But Yudkowsky does seem to think that we should violate our moral instincts - we should push the fat man in front of the tram, we should be more willing to pay to save 20,000 birds than to save 200. Our position on whether it's better to save 400 people or take a chance of saving 500 people should be consistent with our position on whether it's better to kill 100 people or take a chance of killing 500 people. We should sell all our possessions except the bare minimum we need to live and give the rest to efficient charity.
If morality is simply our desire to do what feels Right, how can it ever justify doing something that feels Wrong?
But Yudkowsky does seem to think that... We should sell all our possessions except the bare minimum we need to live and give the rest to efficient charity.
Yudkowsky does not advocate this. Nor does he practice it. In fact he does the opposite---efficient charity gives him money to have more than the bare minimum needed to live (and this does not seem unwise to me).
My apologies if this doesn't deserve a Discussion post, but if this hasn't been addresed anywhere than it's clearly an important issue.
There have been many defences of consequentialism against deontology, including quite a few on this site. What I haven't seen, however, is any demonstration of how deontology is incompatible with the ideas in Elizier's Metaethics sequence- as far as I can tell, a deontologist could agree with just about everything in the Sequences.
Said deontologist would argue that, to the extent a human universial morality can exist through generalised moral instincts, said instincts tend to be deontological (as supported through scientific studies- a study of the trolley dilemna v.s the 'fat man' variant showed that people would divert the trolley but not push the fat man). This would be their argument against the consequentialist, who they could accuse of wanting a consequentialist system and ignoring the moral instincts at the basis of their own speculations.
I'm not completely sure about this, but figure it an important enough misunderstanding if I indeed misunderstood to deserve clearing up.