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bryjnar comments on (Almost) every moral theory can be represented by a utility function - Less Wrong
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Consequentialism (usually) has a slightly richer vocabulary than just "This is the right act": there's usually a notion of degree. That is, rather than having an ordinal ranking of actions, you get a cardinal ranking. So action A could be twice as good as action B. The translation you've proposed collapses this. I'm not sure how big a problem that is, though.
Yeah, that thought crossed my mind after I posted my comment. This may be what the authors are talking about. I envisioned the problem a little differently though - consequentialism does seem to only need an ordinal ranking, while deontological theories just need to put actions in categories "good" and "bad" depending on context - at least based on my understanding of the terms.
Actually, neither of the papers that Luke linked to seem to discuss whether consequentialist theories can be represented deontologically. They seem more interested in the reverse question.
Did you mean to say that consequentialism needs a cardinal ranking, rather than an ordinal one? A two-category ranking is certainly an ordinal one!
No I didn't, but I should have said that usually consequentialism typically has a higher resolution - i.e. more categories if it's an ordinal ranking - so you're still losing information by making it deontological.
For some reason I've never understood consequentialist philosophers also often/usually collapse that cardinal ranking into the right (usualy one) action and all the other wrong actions, see this. Presumably they wouldn't worry too much about this problem.