Deontology VS Consequentialism VS Virtues - the three dominant philosophical systems of ethics

[Jack Haywood]

The purpose of this thread is to discuss these three main groupings of ethical schools of thought in all their varieties. Here's some info about them for anyone who knows nothing about what they are:

DEONTOLOGICAL ETHICS

VIRTUE ETHICS

CONSEQUENTIALIST ETHICS

 

[Harvey Danger]

TL;DR
If you believe in a higher power/moral standard that exists completely external to humanity, you'll wind up on the Deontology path, and spend your life debating interpretations like an autist lawyer.

If you don't, then after quite a lot of arguing, your system boils down to subjective Virtue. Odds are you think it's objective or universal, but it won't be. That is fine for you personally, but either your system doesn't scale or it doesn't last over time and generations.

If you're dragging out a spreadsheet to do a cost/benefit analysis, you're a utilitarian. If you went to a fancy school, you call yourself Consequentialist instead. Not that it matters, because your system has yet to be proven workable within normal human society. Also, nobody likes you.

Everyone who disagrees with the above is either an amoral asshole, or a philosophy major on break from his Starbucks shift.

 

[Oskar Dirlewanger]

Whenever I hear the word "ethics", I reach for my revolver. - Mahatma Gandhi

 

[dreamworks face]

TL;DR
If you believe in a higher power/moral standard that exists completely external to humanity, you'll wind up on the Deontology path, and spend your life debating interpretations like an autist lawyer.

There's a bit more nuance to deontology vs consequentialism in that you don't necessarily have to believe that there is a higher moral standard, more that there is an absolute one. Deontology posits that there are certain actions that are morally wrong regardless of outcome, whereas in consequentialism, outcome determines the morality of the action. Virtue ethics goes another exceptional direction and tries to have things consider what a virtuous person would do.

What I like about deontology compared with the rest is if I do thought experiments where I try to program a self-driving car to make decisions - like, say my self-driving car is programmed to look around and try to pick whatever outcome causes the least loss of life. I'd prefer not to be driving down the road and the car sees neo-Hitler in the crosswalk and decides to run him over and kill me in the process, I would instead prefer for my self driving car to avoid killing anyone if at all possible.

The problems there are two-fold - a) consequentialism suffers from a pretty big epistemic gap because how are you supposed to know the future? A lot of the arguments in favor of utilitarianism and consequentialism assume knowledge that you're pretty unlikely to have - but b), assuming whatever's making the decision knows the future, then you can run into some pretty screwed up situations.

Virtue ethics comes from an orthogonal direction - in a virtue ethics scenario, your car should act as a good car should. So it's actually not a useful theory in terms of action guidance, and I find action guidance to be a fairly useful trait in a theory of normative ethics.

Which swings me back to deontology. Yeah, it rubs people the wrong way to just put down a list of rules of things that shouldn't do (feels like religion) - but in terms of action guidance, it's much less easy to justify bullshit if you just loop through all the rules of things that you shouldn't do, and don't do the things on that list.

 

[Harvey Danger]

There's a bit more nuance to deontology vs consequentialism in that you don't necessarily have to believe that there is a higher moral standard, more that there is an absolute one.

I edited myself down for the sake of the joke flow, and you caught some resulting bad grammar: that was supposed to be "higher power" or "moral standard" that was outside of humanity, not necessarily higher moral standard.

The implied argument being, you can't have an absolute moral standard arise from human reason, thought, or emotions; any human standard is necessarily limited, flawed, or subjective. You have to go to something outside of human creation to attain complete objectivity. So you're right, it doesn't have to be "higher" than a human standard, it simply has to be free of human construction to obtain something like an "absolute" standard.

The problems there are two-fold - a) consequentialism suffers from a pretty big epistemic gap because how are you supposed to know the future? A lot of the arguments in favor of utilitarianism and consequentialism assume knowledge that you're pretty unlikely to have - but b), assuming whatever's making the decision knows the future, then you can run into some pretty screwed up situations.

Consequentialism is like Soviet-style Communism: if you had perfect knowledge of every aspect of some decision, and perfect knowledge of the future ramifications, it's workable. If you don't, it's a practical disaster.

That's what makes them both so dangerously attractive, it's theoretically the most objective way to do things. Big emphasis on the theory part. Reality shows the necessary calculations are unworkable. I'd argue that, at the current state of human knowledge, we've shown that being able to make such calculations is also theoretically impossible (for both consequentialism and Communism). But obviously there's disagreement with my conclusion there.

(I could spend a few paragraphs shitting on virtue ethics here. Maybe later. Usually when you want to figure out if you're trolling normies or philosophy nerds, you relabel that column as "Miscellaneous" and wait to see who gets mad.)

 

[Where Do You Find Them?]

They're all a waste of time and the fact that there are so many systems proves it.

Let's imagine I am entirely ignorant of ethics beyond a vague wish to be ethical. A reasonable first step for me would be to sit down and decide which system I like best, i.e. how should I approach the problem of ethics in the first place? But then I'm stuck in a catch-22. If we truly accept that I am totally ignorant of ethics how could I possibly make this choice? It's only once I've accepted some form of moral compass that I can use it to judge these systems.

Of course it doesn't actually go down like that. Nobody ever fully accepts the idea that they are ignorant of ethics, that they truly don't know right from wrong. Even in that last paragraph I still had to accept an unexamined "vague wish to be ethical" or else I'm stuck unable to justify the pursuit of ethics at all.

When looking at it in this light drawing a distinction between ethics and morality becomes critical. From now on, I'll use ethics to mean the rules and systems we create (i.e. the examined result of inquiry) and morals to refer to the unexamined gut feeling that you come into this inquiry with. As I hope I've shown ethics depends on morality. Without it we'd be left unable to justify statements like "The end of humanity would be a bad thing" without resorting to circular reasoning.

I understand this isn't the distinction people usually draw between these terms but I'm mostly going to ignore societies influence on this except to say that society is just a collection of people. There can be no good for society that it not good for at least some of the individuals composing it and so you would want your society to try to instill a system of ethics that is good for those individuals.

So, with that in mind, looking at the three systems here they all suffer the same fatal flaw. They attempt to somehow codify morality and in doing so pervert it. Utilitarianism tries to codify morality as, basically, "most happiness good" which doesn't actually sit well with anyone's gut. Deontology attempts to produce some system of rules via which morality will be served and inevitably fails. Virtue ethics seems at first glance to be fairly in line with this. It even takes it a step further. We're not just going to rely on our morality, we're going to be the type of person with the best morality, but in this it falls down. We end up trying too hard. We think "I must be compassionate" even as our morality tells us to punch the smug fucker and teach him a lesson.

Far better just to sit back, relax and do what you think is right. All of ethics comes from morality and none of it has added to it in a meaningful way. Instead of trying to work it out ahead of time and use your morality to produce a system of ethics, just use your morality straight up. Ethics is a fun thing to sit and shitpost about on a Sunday afternoon, but it isn't going to make you a better person.

Original theory do not steal. Shut up! Beauvoir stole it from me I swears it. Also I know this counts as virtue ethics but I only huff my own farts bi-weekly so does it TRULY count?

 

[AnOminous]

Deontology posits that there are certain actions that are morally wrong regardless of outcome, whereas in consequentialism, outcome determines the morality of the action.

That said, "good" ethics of either sort generally have roughly the same outcome. In neither system of ethics is murdering people a good thing, although the reasoning getting there may differ. To tease out the actual differences in practice often requires positing weird edge cases that don't actually happen in reality, so you have nonsense like utility monsters wrecking utilitarianism, and having to kill the last person on Death Row when a society ceases to exist in Kantian ethics, as if it matters at that point.

So if you're in that situation where you have to kill an innocent baby for some perceived benefit in utilitarianism, you just say no, you don't actually do that because it's bad and fuck being consistent. You also don't give the utility monster, who doesn't exist anyway, everyone else's food because it really, really loves the food more than everyone else would and if the others die of starvation, well though.

Both sets of ethics ultimately, practically, require some set of rules. These rules are often somewhat arbitrary and aren't exactly perfect for every set of circumstances. However, if you let every single person set their own optimal set of rules and then act according to them, considering how many of them are selfish, or even outright sadistic and crazy, you'd have absolute chaos.

tl;dr the fundamental moral outlook behind either set of ethics may be totally different but unless you follow their reasoning to absurd conclusions and then do absolutely insane things, either set "works." Even a utilitarian system requires acknowledging the morality of the majority because if you just ignore that and set up some system that may make sense to you and some philosophers, but is absolutely abhorrent to the majority, they'll just say fuck off and probably string you up too.

I think people use more common sense than abstract ethics because philosophy is silly bullshit to the vast majority of people.