One issue I have with these arguments for pluralism and for sometimes obeying something like common sense morality for its own sake and independent of utilitarian justification is that common sense morality is crazy/impossible to follow in almost all normal decision situations if you think it’s implications through properly.
One argument for this is MacAskill’s argument that deontology required paralysis. Every time you leave the house, you foreseeably cause someone to die by changing the flow of traffic. Cars also contribute to air pollution which foreseeably kills people, suggesting that emitting any amount of pollution is impermissible. This violates nonconsequentialist side-constraints. I don’t understand how you can give some weight to this type of view.
This is not the point that we should follow utilitarian morality when the stakes are high from a utilitarian point of view.
One argument for this is MacAskill’s argument that deontology required paralysis. Every time you leave the house, you foreseeably cause someone to die by changing the flow of traffic.
A counterargument is that most people live by (imperfectly) adhering to their commonsense morality, and are usually not paralyzed. So it seems that the paralysis is a feature of a theoretical simplification rather than of the real system.
I’m mostly-deontologist and don’t think the paralysis argument works, but I also don’t think the way most people live is a good counterargument to it. I don’t think so because MacAskill is arguing against a coherent moral worldview, whereas hardly any people live according to a coherent moral worldview. Them not being paralysed is, I think, not because they have a much more refined version of deontology than what MacAskill argues against, but because they don’t have a coherent version of it at all.
Edit: I’ll rephrase—I think it’s good to improve our morals and our adherence to them, but achieving a fully coherent moral theory is unrealistic and probably impossible.
One issue I have with these arguments for pluralism and for sometimes obeying something like common sense morality for its own sake and independent of utilitarian justification is that common sense morality is crazy/impossible to follow in almost all normal decision situations if you think it’s implications through properly.
One argument for this is MacAskill’s argument that deontology required paralysis. Every time you leave the house, you foreseeably cause someone to die by changing the flow of traffic. Cars also contribute to air pollution which foreseeably kills people, suggesting that emitting any amount of pollution is impermissible. This violates nonconsequentialist side-constraints. I don’t understand how you can give some weight to this type of view.
This is not the point that we should follow utilitarian morality when the stakes are high from a utilitarian point of view.
A counterargument is that most people live by (imperfectly) adhering to their commonsense morality, and are usually not paralyzed. So it seems that the paralysis is a feature of a theoretical simplification rather than of the real system.
I’m mostly-deontologist and don’t think the paralysis argument works, but I also don’t think the way most people live is a good counterargument to it. I don’t think so because MacAskill is arguing against a coherent moral worldview, whereas hardly any people live according to a coherent moral worldview. Them not being paralysed is, I think, not because they have a much more refined version of deontology than what MacAskill argues against, but because they don’t have a coherent version of it at all.
I don’t think incoherence is much of a problem.
Edit: I’ll rephrase—I think it’s good to improve our morals and our adherence to them, but achieving a fully coherent moral theory is unrealistic and probably impossible.
Just look around.
Edited to maybe make it clearer what I mean.
Thanks, appreciate it! :)