Followup to:  Evolutionary Psychology

It takes hundreds of generations for a simple beneficial mutation to promote itself to universality in a gene pool.  Thousands of generations, or even millions, to create complex interdependent machinery.

That's some slow learning there.  Let's say you're building a squirrel, and you want the squirrel to know locations for finding nuts.  Individual nut trees don't last for the thousands of years required for natural selection.  You're going to have to learn using proteins.  You're going to have to build a brain.

One of our most controversial posts ever was "Torture vs. Dust Specks".  Though I can't seem to find the reference, one of the more interesting uses of this dilemma was by a professor whose student said "I'm a utilitarian consequentialist", and the professor said "No you're not" and told them about SPECKS vs. TORTURE, and then the student - to the professor's surprise - chose TORTURE.  (Yay student!)

In the spirit of always making these things worse, let me offer a dilemma that might have been more likely to unconvince the student - at least, as a consequentialist, I find the inevitable conclusion much harder to swallow.

Consequentialists see morality through consequence-colored lenses.  I attempt to prise apart the two concepts to help consequentialists understand what deontologists are talking about.

Consequentialism¹ is built around a group of variations on the following basic assumption:

• The rightness of something depends on what happens subsequently.

It's a very diverse family of theories; see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article.  "Classic utilitarianism" could go by the longer, more descriptive name "actual direct maximizing aggregative total universal equal-consideration agent-neutral hedonic act² consequentialism".  I could even mention less frequently contested features, like the fact that this type of consequentialism doesn't have a temporal priority feature or side constraints.  All of this is is a very complicated bag of tricks for a theory whose proponents sometimes claim to like it because it's sleek and pretty and "simple".  But the bottom line is, to get a consequentialist theory, something that happens after the act you judge is the basis of your judgment.

To understand deontology as anything but a twisted, inexplicable mockery of consequentialism, you must discard this assumption.

Deontology relies on things that do not happen after the act judged to judge the act.  This leaves facts about times prior to and the time during the act to determine whether the act is right or wrong.  This may include, but is not limited to:

• The agent's epistemic state, either actual or ideal (e.g. thinking that some act would have a certain result, or being in a position such that it would be reasonable to think that the act would have that result)
• The reference class of the act (e.g. it being an act of murder, theft, lying, etc.)
• Historical facts (e.g. having made a promise, sworn a vow)
• Counterfactuals (e.g. what would happen if others performed similar acts more frequently than they actually do)
• Features of the people affected by the act (e.g. moral rights, preferences, relationship to the agent)
• The agent's intentions (e.g. meaning well or maliciously, or acting deliberately or accidentally)