Lightningman_42 wrote:RedAppleGP wrote:What I have obtained from this is that, we should be considering the good/bad of the actions, rather than the good/bad of the outcomes, and should follow some set of arbitrary rules that I've never heard of.
Considering what I know about deontology, I'd say that the 2 most notable flaws are that:
1. It does not provide a reliable means by which to judge the comparitive severity of actions, and thus is not useful for resolving conflicts of interest.
2. The derivation of its principles is arbitrary (like you pointed out).
1. Right. Some deontologists rank the "wrongs" or "duties" in a hierarchy. So if stealing is worse than lying, it's always worse to steal than commit any number of lesser wrongs (worse to steal a penny than lie to a billion people).
This provides no help in evaluating mixed circumstances, though.
As these systems are made more robust, like by counting the number of infractions and the weight of them, it approaches virtue ethics or some crude form of rule consequentialism.
The more useful it becomes and the better it maps to reality, the less it resembles deontology.
2. Deontologists have tried to solve this issue.
The most common is Divine Command; god said it, therefore those are the rules. Christians (and others) consider this non-arbitrary without realizing their choice of and interpretation of scripture is itself arbitrary.
Then there's Kant's categorical imperative, and by extension Ayn Rand's Objectivism, which attempts to set out non-arbitrary objective rules in ignorance of the true variety of human opinion.
Kant's is summed up as:
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction."
You can see some of the semantic nonsense circular logic Kant gets up to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Perfect_duty
Perfect duty[edit]
According to his reasoning, we first have a perfect duty not to act by maxims that result in logical contradictions when we attempt to universalize them. The moral proposition A: "It is permissible to steal" would result in a contradiction upon universalisation. The notion of stealing presupposes the existence of property, but were A universalized, then there could be no property, and so the proposition has logically negated itself.
In general, perfect duties are those that are blameworthy if not met, as they are a basic required duty for a human being.
How about, "it's permissible to take things that are lying about" or "it's permissible to take whatever you can take without lethal force"
Kant's argument presupposes that property exists, but if you just exclude that presupposition from the proposition, you have no problem.
Anybody who didn't care about property or didn't regard the concept as useful would not be wrong in taking, and from the perspective of others stealing.
You may want to go through some of these and break them down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative#Normative_interpretation
The categorical imperative is better replaced by the golden rule, or some version of it (particularly the modern version we discuss here with respect to considering the interests of others [sentient beings]).
Kant rejected the golden rule, though, or insisted it was derived from the categorical imperative. So, at least, that was never his intention.
When you fix both parts for their errors, you basically end up with some form of altruistic consequentialism.
One thing Kant was right about was with respect to rejection of egoism as part of utilitarianism. Therein lies the break with Randian Objectivism, but it's a trivial one in practice.
