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DeVliegendeHollander comments on Are consequentialism and deontology not even wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It is a bit too highbrow for me, but if the argument is that "moral" is not a special sense of words, a moral "ought" is the same kind of "ought" as "this machine ought to be oiled", isn't that textbook consequentalism? Non-moral oughts are of course consequentialist - if oiling or not oiling the machine makes no difference, why bother?
Also, the law conception of ethics... let's assume now, really just for the sake of testing hypotheses, that left-wing people are right. By that I mean that kind of analysis that the culture of societies is largely about upper classes justifying their rule, such as kings claiming they have a divine right and so on. Wouldn't any society where there are kings and laws would like to justify it by making up stories like the king is just doing the same thing as what the gods are doing?
Also, laws are far more fundamental than religion. Every culture has customs and taboos and turning them into laws is just about writing them down.
No, it only seems that way to you because you implicitly assume consequentialism. Plato, for example, would argue that "this machine ought to be oiled" because an oiled machine better approximates the ideal form of a machine (in what we now call a Platonic sense).
And better approximating it is a consequence.
Ah... I sense there is a different problem here. Consequentualism can be interpreted widely enough to be fully general term that predicts everything and thus nothing. After all even breaking a deontological rule can be said to have some consequence somewhere somehow and virtue ethics certainly speaks about internal consequences.