(Eliezer.)
So, I wasn't attempting to answer the question "Are deontologists necessarily subject to 'pumping'?" but the different question "Are people who work entirely off moral intuition necessarily subject to 'pumping'?". Imm's question -- if I didn't completely misunderstand it, which of course I might have -- was about the famous framing effect where describing the exact same situation two different ways generates different preferences. If you work entirely off intuition, and if your intuitions are like most people's, then you will be subject to this sort of framing effect and you will make the choices I ascribed to Imm in that little bit of dialogue, and the result is that you will make two decisions both of which look to you like improvements, and whose net result is that more people die. On account of your choices. Which really ought to be unacceptable to almost anyone, consequentialist or deontologist or anything else.
I wasn't attempting a defence of Eliezer's metaethics. I was answering the more specific question that (I thought) Imm was asking.
I did mean I was making a deontological distinction between saving and killing, not just a framing question (and I didn't really mean that scenario specifically, it was just the example that came to mind - the general question is the one I'm interested in, it's just that as phrased it's too abstract for me) Sorry for the confusion.
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.