elspood comments on Philosophical Landmines - Less Wrong

84 [deleted] 08 February 2013 09:22PM

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Comment author: TheOtherDave 09 February 2013 02:56:20PM 8 points [-]

Do you have a real example of deontology outperforming consequentialism IRL?

I'm not sure what that would look like. If consequentialism and deontology shared a common set of performance metrics, they would not be different value systems in the first place.

For example, I would say "Don't torture people, no matter what the benefits of doing so are!" is a fine example of a deontological injunction. My intuition is that people raised with such an injunction are less likely to torture people than those raised with the consequentialist equivalent ("Don't torture people unless it does more good than harm!"), but as far as I know the study has never been done.

Supposing it is true, though, it's still not clear to me what is outperforming what in that case. Is that a point for deontological injunctions, because they more effectively constrain behavior independent of the situation? Or a point for consequentialism, because it more effectively allows situation-dependent judgments?

Comment author: elspood 11 February 2013 07:43:16PM 1 point [-]

If consequentialism and deontology shared a common set of performance metrics, they would not be different value systems in the first place.

At least one performance metric that allows for the two systems to be different is: "How difficult is the value system for humans to implement?"