Nisan comments on Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations? - Less Wrong

37 Post author: lukeprog 16 August 2011 04:40PM

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Comment author: Nisan 18 August 2011 05:43:37PM 1 point [-]

The connection between the folk morality of the common man and the deontologies of the philosophers is not well-made in this post; hinting that the same neurological processes could perhaps lead to both, based on a few studies, just isn't enough to justify the provocative terminology.

To make this criticism of Greene more concrete, I will point out that a "consequentialist" judgment, in Greene's terminology, is one in which consideration of outcomes have trumped or overpowered or have won in spite of other considerations; and a "deontological" judgment is one in which other considerations have won in spite of the outcomes. An actual consequentialist theory will always output "consequentialist" judgments, but a deontological theory will sometimes output "deontological" judgments and sometimes output "consequentialist" judgments.

So one can sort of see where Greene's terminology is coming from, but in the context of the eternal debate between consequentialists and deontologists it would be uncharitable to imply that deontologists always give "deontological" judgments.