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bogus comments on A confusion about deontology and consequentialism - Less Wrong Discussion

5 [deleted] 11 February 2013 07:19PM

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Comment author: bogus 12 February 2013 01:09:24AM *  2 points [-]

To be absolutely clear, my post is about the way academic philosophy happens to organize a certain debate

Note that "the way academic philosophy happens to organize" debates about ethics and morality should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Most people who engage in moral/ethical judgment in everyday life pay very little attention to moral philosophy in the academic sense.

In fact, as it happens, most of the public debate about ethics and morals takes place outside academic philosophy, and is hard to disentangle from debate involving politics, law and general worldviews or "cosmologies" (in the anthropological sense).

Comment author: [deleted] 12 February 2013 02:24:20AM 1 point [-]

Very true, though I think it's important to acknowledge two things: a) philosophers like Mill and Kant have had a huge impact on everyday moral thinking in the west, and b) the kinds of moral debates we typically have on this site are not independent of academic philosophy.