_TL;DR: I see lots of debates flinging around "consequentialism" and "utilitarianism" and "moral realism" and "subjectivism" and various other philosophical terms, but each time I look up one of them or ask for an explanation, it inevitably ends up being something I already believe, even when it comes from both sides of a heated argument. So it turns out "I am a X" for nearly all X I've ever seen on LessWrong. Here's what I think about all of this, in honest lay-it-out-there form. For a charitable reading, assume there is no sarcasm or trolling anywhere in this comment._
Hmm. So...
I believe that there is an objective system of verifiable, moral facts which can be true or false. [3]
These facts depend on certain objective features of the universe. [2]
However, if one is to ask a moral question without including a specific group-referent (though usually, "all humans" or "most humans" is implicit) from which one can extract that objective algorithm that makes things moral or not, then there is no "final word" or "ultimate truth" about which answer is right, and in fact the question seems hopelessly self-contradictory to me. [1]
To my understanding, since something inside humans determines moral judgments and also determines our opinions on morality, they are correlated, but by a separate cause that seems all too often ignored. I believe that eventually we may be able to understand how this separate black box inside humans does decisions on morality, and then formulate equations to calculate how moral something is for a particular agent. [5]
Given that this "morality" thing only depends on the minds of people, it can also be said to be only about what these people think of it, in a very wide sense of the phrase. However, what opinions people generate and what turns out to be objectively moral are correlated, but from a third cause - one that is still a black box which we cannot describe very accurately (otherwise, you'd be able to show me exactly which neurons fire and in which order and exactly why that makes someone think and say that killing is, ceteris paribus, just simply bad and wrong).
Based on the above, if one were to remove humans altogether then I believe there would be no "right" or "wrong" or "moral" left at all, at least not in the way we mean those words. [1]
Since humans humans can influence the state of reality, and there's an algorithm somewhere that determines what we find moral, and humans "prefer" things that are moral (are programmed to act in a way that brings about higher quantities of this "moral" stuff), then if they do things which probably lead to more of it, they prefer that result, and if otherwise, they would have preferred that first result. It follows from this that humans should do things which (probably) lead to higher values of this moral stuff.
I would even go so far as to claim that anything that does not do the above, therefore breaks the rules of morality, and is not maximizing the algorithm of morality - they are breaking the rules and doing something outright wrong as a simple matter of mathematics. If they did the right thing, they would have more moral results. [4]
...So, what "am" I? What labels do I "get", having hereby cited, to the best of my understanding, the primary points and positions of all the sides of the debates here, with in my mind no contradiction whatsoever in any of the above?
Deontology and consequentialism aren't what's confusing me. What's confusing me is that there is all this confusion about the above points, and why people keep arguing about all of the above while to me they always seem to just be talking past eachother and seem to show clear signs of having the exact same model of the world (though sometimes assigning different names to different nodes or even to the model itself), or at least make the same predictions about morality.
Foundations, background and prior beliefs ("justifications"), to avoid more needless confusion:
0 - There is an objective, shared reality that we all live in that determines our experiences, not the other way around. This is simply the most natural, simplest way for the universe to function, and despite many claiming that there's a dragon in their garage, every single human I've ever met has always acted as if the above were true. With no exceptions.
1 - By studying the anthropic principle, physics, evolution, and some long-term history, I arrive at the conclusion that the universe isn't built for humans, that humans are a random artifact in it, and that if there were never any humans in the universe (or if we all go extinct), the rest of the universe will go on not giving a shit about us (as in, it can't give a shit, it doesn't have a mind, or even if it does, this mind just obviously doesn't do things according to human morality, otherwise we'd live in what humans would consider an ultimate heavenly utopia) and running along on its course of cruel physics and lifeforms suffering horribly before winking out of existence entirely for no reason or justification we might find valid or comforting right now.
2 - The Map is not the Territory, but the map is in the territory. Therefore, any part of the map is also an objective element of the landscape, an objective feature of reality. This includes human minds and human thoughts and human debates about morality.
3 - Since human minds are part of objective reality, they can be analyzed and objective, verifiable propositions can be stated about them.
4 - Numerically, some results will be better than others. However, if we assume that humans have multiple values as part of this "morality" thing and some of them have no relative ratios or bases of comparison, we run into game-theoretic issues of having to choose one of the pareto optimums in a significant number of possible games. It is theoretically possible in the real world that some issues will be this ambiguous, but in my experience in the vast majority of cases a more careful evaluation of the same morality algorithm will reveal that some of the possible choices which in the immediate seem to fulfill different values ambiguously will ultimately lead to strictly dominant outcomes when weighed over their effects on the world and opportunities for more fulfillment of values that are part of what is being currently valued.
In other words, while some possible choices may have multiple "optimal" terminal-value payoffs in a way that makes it ambiguous if calculated naively, the instrumental contribution of each choice to future worldstates will almost always make one of the outcomes strictly better than all the others because of the additional current value of generating worldstates that will give better odds of generating more value in future games.
5 - I reject all forms of dualism or claims that we can never possibly understand what goes on in human minds, on the basis of the same arguments and evidence cited in the Generalized Solution to P-Zombies. I can elaborate slightly more on this on request, but I personally consider the matter long resolved (as in, dissolved entirely such that I see no questions left to ask).
Edit: Added TLDR and fixed some of the formatting.
2 - The Map is not the Territory, but the map is in the territory. Therefore, any part of the map is also an objective element of the landscape, an objective feature of reality. This includes human minds and human thoughts and human debates about morality.
If you think of your map as a set of sentences that models the territory, an objective fact can be defined as a sentence in this set. So morality is objective in this regard if what determines your moral judgments are sentences in your map. Now consider the following counterfactual: in this world the a...
I think there’s a confusion in our discussions of deontology and consequentialism. I’m writing this post to try to clear up that confusion. First let me say that this post is not about any territorial facts. The issue here is how we use the philosophical terms of art ‘consequentialism’ and ‘deontology’.
The confusion is often stated thusly: “deontological theories are full of injunctions like ‘do not kill’, but they generally provide no (or no interesting) explanations for these injunctions.” There is of course an equivalently confused, though much less common, complaint about consequentialism.
This is confused because the term ‘deontology’ in philosophical jargon picks out a normative ethical theory, while the question ‘how do we know that it is wrong to kill?’ is not a normative but a meta-ethical question. Similarly, consequentialism contains in itself no explanation for why pleasure or utility are morally good, or why consequences should matter to morality at all. Nor does consequentialism/deontology make any claims about how we know moral facts (if there are any). That is also a meta-ethical question.
Some consequentialists and deontologists are also moral realists. Some are not. Some believe in divine commands, some are hedonists. Consequentialists and deontologists in practice always also subscribe to some meta-ethical theory which purports to explain the value of consequences or the source of injunctions. But consequentialism and deontology as such do not. In order to avoid strawmaning either the consequentialist or the deontologist, it’s important to either discuss the comprehensive views of particular ethicists, or to carefully leave aside meta-ethical issues.
This Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article provides a helpful overview of the issues in the consequentialist-deontologist debate, and is careful to distinguish between ethical and meta-ethical concerns.
SEP article on Deontology