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Bound_up comments on The Trolley Problem and Reversibility - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (27)
Bluntly: You don't know what you're talking about.
You're reasoning about deontology as if it were consequentialism. Deontology is primarily concerned with means, not ends, and your reasoning is based on the ends of non-interventialism (which is not, in fact, even the ethics of deontology), rather than the means taken to achieve this. The state of the switch, or of past actions, doesn't matter to deontology; it's what you do that matters.
A deontologist may think the consequentialists' actions in this scenario are unethical. This is not the same as desiring to undo those actions. What you miss is that the deontologist, just as much as the consequentialist, desires the end state where fewer people die, NOT the end state that is unchanged from a "natural" state - the deontologist, however, don't see the means as justifying the ends, and indeed don't see ends as justifications whatsoever. The deontologist sees it as wrong to sacrifice a person, even to save several; likewise, it would also be wrong to sacrifice several people, regardless of the justification, including your extremely contrived justification of undoing somebody else's actions.
In short, your caricature of a deontologist is merely a bad consequentialist, and doesn't follow deontology at all.
Seconded. A deontologist is not worried about the results insofar as determining their decision. They have a constraint against "making that call," "judging who should or shouldn't live," or "playing with peoples' lives/playing God."
If you violate one of those by flipping the lever, you done wrong. If they flip it back, they'd be making that same call, and do wrong.
Each successive purposeful flip of the lever would be an additional sin. You make it sound like the deontologist values the lever being left in its original position, and they don't. They just value not interfering with the lever, in whatever series of states it's been in the past.
Deontologists don't see these questions and consider the opposite answer to be the right choice, but rather they give no answer as their choice, like the Zen monk's MU.
They don't make different decisions because they value different ends, but because their means figure into the value equation, no matter what the ends are. Some means have enormous negative value for them even if locally they seem to work just fine.
Saying things like "some means have enormous negative value for them" misunderstands how deontology (and similar ethical systems) work.
Basically they work by considering the action as a particular thing which can be good or bad, completely distinct from the effects. The effects may be good, or they may be bad.
Given this analysis, if an action is bad, it is bad. That is a tautology. The effects of that action can be infinitely good, and it will not change the fact that the action is bad, just like if an object is red, that will not change just because everything else is green. This means that in a deontological system, the universe can end up better off after someone does something wrong. It is still wrong, in that system. It does not have anything to do with an enormous negative value; the total value of the universe after the action may have increased.
I wish I had been clearer.
This sounds like what I mean. They aren't just worried about the ends being good or bad, the means themselves (sometimes) have negative values, i.e., are wrong.
I said enormous negative value because I'm not positive whether a real deontologist could be eventually persuaded that a forbidden means would be permissible if the ends were sufficiently positive, i.e., steal something to literally save the entire world.