I've long had the intuition that consequentialist ethics and deontological ethics were equivalent (in the sense described here). To someone who has read the papers (finals, etc), why can't you represent an arbitrary consequentialist moral theory within a deontological moral theory? Many deonotological theories are context dependent - e.g. If context A holds, don't lie, but if context B holds, lie. Suppose we have some utility function U that we want to deontologicalize. It seems fairly trivial to set context A as "The set of situations where lying does not maximize utility according to U" and context B as "The set of situations where lying does maximize utility according to U." Indeed, if you look at a utility-maximizer in the right light, she looks like she's following a categorical imperative: "Always and everywhere choose the action which maximizes utility." What's wrong with this?