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Comment by George83728 | Hacker News Reader

Utilitarianism and consequentialism are very dangerous; they make it too easy for people to justify murder by doing a little moral arithmetic and (consciously or subconsciously) putting their finger on the scale by selectively considering or ignoring some outcomes. Peter Singer has demonstrated this himself, having seen fit to justify the murder of children for the greater good. This is why good moral philosophies have a deontological core of simple principles such as "Don't murder people."

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In reality we're all consequentialists, some masquerading as deontologists.

Eg, try and find people who believe US participation in WWII was immoral because participation involved German children as collateral damage.

Rules like "don't murder people" don't ever work. If you held yourself to that rule, your opponent would have a very easy time exploiting it. So in my opinion such rules more exist as a pretty fiction than as an actual practice.

Better to have the rules and sometimes find very compelling reasons to break them, than to never have the rules at all. The rules raise the activation energy. A rule against murder may be overridden when presented with an extreme circumstance, but utilitarianism without such a rule at all will permit (or even require) murder for very marginal theoretical gain. Under such systems you have the government going around murdering farmers so their property can be collectivized for the greater good, and then millions of people starve to death which was never factored into the equation but oops, too late now. Better to live in a society which generally respects deontological principles (and sometimes breaks them) than to live in a utilitarian society with no such compunctions.

There are many forms of utilitarianism, but I don't think any advocate only for considering the most immediate consequences. Like if you're considering murder because it'd be beneficial in the long run, surely you also have to consider the possible negatives as well, which rarely makes a good option.

But really, all moral systems have horrifying failures. If in utilitarianism you can inflict horrors for utility, then in deontology you can inflict an unlimited amount of it if you ever come to the conclusion that it's allowable.

Eg, any time a deontological system decides that foreigners/gays/jews/etc aren't truly people, then they get kicked out of the system completely. And then any amount of suffering they might feel as a result is literally irrelevant -- deontology doesn't even consider it at all.

> Rules like “don’t murder people” don’t ever work.

I’ve found it to be a pretty workable rule in living my actual life so far.

> such rules more exist as a pretty fiction than as an actual practice

I’m curious what life experiences you’ve had which lead you to conclude that “don’t murder people” is so inapplicable as to be fiction. Are you living near Bakhmut?

I mean, war is a trivial counter-example. You're intentionally killing people.

There's two ways to go about it. Either you ignore the rules whenever they start getting in the way, or you build huge subjective holes into them.

As an example of twisted logic this provokes, here’s one I’ve encountered in Schlosser’s Command and Control a couple of days ago:

> [Truman administration head of Joint Chiefs, General Omar] Bradley accused the Navy of being in “open rebellion” against the civilian leadership of the United States. The admirals were “Fancy Dans” and “aspiring martyrs” who just didn’t like to take orders. As for the accusation that [an “atomic blitz“] targeting [seventy] cities [hosting a plurality of the Soviet population] was immoral, Bradley responded, “As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.”

I can’t model or even try to imagine the mental gymnastics it takes to just stop at this—as opposed to continuing to “therefore we should not engage in it”, which is of course refuted by that (supposedly) being even more immoral, which in turn breaks the original assumption that all immoral things are equally bad.

Or I can try to have rules and values that work for the situations I reasonably expect myself to manage responsibly and I accept that they will fail in extreme cases. The example you gave was WW2, which was arguably the worst catastrophe in human history. It would be impractical for me to try to build a moral system to handle it.

Put it this way: If your friend asks you for advice on how to set up his wedding website, which of the following is good advice?

A) Use Squarespace.

B) Write an HTML & CSS file and put it on github pages.

C) Use Netlify.

D) Set up a multi-region kubernetes cluster with enough storage and capacity to stream the World Cup.

This does not follow.

You can be required to do things because of external forces that intentionally break the “moral rules” of normal society.

It can be morally wrong to kill a man, but you can still have to do it to defend yourself to survive.

> Rules like "don't murder people" don't ever work.

What about the Golden Rule? It would provide for not killing others, except in self-defense.

Close but no cigar, that deontology begs the question _why_ should we not murder people. Utilitarianism gives a consistent, albeit simple, answer.

Note that I probably agree with you, but the solution isn’t as simple as you think.

>Utilitarianism gives a consistent, albeit simple, answer.

Except it doesn't. The "simple" cases of utilitarianism (i.e. happiness-maximizing or unhappiness-minimizing) are both supportive of killing people if their expected remaining lifetime happiness is negative or if their death would result in others being happier - see the infamous organ donor problem. Worse, by following that philosophy you eventually get to the Repugnant Conclusion[0], which is a world of as many minimally-happy humans as possible. The complex cases result in complex epicycles of propagating out utilitiarian ideals to the rest of society and eventually asserting that heuristics of the moral value of actions would actually be best in most cases because the effects of actions are impossible to quantitatively evaluate for anyone. Those heuristics essentially boil down to deontological principles.

[0]: The fact that many public utilitarian philosophers are so unable to find a way out of this, yet so enamored with the idea of utilitarianism that they can't imagine it being wrong, that they signed a public statement saying that actually the Repugnant Conclusion is totally fine and people should still push for population ethics that lead to it is wild to me. See https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/utilitas/article/wha...

Yes, it's amusing that the simplest way (for atheists such as myself) to justify deontology is with a utilitarian argument; having deontology principles is good because those principles produce good outcomes. But I think my point stands, that utilitarianism without any deontological safety rails is a recipe for mass murder.

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