You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Randy_M comments on What Deontology gets right - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: ThrustVectoring 25 February 2013 09:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (18)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Randy_M 25 February 2013 11:21:50PM 0 points [-]

"So while Deontology over-corrects for this (for example, if you put a gun to my head and demand that I profess belief X, I'm going to say that I believe X, which a Deontological prohibition against lying forbids), it does so in a way that is better than many people's naive consequential thinking."

On one level, isn't all deontology consequentialist? In the deontologist moral system that proscribes lying, it doesn't proscribe saying certain words or making certain markings on paper--or to go one level higher, moving my fingers as if on a keyboard. Clearly the real prohibition is on intentionally (or through negligence) decieving someone, which is a consequence of certain acts in specific contexts.

So I think that while they seem quite different, there is a fuzzy line between the two. Of course I've no doubt this is obvious and elementary.

Comment author: ThrustVectoring 26 February 2013 02:49:42AM 0 points [-]

Well, you can think of deontology as consequentialism with infinite disutility for breaking a specific set of rules. It winds up with the same deontological rule-following, at least.