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Consequences are at the foundation of why we have ethics at all. All normative arguments are appeals to consequences when you look closely enough. The practical

Consequences are at the foundation of why we have ethics at all. All normative arguments are appeals to consequences when you look closely enough. The practical differences emerge from where and how far into the future you look for the consequences. (The discussion seems ill-founded to me, without a lot more qualification on exactly which consequences one is looking to.)

jefftk 7y ago
You're describing Consequentialism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism), which is a popular view, especially among technically minded people, but there are also other widely held views that work differently: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  I think the parent poster's claim (if I may put words in their mouth) is that, despite the protestations of these other schools of thought, the only reason their rulesets/virtues exist are because of the general case consequences of those rulesets and virtues. They may not explicitly denote their appeal to consequences, but those ethical systems would not exist in their given forms of the actions they proscribe actions did not have consequences. For example, a virtue ethicist might claim that honesty is a virtue, and thus we should try to be honest. But why is honesty a virtue? I'm not familiar with how virtue ethics deals with infinite regress. However, whatever the philosopher might claim, the real answer is because we evolved in a context where dishonesty was punished. This punishment shaped our sociological and neural landscapes such that we have a dim view of dishonesty in others. The virtue ethicist dresses that up one way, the deontologist might dress it up another, but the actual fact is that the human view of honesty arose from the consequences.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    Put another way: I find virtue ethics and other systems are often fine practical approaches to consequentialism.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    "the real answer is because we evolved in a context where dishonesty was punished" is actually a very different theory, and not even the same sort of theory! Consequentialism, Deontology, and Virtue Ethics all try to answer the question "what is moral" or "what should we do". You're instead answering something like "how do we decide what moral theories to follow", "where do moral theories come from", or even, "where do our moral intuitions come from", which is more a question of Metaethics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - kqr 7y ago
    > For example, a virtue ethicist might claim that honesty is a virtue, and thus we should try to be honest. But why is honesty a virtue? This one can be argued with Kant's categorical imperative, which says "it is unethical if making it required involves a logical contradiction", roughly phrased. If we made it a general law that everyone must lie, then the distinction between truth and falsehood would be meaningless, and the meaning of the law would also evaporate. Therefore, lying is unethical.
    - im3w1l 7y ago
      > If we made it a general law that everyone must lie This is too black and white. There can also simply be no law either way. And even if there is a law that you must lie, that law may be restricted in scope. For instance there may be a rule of politeness saying that you should answer "How are you?" with "fine thanks", even though it's not the truth. > then the distinction between truth and falsehood would be meaningless No this doesn't follow. Even if people lie a lot, there is still a difference between truth and falsehood.
- Der_Einzige 7y ago
  Deontology is consequentialism. I think schopenhauer is a bit of a quack but his analysis on why Kant is actually the biggest egoist (and consequentialist of then all) is super on point Kants categorical imparative (the foundation of deontology) redundantly repeats the ancient command: "don't do to another what you don't want done to you." Is egoistic because its universality includes the person who both gives and obeys the command. And it's cold and dead because it is to be followed without love, feeling, or inclination, but merely out of a sense of duty.
  - mech1234 7y ago
    Deontological ethics or deontology is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action. (from wikipedia). You may be confused because you've circled the drain a bit considering a few particular philosophers and their stances. The categorical imperative is a particular deontological rule that closely resembles consequentialism.
    - Der_Einzige 7y ago
      Lmfao this is so wrong it's absurd. The categorical imparative is absolutely supposed to be the antithesis of consequentialism. It is an implementation of deontology. Deontology comes about as an attempt to escape consequentialism The fact that it breaks down back into consequentialism is as a result of deontology being not actually different from consequentialism
      - mech1234 7y ago
        I think you're wrong in ways that are difficult to untangle. To give an example of an obviously flawed deontology, "Never swim within 30 minutes after eating" is a deontological rule. Many experienced swimmers (or eaters) know that this is a rule that can be broken safely, and choose not to follow it. Not to say that better or more complicated rules don't exist. The 10 Commandments are a deontological system, and are not identical to consequentialism. The contrast is- following pre-established rules, which were (hopefully) written with good outcomes in mind, vs. judging the likelihood of good outcomes on-the-fly.
- mech1234 7y ago
  I've had a theory that: In the long run, consequentialism and virtue ethics converge. Calibrate your chosen virtues to produce good outcomes. The more experience you have, the more closely you can understand which virtues result in which ends. It's like playing poker, choose your bets.
  - naravara 7y ago
    >Calibrate your chosen virtues to produce good outcomes. The more experience you have, the more closely you can understand which virtues result in which ends. Utilitarians do like rule and virtue versions of the philosophy, but it also kind of begs the question by accepting utilitarian assumptions. The key thing with consequentialism is that you are positing a world where what is "good" is known, measurable, and directly comparable and rankable. This kind of misses the virtue or deontological contention though. Those philosophies aren't saying to ignore the consequences, they're saying that you can't resolve ethical dilemmas by scoring the "outcomes" and picking what has a higher score. They will address the gaps through horror-story hypotheticals, like the "infinite pleasure machine[1]" problem, the "utility monster[2]" problem, or the "this expects too much of us[3]" problem. You can get around it by arguing that the idea of "good" doesn't have to resolve based on hedonic calculus, but then you go back around to deciding that virtue is the chief marker of good and not utility, and then you're not really consequentialist anymore, you're just using consequentialism as a heuristic to approximate whatever other framework you have. [1] What if we invented a machine or drug that can directly stimulate the pleasure/utility sense in people and rig everyone up to it such that they are always ecstatically happy? Would the ethical thing be to plug everyone into this machine even if they're, functionally, living in The Matrix? [2] What if someone comes along who derives SO MUCH JOY out of consumption that the rational utility calculation decides that we should vastly over prioritize their happiness. In some formulations it could just mean that they get a bigger share than anyone else. In other formulations it posits that the utility monster's utility is so great that it's worth making other individual people miserable since their misery does not outweigh the utility monster's happiness. There is also an inter-temporal angle where you might say it's worth it to be miserable for big stretches of your life to maximize the resources available in your most utility-appreciating years. The problem, though, is that the version of yourself in the less-than-max-appreciation years is still gonna be unhappy and resent their younger/older self's happiness. There is also the religious version, where you argue that the utility in heaven is so great that you should just ignore suffering here on this mortal plane altogether. Presumably a loving God wouldn't have created a world where that even makes sense as a moral system, why create the world then? So God can't be a utilitarian. [3] You can also call this the Chidi Anagonye problem. Basically human cognition can't anticipate all the consequences of an action, so utility-wise where do you draw the line on how far or how many degrees of separation a consequence has from an action? If we were all to be true utilitarians it would cripple us with indecision. This also suggests that smarter people have the inherent capacity to be ethically superior to others, and it can be read to downgrade the moral status of animals or the mentally disabled. One of the strongest things about utilitarianism, though, is that it is one of the few moral frameworks with very strong arguments to account for the moral status of animals and the disabled, so losing that advantage rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That's an argument from consequences though, and some here might say it's invalid. ;-)
- barrkel 7y ago
  I think those boil down to consequences; if it's not the bad things happen when we don't have rules / a categorical imperative / golden rule, or not achieving eudaimonia, it's bad things that happen in the afterlife. Why regulate human behaviour if not for a reason? Dare I say it, a consequence?
golemotron 7y ago
Consequences are core to ethics. The problem arises when people are scared to say "X is true" or even ask whether X is true because they are scared of bad consequences. They forget that neglecting inquiry can have bad consequences as well.

jefftk 7y ago

You're describing Consequentialism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism), which is a popular view, especially among technically minded people, but there are also other widely held views that work differently: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
I think the parent poster's claim (if I may put words in their mouth) is that, despite the protestations of these other schools of thought, the only reason their rulesets/virtues exist are because of the general case consequences of those rulesets and virtues. They may not explicitly denote their appeal to consequences, but those ethical systems would not exist in their given forms of the actions they proscribe actions did not have consequences. For example, a virtue ethicist might claim that honesty is a virtue, and thus we should try to be honest. But why is honesty a virtue? I'm not familiar with how virtue ethics deals with infinite regress. However, whatever the philosopher might claim, the real answer is because we evolved in a context where dishonesty was punished. This punishment shaped our sociological and neural landscapes such that we have a dim view of dishonesty in others. The virtue ethicist dresses that up one way, the deontologist might dress it up another, but the actual fact is that the human view of honesty arose from the consequences.
- karatestomp 7y ago
  Put another way: I find virtue ethics and other systems are often fine practical approaches to consequentialism.
- jefftk 7y ago
  "the real answer is because we evolved in a context where dishonesty was punished" is actually a very different theory, and not even the same sort of theory! Consequentialism, Deontology, and Virtue Ethics all try to answer the question "what is moral" or "what should we do". You're instead answering something like "how do we decide what moral theories to follow", "where do moral theories come from", or even, "where do our moral intuitions come from", which is more a question of Metaethics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/metaethics/
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- kqr 7y ago
  > For example, a virtue ethicist might claim that honesty is a virtue, and thus we should try to be honest. But why is honesty a virtue? This one can be argued with Kant's categorical imperative, which says "it is unethical if making it required involves a logical contradiction", roughly phrased. If we made it a general law that everyone must lie, then the distinction between truth and falsehood would be meaningless, and the meaning of the law would also evaporate. Therefore, lying is unethical.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    > If we made it a general law that everyone must lie This is too black and white. There can also simply be no law either way. And even if there is a law that you must lie, that law may be restricted in scope. For instance there may be a rule of politeness saying that you should answer "How are you?" with "fine thanks", even though it's not the truth. > then the distinction between truth and falsehood would be meaningless No this doesn't follow. Even if people lie a lot, there is still a difference between truth and falsehood.
Der_Einzige 7y ago
Deontology is consequentialism. I think schopenhauer is a bit of a quack but his analysis on why Kant is actually the biggest egoist (and consequentialist of then all) is super on point Kants categorical imparative (the foundation of deontology) redundantly repeats the ancient command: "don't do to another what you don't want done to you." Is egoistic because its universality includes the person who both gives and obeys the command. And it's cold and dead because it is to be followed without love, feeling, or inclination, but merely out of a sense of duty.
- mech1234 7y ago
  Deontological ethics or deontology is the normative ethical theory that the morality of an action should be based on whether that action itself is right or wrong under a series of rules, rather than based on the consequences of the action. (from wikipedia). You may be confused because you've circled the drain a bit considering a few particular philosophers and their stances. The categorical imperative is a particular deontological rule that closely resembles consequentialism.
  - Der_Einzige 7y ago
    Lmfao this is so wrong it's absurd. The categorical imparative is absolutely supposed to be the antithesis of consequentialism. It is an implementation of deontology. Deontology comes about as an attempt to escape consequentialism The fact that it breaks down back into consequentialism is as a result of deontology being not actually different from consequentialism
    - mech1234 7y ago
      I think you're wrong in ways that are difficult to untangle. To give an example of an obviously flawed deontology, "Never swim within 30 minutes after eating" is a deontological rule. Many experienced swimmers (or eaters) know that this is a rule that can be broken safely, and choose not to follow it. Not to say that better or more complicated rules don't exist. The 10 Commandments are a deontological system, and are not identical to consequentialism. The contrast is- following pre-established rules, which were (hopefully) written with good outcomes in mind, vs. judging the likelihood of good outcomes on-the-fly.
mech1234 7y ago
I've had a theory that: In the long run, consequentialism and virtue ethics converge. Calibrate your chosen virtues to produce good outcomes. The more experience you have, the more closely you can understand which virtues result in which ends. It's like playing poker, choose your bets.
- naravara 7y ago
  >Calibrate your chosen virtues to produce good outcomes. The more experience you have, the more closely you can understand which virtues result in which ends. Utilitarians do like rule and virtue versions of the philosophy, but it also kind of begs the question by accepting utilitarian assumptions. The key thing with consequentialism is that you are positing a world where what is "good" is known, measurable, and directly comparable and rankable. This kind of misses the virtue or deontological contention though. Those philosophies aren't saying to ignore the consequences, they're saying that you can't resolve ethical dilemmas by scoring the "outcomes" and picking what has a higher score. They will address the gaps through horror-story hypotheticals, like the "infinite pleasure machine[1]" problem, the "utility monster[2]" problem, or the "this expects too much of us[3]" problem. You can get around it by arguing that the idea of "good" doesn't have to resolve based on hedonic calculus, but then you go back around to deciding that virtue is the chief marker of good and not utility, and then you're not really consequentialist anymore, you're just using consequentialism as a heuristic to approximate whatever other framework you have. [1] What if we invented a machine or drug that can directly stimulate the pleasure/utility sense in people and rig everyone up to it such that they are always ecstatically happy? Would the ethical thing be to plug everyone into this machine even if they're, functionally, living in The Matrix? [2] What if someone comes along who derives SO MUCH JOY out of consumption that the rational utility calculation decides that we should vastly over prioritize their happiness. In some formulations it could just mean that they get a bigger share than anyone else. In other formulations it posits that the utility monster's utility is so great that it's worth making other individual people miserable since their misery does not outweigh the utility monster's happiness. There is also an inter-temporal angle where you might say it's worth it to be miserable for big stretches of your life to maximize the resources available in your most utility-appreciating years. The problem, though, is that the version of yourself in the less-than-max-appreciation years is still gonna be unhappy and resent their younger/older self's happiness. There is also the religious version, where you argue that the utility in heaven is so great that you should just ignore suffering here on this mortal plane altogether. Presumably a loving God wouldn't have created a world where that even makes sense as a moral system, why create the world then? So God can't be a utilitarian. [3] You can also call this the Chidi Anagonye problem. Basically human cognition can't anticipate all the consequences of an action, so utility-wise where do you draw the line on how far or how many degrees of separation a consequence has from an action? If we were all to be true utilitarians it would cripple us with indecision. This also suggests that smarter people have the inherent capacity to be ethically superior to others, and it can be read to downgrade the moral status of animals or the mentally disabled. One of the strongest things about utilitarianism, though, is that it is one of the few moral frameworks with very strong arguments to account for the moral status of animals and the disabled, so losing that advantage rubs a lot of people the wrong way. That's an argument from consequences though, and some here might say it's invalid. ;-)
barrkel 7y ago
I think those boil down to consequences; if it's not the bad things happen when we don't have rules / a categorical imperative / golden rule, or not achieving eudaimonia, it's bad things that happen in the afterlife. Why regulate human behaviour if not for a reason? Dare I say it, a consequence?

golemotron 7y ago

Consequences are core to ethics. The problem arises when people are scared to say "X is true" or even ask whether X is true because they are scared of bad consequences. They forget that neglecting inquiry can have bad consequences as well.