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VoiceOfRa comments on Are consequentialism and deontology not even wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (57)
How about asking what you should do? By refusing to ask that question you haven't explained morality, you've merely stuffed it under the rug. Since the should question actually is important (and pressing) you'll find yourself having to sneak in connotations to answer it.
For example, you wrote:
It's possible to substitute add should-like connotations to any of the above questions and end up with a (generally bad) theory of morality.
What determines whether or not you "should" do something?
My thoughts are that "should requires an axiom". You could say "you shouldn't kill people... if you don't want people to suffer". Or "you should kill people... if you want to go to jail".
In practice, I think people have similar ideas about how outcomes make them feel. Outcome X feels just. Outcome Y feels unjust etc.
When people use the word "should", I think they're implicitly saying "should... in order to achieve the outcomes that me/society feel are just".
This is basically the issue of whether categorical imperatives are a coherent concept. I have the same feeling as you: that they are not, and that I don't even understand what it would mean for them to be. I'm continually baffled by the fact that so many human minds are apparently able to believe that categorical imperatives are a thing. This strikes me as a difficult problem somewhere at the intersection between philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive psychology.
If you don't even understand what it would mean, this could be a symptom that you are understanding "categorical imperative" differently than they do. I'm going to guess that you are assuming metaethical motivational internalism.
Therein lies your difficulty.
No, it doesn't, because your guess is wrong.
That is precisely the question we are trying to answer.