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eli_sennesh comments on Are consequentialism and deontology not even wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (57)
"Not Even Wrong": an idea so incredibly ill-founded that it can't be tested, because it's wrong in the presuppositions it necessitates and admits, and wrong in its definitions as well.
"2 + 2 = 3" is Wrong. "The sky is made of music" is Not Even Wrong.
Hi Eli. I understand the meaning of the phrase "not even wrong", I don't understand its application in this particular context.
Well, I'm obviously not Kaj, but I do think that consequentialism is maximizing a utility function over world-states. You could say that deontology, then, is having a preference ordering or utility function over actions your algorithm outputs, with little or no regard for the world-states those actions make likely. Virtue-ethics, then, could be taken as a preference ordering over kinds of people one can be, choosing actions based on which Kind of Person those actions provide evidence for your being (which basically makes it the Evidential Decision Theory weirdo of the bunch).
One way consequentialism could be Not Even Wrong is if we evaluate utility over world-lines, with the entire causal history and world-state both contributing as input variables to the preference function.
Well, I would describe the scenario you suggest as "consequentialism is wrong" rather than "consequentialism is not even wrong". Moreover, I don't see what it has to do with whatever the Greeks or Bentham or whoever meant when they wrote something.
Fair enough, then.