Are you aware of Haidt's experiments/surveys where he tried to map the landscape of moral intuitions by asking a series of questions that often cause people to react with moral outrage, but they are stumped when asked to explain the reason?
Part of his conclusion was that harm was not the only practical basis for moral intuition. He identified 5 additional moral dimensions: fairness, authority, loyalty, liberty, and sanctity. He seems to think that these cannot be reduced to care/harm. Or at least, he was comfortable asking about thought experiments that violated these while stipulating that no one was harmed.
I suspect things are even more complicated than that. People can moralize custom and habit. Getting to the real fundamentals is difficult.
Philipa Foot argued that utilitarianism focused on only one virtue, benevolence, and that it failed to give room for other legitimate virtues.
About “Who cares about your rules, Deontology? Others’ lives matter more than that,” it is interesting that this is a very fundamental part of Judaism ("Pikuach nefesh" on Wikipedia explains it). My neighbor is an Orthodox Jewish woman so I have seen how this is important for her life - when she was a nurse she regularly broke Sabbath to help at the hospital when she saw them blinking their lights signifying that they needed her. (And she also justifies her track record in utilitarian terms - she emphasizes that she never lost a patient, even though she often broke hospital rules in order to accomplish that.)
However, there are then exceptions to this rule, certain things you can't do even to save a life (including idolatry, incest, and some sorts of murder), so in the end deontology trumps I suppose. But I do find it interesting how a blatant utilitarian exception to the otherwise extremely strict rule book with which my neighbor lives her life doesn't seem to lead her to question her faith on philosophical grounds. Like, couldn't you be saving lives in developing countries with all the money you spend on expensive kosher meat?
I feel like the disagreement here is not about meta-ethics but ethics and values. Your post suggests consequentialist meta-ethics must care only about individual preferences, but I don't think that's necessarily the case.
Let's take the example of Herostratus burning down the Temple of Artemis, but stipulate that no one was harmed or upset by this act. Was it still wrong?
A deontologist can say it was since Herostratus had wrong motives. A virtue ethicist can say it was since Herostratus behaved viciously. Can a consequentialist say it was wrong? Yes: this act reduced the amount of beauty in the world, and one can be a consequentialist about beauty.
And I don't feel like that's a prima facie absurd example. Certainly, I would prefer a dead world with a Temple of Artemis standing to a world of complete nothingness. How does suffering trade-off against beauty? I don't know, but it's far from obvious any amount of suffering is always more important.
Likewise, conservative sexual morality could still be consequentialist, just about values alien to our ethical systems. I think they are wrong, but because they have wrong priorities, not because they are deontologists.
Surely at least some "conservative moralizing" is shorthand for avoiding likely future suffering, especially becuase biological reality isn't nearly as malleable as we can wish to believe in our youth.
I'm thinking of the 20yo woman who thiinks "body count" doesn't matter at all, and for very obvious evopsych reasons is more likely to be in a range of negative states at 40. The attitude that I believe will maximize consequences is much closer to her view than it is to a burqa, but there are still many who would call any deviation from her view at all "conservative moralizing". (Maybe you'd want to call her view "leftist moralizing", a similar deviation from rational consequentialism?)
Are you aware of Haidt's experiments/surveys where he tried to map the landscape of moral intuitions by asking a series of questions that often cause people to react with moral outrage, but they are stumped when asked to explain the reason?
Part of his conclusion was that harm was not the only practical basis for moral intuition. He identified 5 additional moral dimensions: fairness, authority, loyalty, liberty, and sanctity. He seems to think that these cannot be reduced to care/harm. Or at least, he was comfortable asking about thought experiments that violated these while stipulating that no one was harmed.
I suspect things are even more complicated than that. People can moralize custom and habit. Getting to the real fundamentals is difficult.
Philipa Foot argued that utilitarianism focused on only one virtue, benevolence, and that it failed to give room for other legitimate virtues.
About “Who cares about your rules, Deontology? Others’ lives matter more than that,” it is interesting that this is a very fundamental part of Judaism ("Pikuach nefesh" on Wikipedia explains it). My neighbor is an Orthodox Jewish woman so I have seen how this is important for her life - when she was a nurse she regularly broke Sabbath to help at the hospital when she saw them blinking their lights signifying that they needed her. (And she also justifies her track record in utilitarian terms - she emphasizes that she never lost a patient, even though she often broke hospital rules in order to accomplish that.)
However, there are then exceptions to this rule, certain things you can't do even to save a life (including idolatry, incest, and some sorts of murder), so in the end deontology trumps I suppose. But I do find it interesting how a blatant utilitarian exception to the otherwise extremely strict rule book with which my neighbor lives her life doesn't seem to lead her to question her faith on philosophical grounds. Like, couldn't you be saving lives in developing countries with all the money you spend on expensive kosher meat?
I feel like the disagreement here is not about meta-ethics but ethics and values. Your post suggests consequentialist meta-ethics must care only about individual preferences, but I don't think that's necessarily the case.
Let's take the example of Herostratus burning down the Temple of Artemis, but stipulate that no one was harmed or upset by this act. Was it still wrong?
A deontologist can say it was since Herostratus had wrong motives. A virtue ethicist can say it was since Herostratus behaved viciously. Can a consequentialist say it was wrong? Yes: this act reduced the amount of beauty in the world, and one can be a consequentialist about beauty.
And I don't feel like that's a prima facie absurd example. Certainly, I would prefer a dead world with a Temple of Artemis standing to a world of complete nothingness. How does suffering trade-off against beauty? I don't know, but it's far from obvious any amount of suffering is always more important.
Likewise, conservative sexual morality could still be consequentialist, just about values alien to our ethical systems. I think they are wrong, but because they have wrong priorities, not because they are deontologists.
Surely at least some "conservative moralizing" is shorthand for avoiding likely future suffering, especially becuase biological reality isn't nearly as malleable as we can wish to believe in our youth.
I'm thinking of the 20yo woman who thiinks "body count" doesn't matter at all, and for very obvious evopsych reasons is more likely to be in a range of negative states at 40. The attitude that I believe will maximize consequences is much closer to her view than it is to a burqa, but there are still many who would call any deviation from her view at all "conservative moralizing". (Maybe you'd want to call her view "leftist moralizing", a similar deviation from rational consequentialism?)
What counts as an independent reason? What are arbitrary rules dependent upon?