Source: Facebook

http://johnquiggin.com/2014/12/31/consequentialist-arguments-for-deontological-positions/comment-page-1/#comment-249747John,

I think such arguments are not cast in useful frames, because the difference between Imitative(virtue) ethics, rule(deontological) ethics, and outcome(consequentialist) ethics, is merely the information one has at one’s disposal in making judgements. Just as abduction, induction and deduction are different levels of guesswork depending upon the information we have at our disposal. In that light, I am not sure that the assumption that one combines rule justifications and consequent justifications is any more than an artifact of the normal process of debating moral rules because of the outcomes they produce. There isn’t anything irrational about it.

But, rather than frame the question as one of rationalism, we can also frame it scientifically: Humans demonstrably justify our moral intuitions through a fog of cognitive biases that are unequally distributed in intensity across all of us – not the least of which are by gender, kin, class, family structure, and pressures from local geographic competition. It is as painfully obvious that you are an Australian as it is to you that I am an American, or someone else is a Canadian, Brit or German. Yet each of us in the final analysis relies upon an intuitionistic judgment. And appeals to scientific judgement are rare. In your post you make this same argument: that in the end we result to intuition.

So, the very idea of a common good achievable by moral argument among well intentioned equals is probably illogical – which is why we cannot achieve it. We were relatively equal in interests under craftsman-agrarianism and the absolute nuclear family. But outside of those conditions, our inequality of interests is increasingly visible, expressed and our inequality of interests dominant. And particularly with the dissolution of the family and the de-nationalism of liberalism, our inequality of interests is increasingly expressed in political preferences.

Instead of operating under the pretense of equals under majority rule, if we treat one another as possessed of different sensory biases (roles) in a division of inter-temporal reproductive labor, and that we use voluntary exchange as our information system, then under those conditions, majority rule is only slightly less terrible a means of cooperating than tyranny, and a failure to construct exchanges lost opportunity for cooperation.

And so our purpose, if better served, in economic science (the study of human cooperation), is to provide institutional means for facilitating superior communication (exchanges) between individuals and groups, rather than attempting to construct unknowable optimums under majority rule.

At that point fallacious arguments predicated upon false premises will no longer be necessary and we can simply argue about what we are each willing to do, instead of what we justify to be good albeit if in our own illusory and biased interests.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev,

http://johnquiggin.com/2014/12/31/consequentialist-arguments-for-deontological-positions/