cupholder comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong

7 Post author: komponisto 07 June 2010 08:37AM

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Comment author: prase 08 June 2010 10:04:35AM *  4 points [-]

A person may dislike being lied to, value the world where such lying occurs less, irrespective of whether they know of said lying.

In my opinion, this is a lawyer's attempt to masquerade deontologism as consequentialism. You can, of course, reformulate the deontologist rule "never lie" as a consequentialist "I assign an extremely high disutility to situations where I lie". In the same way you can put consequentialist preferences as a deontoligst rule "at any case, do whatever maximises your utility". But doing that, the point of the distinction between the two ethical systems is lost.

Comment author: cupholder 08 June 2010 02:06:09PM 2 points [-]

But doing that, the point of the distinction between the two ethical systems is lost.

If so, maybe we want that.