesn't know his gun is unloaded. No out for him. I've been saying "acts", but in point of fact, I hold agents responsible for intentions, not completed acts per se. This lets my morality work even if solipsism is true, or we are brains in vats, or an agent fails to do bad things through sheer incompetence, or what have you.
Upvoted for spelling out so much, though I disagree with the whole approach (though I think I disagree with the approach of everyone else here too). This reads like pretty run of the mill deontology-- but since I don't know the field that well, is there anywhere you differ from most other deontologists?
Also, are rights axiomatic or is there a justification embedded in your concept of personhood (or somewhere else)?
The quintessential deontologist is Kant. I haven't paid too much attention to his primary sources because he's miserable to read, but what Kant scholars say about him doesn't sound like what goes through my head. One place I can think of where we'd diverge is that Kant doesn't forbid cruelty to animals except inasmuch as it can deaden humane intuitions; my principle of needless destruction forbids it on its own demerits. The other publicly deontic philosopher I know of is Ross, but I know him only via a two-minute unsympathetic summary which - intentionally or no - made his theory sound very slapdash, like he has sympathies to the "it's sleek and pretty" defense of utilitarianism but couldn't bear to actually throw in his lot with it.
The justification is indeed embedded in my concept of personhood. Welcome to personhood, here's your rights and responsibilities! They're part of the package.
Ross is an interesting case. Basically, he defines what I would call moral intuitions as "prima facie duties." (I am not sure what ontological standing he thinks these duties have.) He then lists six important ones: beneficence, honour, non-maleficence, justice, self-improvement and... goodness, I forget the 6th. But essentially, all of these duties are important, and one determines the rightness of an act by reflection - the most stringent duty wins and becomes the actual moral duty.
E.g., you promised a friend that you would meet them, but on the way you come upon the scene of a car crash. A person is injured, and you have first aid training. So basically Ross says we have a prima facie duty to keep the promise (honour), but also to help the motorist (beneficence), and the more stringent one (beneficence) wins.
I like about it that: it adds up to normality, without weird consequences like act utilitarianism (harvest the traveler's organs) or Kantianism (don't lie to the murderer).
I don't like about it that: it adds up to normality, i.e., it doesn't ever tell me anything I don't want to hear! Since my moral intuitions are what decides the question, the whole thing functions as a big rubber stamp on What I Already Thought. I can probably find some knuckle-dragging bigot within a 1-km radius who has a moral intuition that fags must die. He reads Ross & says: "Yeah, this guy agrees with me!" So there is a wrong moral intuition. On the other hand, before reading Peter Singer (a consequentialist), I didn't think it was obligatory to give aid to foreign victims of starvation & preventable disease; now I think it is as obligatory as, in his gedanken experiment, pulling a kid out of a pond right beside you (even though you'll ruin your running shoes). Ross would not have made me think of that; whatever "seemed" right to me, would be right.
I am also really, really suspicious of the a priori and the prima facie. It seems very handwavy to jump straight to these "duties" when the whole point is to arrive at them from something that is not morality - either consequences or through some sort of symmetry.
"The whole thing functions as a big rubber stamp on What I Already Thought"
Speaking as a (probably biased) consequentialist, I generally got the impression that this was pretty much the whole point of Deontology.
However, the example of Kant being against lying seems to go against my impression. Kantian deontology is based on reasoning things about your rules, so it seems to be consistent in that case.
Still, it seems to me that more mainstream Deontology allows you to simply make up new categories of acts (ex. lying is wrong, but lying to murderers is OK) in order to justify your intuitive response to a thought experiment. How common is it for Deontologists to go "yeah, this action has utterly horrific consequences, but that's fine because it's the correct action", the way it is for Consequentialists to do the reverse? (again noting that I've now heard about the example of Kant, I might be confusing Deontology with "inuitive morality" or "the noncentral fallacy".)
So I think I have pretty good access to the concept of personhood but the existence of rights isn't obvious to me from that concept. Is there a particular feature of personhood that generates these rights?
That's one of my not-finished things, is spelling out exactly why I think you get there from here.