Perhaps it wasn't clear -- those two were the same village. So I'm not adding up people, I'm not assuming that anything cancels out with anything else. I'm observing that if you have those (inconsistent) preferences, and if you have them by enough of a margin that they can be strengthened a little, then you end up happily making a sequence of changes that take you back to something plainly worse than where you started. Just like getting money-pumped.
Firstly, a deontological posistion distinguishes between directly killing people and not saving them- killing innocent people is generally an objective moral wrong. Your scenario is deceptive because it seems to lmm that innocents will be killed rather than not saved.
More importantly, Elizier's metaethics is based on the premise that people want to be moral. That's the ONLY argument he has for a metaethics that gets around the is-ought distinction.
Say for the sake of argument a person has a course of action compatible with deontology v.s one compatible wit...
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.