multifoliaterose comments on Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations? - Less Wrong
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I think this whole "utilitarian vs. deontological" setup is a misleading false dichotomy. In reality, the way people make moral judgments -- and I'd also say, any moral system that is really usable in practice -- is best modeled neither by utilitarianism nor by deontology, but by virtue ethics.
All of the puzzles listed in this article are clarified once we realize that when people judge whether an act is moral, they ask primarily what sort of person would act that way, and consequently, whether they want to be (or be seen as) this sort of person and how people of this sort should be dealt with. Of course, this judgment is only partly (and sometimes not at all) in the form of conscious deliberation, but from an evolutionary and game-theoretical perspective, it's clear why the unconscious processes would have evolved to judge things from that viewpoint. (And also why their judgment is often covered in additional rationalizations at the conscious level.)
The "fat man" variant of the trolley problem is a good illustration. Try to imagine someone who actually acts that way in practice, i.e. who really goes ahead and kills in cold blood when convinced by utilitarian arithmetic that it's right to do so. Would you be comfortable working or socializing with this person, or even just being in their company? Of course, being scared and creeped out by such a person is perfectly rational: among the actually existing decision algorithms implemented by human brains, there are none (or at least very few) that would make the utilitarian decision in the fat man-trolley problem and otherwise produce reasonably predictable, cooperative, and non-threatening behavior.
It's similar with the less dramatic examples discussed by Haidt. In all of these, the negative judgment, even if not explicitly expressed that way, is ultimately about judging what kind of person would act like that. (And again, except perhaps for the ideologically polarized flag example, it is true that such behaviors signal that the person in question is likely to be otherwise weird, unpredictable, and threatening.)
I'd also add that when it comes to rationalizations, utilitarians should be the last ones to throw stones. In practice, utilitarianism has never been much more than a sophisticated framework for constructing rationalizations for ideological positions on questions where correct utilitarian answers are at worst just undefined, and at best wildly intractable to calculate. (As is the case for pretty much all questions of practical interest.)
The phenomenon of utilitarianism serving as a sophisticated framework for constructing rationalizations for ideological positions exists and is perhaps generic. But there's an analogous phenomenon of virtue ethics being rhetorically (think about both sides of the abortion debate). I strongly disagree that utilitarianism is ethically useless in practice. Do you disagree that VillageReach's activity has higher utilitarian expected value per dollar than that of the Make A Wish Foundation?
Yes, there are plenty of situations where game theoretic dynamics and coordination problems make utilitarian style analysis useless, but your claim seems overly broad and sweeping.
I agree that I have indulged in a bit of a rhetorical excess above. What I had in mind is primarily welfare economics -- as I indicated in another comment, I think it's quite evident that this particular kind of formalized utilitarianism is regularly used to construct arguments for various ideological positions that are seemingly rigorous but in fact clearly rationalizations.
I also agree that non-utilitarian theories of ethics are fertile grounds for rationalizations too. I merely wanted to emphasize that given all the utilitarian rationalizations being thrown around, the idea of utilitarian thinking being somehow generally less prone to rationalizations is a non-starter, under any reasonable definitions of these terms.
As for the issues of charity, I think they are also more complicated than they seem, but this is a quite complex topic in its own right, which unfortunately I don't have the time to address right now. I do agree that this area can be seen as a partial counterexample to my general thesis about uselessness of utilitarianism. (But less so than the strong proponents of utilitarian charity commonly claim.)