(Almost) every moral theory can be represented by a utility function

lukeprog

This was demonstrated, in a certain limited way, in Peterson (2009). See also Lowry & Peterson (2011).

The Peterson result provides an "asymmetry argument" in favor of consequentialism:

Consequentialists can account for phenomena that are usually thought of in nonconsequentialist terms, such as rights, duties, and virtues, whereas the opposite is false of nonconsequentialist theories. Rights, duty or virtue-based theories cannot account for the fundamental moral importance of consequences. Because of this asymmetry, it seems it would be preferable to become a consequentialist – indeed, it would be virtually impossible not to be a consequentialist.

Another argument in favor of consequentialism has to do with the causes of different types of moral judgments: see Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations?

Update: see Carl's criticism.

This was demonstrated, in a certain limited way, in Peterson (2009). See also Lowry & Peterson (2011).

The Peterson result provides an "asymmetry argument" in favor of consequentialism:

Consequentialists can account for phenomena that are usually thought of in nonconsequentialist terms, such as rights, duties, and virtues, whereas the opposite is false of nonconsequentialist theories. Rights, duty or virtue-based theories cannot account for the fundamental moral importance of consequences. Because of this asymmetry, it seems it would be preferable to become a consequentialist – indeed, it would be virtually impossible not to be a consequentialist.

Another argument in favor of consequentialism has to do with the causes of different types of moral judgments: see Are Deontological Moral Judgments Rationalizations?

Update: see Carl's criticism.

To me, the main reason behind deontology and similar non-consequentialists moral theories are to work around the human bias, our inability to implement fully consequentialism (because of overconfidence, hyperbolic discounting, stress, emotional weight, ...).

Having a way to encode a deontological moral theory into a utility function (and use consequentialism on it later on) is a nice thing, but not really useful when the point of deontology is that it (arguably) works better on faulty hardware and buggy software we run on than raw consequentialism. If we could perform consequentialism safely, we wouldn't need deontology.

So I stand to my current stance : I use consequentialism when cold-blooded and thinking abstractly, to devise and refine ethical rules ("deontology"), but when directly concerned by something or in the heat of events, I use the deonotological rules decided beforehand, unless I've a very, very strong consequentialist reason not to do so, because I don't trust myself to wield raw consequentialism, and the failure mode of poorly implemented consequentialism is usually worse than of poorly implemented deontology (when you can revise the deontological code afterwards, at least, I'm not speaking of a bible-like code that can't change even in the course of centuries).

10Matt_Simpson14y

That's fine as a heuristic for choosing the morally best action, but that's not really what the papers are talking about. They're talking about whether the underlying moral theory is consequentialist or deonotological, not whether the heuristics for finding moral outcomes fall into either category.

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(Almost) every moral theory can be represented by a utility function

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(Almost) every moral theory can be represented by a utility function

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