Huh? To be fair, I don't think you were setting out to make the case for deontology here. All I am saying about its "use" is that I don't see any appeal. I think you gave a pretty good description of what deontologists are thinking; the North Pole - reindeer - haunting paragraph was handily illustrative.

Anyway, I think Kant may be to blame for employing arguments that consider "what would happen if others performed similar acts more frequently than they actually do". People say similar things all the time -- "What if everyone did that?" -- as though there were a sort of magical causal linkage between one's individual actions and the actions of the rest of the world.

I'm (obviously) no Kant scholar, but I wonder if there is any possible way to flesh out a consistent and satisfactory set of such context-invariant ethical injunctions.

For example, he infamously suggests not lying to a murderer who asks where your friend is, even if you reasonably expect him to go murder your friend, because lying is wrong. Okay -- even if we don't follow our consequentialist intuitions and treat that as a reductio ad absurdum for his whole system -- that's your 'not lying' principle satisfied. But what about your 'not betraying your friends' principle? How many principles have we got in the first place, and how can we weigh them against one another?

Sorry. But then I said:

Maybe this is to beg the question of consequences mattering in the first place.

And added,

But I suppose I have no idea what use deontology is if it doesn't boil down to consequentialism at some level.

?

Certainly, many theists immediately lump atheism, utilitarianism and nihilism together. There are heaps of popular depictions framing utilitarian reasoning as being too 'cold and calculating' and not having 'real heart'. Which follows from atheists 'not having any real values' and from accepting the nihilistic, death-obsessed Darwinian worldview, etc.

What has never stopped bewildering me is the question of why anyone should consider such a possible world relevant to their individual decision-making. I know Kant has some... tangled, Kantian argument regarding this, but does anyone who isn't a die-hard Kantian have any sensible reason on hand for considering the counterfactual "What if everyone did the same"?

Everyone doing X is not even a remotely likely consequence of me doing X. Maybe this is to beg the question of consequences mattering in the first place. But I suppose I have no idea what use deontology is if it doesn't boil down to consequentialism at some level... or, particularly, I have no idea what use it is if it makes appeals to impossibly unlikely consequences like "Everyone lying all the time," instead of likely ones.

That sounds pretty confusing. You might as well just not have officially sanctioned factions in the first place, right? People who agree on a given issue will naturally band together on it, but they won't be so afflicted with the bias or the pressure that comes of being on a well-defined Side, to have their whole range of opinions cohere with those held by the group. There are already de facto 'factions' on any issue we might discuss, and everyone is already felt to be continually obliged to examine the rationality of their positions, so it kind of seems like we're already there!

Hrm. Well, if politics itself is any example to judge by, that may make for a resilient institution -- but the mess of allegiances and biases created by splitting people into well-defined factions probably entails that the institution would be much worse off in terms of truth-finding, because devoting too much of its energies to internecine squabbling.

I suppose you need to strike a balance between unproductive antagonism, and ending up as a group of like-minded folks just patting each other on the back. Thankfully, LW seems to have a strong dose of "Let's get to the bottom of this"-type norms, and the appropriately rigorous/persnickety personalities, to stop it from getting too back-patty.

Well, thank you again!

Done, thanks. (That was my first ever comment here)

But parents — probably the vast majority of them — routinely make tremendous sacrifices in every area of their lives for their children, which seems to come pretty darn close.