Say I value not-murdering.
If I'm a consequentialist, I'll act on this by trying to maximise the amount of non-murdering (or minimising the amount of murdering). This might include murdering someone who I knew was a particularly prolific murderer.
If I'm a deontologist, I'll act on this value by honouring it: I'll withhold from murdering anyone, even if this might increase the total amount of murdering.
This sounds like they are, in fact, valuing different things altogether. The consequentialist negvalues the amount of murdering there is, while the deontologist negvalues doing the murdering.
If the deontologist and consequentialist both value not-murdering-people, then the consequentialist takes the action which leads to them not having murdered someone (so they don't murder, even if it means more total murdering), and the deontologist is as quoted.
If they both negvalue the total amount of murders, the deontologist will honour not-doing-things-which-are-more-total-murder, which by logical necessity implies ¬( not murdering this one time), which means they also murder for the sake of less murdering.
It seems the distinction is, again, merely one of degree and probability estimates, and a difference in the general conceptspace of where people from both "camps" tend to usually pinpoint their values. To rephrase, this means it seems like the only real difference between consequentialists and deontologists is the language and the general empirical clusters of things they value more, including different probability estimates for certain values of the likelihood of some things.
I think it isn't precise to say that they value different things, since the deontologist doesn't decide in terms of values. Speaking of values is practical from the point of view of a consequentialist, who compares different possible states (or histories) of the world; values are then functions defined over the set of world states which the decider tries to maximise. A pure ideal deontologist doesn't do that; his moral decisions are local (i.e. they take into account only the deontologist's own action and perhaps its immediate context) and binary (i.e. the...
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