I think we are looking at this through genuinely different lenses, and I appreciate you engaging.
Protection in RE is not a standalone principle and it is not a synonym for welfare maximization in consequentialism. It is part of an inseparable structural ordering: P > T > F. You cannot pull Protection out of that structure and compare it to consequentialism in isolation, because it only functions as part of the whole. A forum post is a thin slice of the framework, so I completely understand the blurriness. I would genuinely love to know whether you have had a chance to read the RE paper itself, because I think several of your concerns dissolve once the definitions are on their own terms rather than mapped onto familiar ones.
On moral luck, you are actually closer to RE’s position than you might think. You said the act is equally wrong in both cases while the actual results carry more weight. RE agrees, and it gives you the structural reason why both things are true simultaneously: the Self-Deception is identical in both drivers, and the Moral Entropy is different. That is not a repackaging, it is a mechanism.
On the Repugnant Conclusion, you are absolutely right that some serious philosophers accept it. That is a legitimate position. My argument is not that it feels bad. It is that the reasoning process that generates it contains a specific kind of incoherence when run through PTF structure. If you want to defend accepting it, I would be genuinely curious what you make of that argument specifically.
No final word claimed here. Just something I think is worth a closer look.
I think we are looking at this through genuinely different lenses, and I appreciate you engaging.
Protection in RE is not a standalone principle and it is not a synonym for welfare maximization in consequentialism. It is part of an inseparable structural ordering: P > T > F. You cannot pull Protection out of that structure and compare it to consequentialism in isolation, because it only functions as part of the whole. A forum post is a thin slice of the framework, so I completely understand the blurriness. I would genuinely love to know whether you have had a chance to read the RE paper itself, because I think several of your concerns dissolve once the definitions are on their own terms rather than mapped onto familiar ones.
On moral luck, you are actually closer to RE’s position than you might think. You said the act is equally wrong in both cases while the actual results carry more weight. RE agrees, and it gives you the structural reason why both things are true simultaneously: the Self-Deception is identical in both drivers, and the Moral Entropy is different. That is not a repackaging, it is a mechanism.
On the Repugnant Conclusion, you are absolutely right that some serious philosophers accept it. That is a legitimate position. My argument is not that it feels bad. It is that the reasoning process that generates it contains a specific kind of incoherence when run through PTF structure. If you want to defend accepting it, I would be genuinely curious what you make of that argument specifically.
No final word claimed here. Just something I think is worth a closer look.