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VoiceOfRa comments on Are consequentialism and deontology not even wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion

15 Post author: Kaj_Sotala 02 June 2015 07:49AM

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Comment author: VoiceOfRa 04 June 2015 04:25:58AM 1 point [-]

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?

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).

Comment author: [deleted] 05 June 2015 11:31:28PM 1 point [-]

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.