Just skimmed this, but note that there is an existing literature in philosophy on whether non-consequentialist theories can or should be ‘consequentialised’, that is, turned into consequentialist theories, e.g. Portmore (2009), Brown (2011), Sinnott-Armstrong (2019), Shroeder (2019), Muñoz (2021). I found these in 5 minutes, so there’s probably loads more.
A very general problem with the move, as Sinnott-Armstrong (2019) points out, is that if all theories can be re-presented as consequentialist, then it means little to label a theory as consequentialist. Even if successful, we would then have many different ‘consequentialisms’ that suggest, in practice, different things: should you kill the one and harvest their organs to save the five?
Of course, all minimally plausible versions of deontology and virtue ethics must be concerned in part with promoting the good. As John Rawls, not a consequentialist himself, famously put in A Theory of Justice: “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” That does not, however, make everyone a consequentialist.
I would suggest to actually read, and try to understand the post?
The papers you link mostly use the notion of ‘consequentializing’ in the sense that you can re-cast many other theories as consequentialist. But often this is almost trivial, if you allow yourself the degree of freedom of ‘changing what’s considered good’ on the consequentialist side (as some of the papers do). For some weird reason, you have a deontic theory prohibiting people to drink blue liquids? Fine, you can represent that in consequentialist terms, by ranking all the words where people drink blue liquids as worse than any word where this does not happen. This has the problem you mention—everything becomes ‘some form of consequentialism’.
This is not what this post is about, and what I’m arguing for goes mostly in a different direction. You basically take consequentialism as “true” and some ordering of good states of world states as given. Next, you notice that the act-based consequentialism is often computationally intractable, for humans, using their brains. (This seem different angle of view than most philosophy papers, which by default ignore the wisdom you get from computational complexity or information theory & physics.)
if all theories can be re-presented as consequentialist, then it means little to label a theory as consequentialist. Even if successful, we would then have many different ‘consequentialisms’ that suggest, in practice, different things
I think this is very much answered in the post, by the analogy to limiting cases:
Sometimes, the relation between theories in physics is that one theory can be understood to be a special or limited case of another theory, for example a low-energy limit, high-energy limit, or classical limit. In these cases, the theory covering more of the territory can sometimes tell us when we can safely use the simpler, limiting case theory.
The claim is not “all these theories are equivalent despite arriving at different conclusions”—but rather “these are what consequentialism boils down to under the assumptions that are in fact relevant to us most of the time”. Different limiting cases can have contradictory results, but that just means you need to know which one is a good approximation for your case and which one isn’t.
Just skimmed this, but note that there is an existing literature in philosophy on whether non-consequentialist theories can or should be ‘consequentialised’, that is, turned into consequentialist theories, e.g. Portmore (2009), Brown (2011), Sinnott-Armstrong (2019), Shroeder (2019), Muñoz (2021). I found these in 5 minutes, so there’s probably loads more.
A very general problem with the move, as Sinnott-Armstrong (2019) points out, is that if all theories can be re-presented as consequentialist, then it means little to label a theory as consequentialist. Even if successful, we would then have many different ‘consequentialisms’ that suggest, in practice, different things: should you kill the one and harvest their organs to save the five?
Of course, all minimally plausible versions of deontology and virtue ethics must be concerned in part with promoting the good. As John Rawls, not a consequentialist himself, famously put in A Theory of Justice: “All ethical doctrines worth our attention take consequences into account in judging rightness. One which did not would simply be irrational, crazy.” That does not, however, make everyone a consequentialist.
I would suggest to actually read, and try to understand the post?
The papers you link mostly use the notion of ‘consequentializing’ in the sense that you can re-cast many other theories as consequentialist. But often this is almost trivial, if you allow yourself the degree of freedom of ‘changing what’s considered good’ on the consequentialist side (as some of the papers do). For some weird reason, you have a deontic theory prohibiting people to drink blue liquids? Fine, you can represent that in consequentialist terms, by ranking all the words where people drink blue liquids as worse than any word where this does not happen. This has the problem you mention—everything becomes ‘some form of consequentialism’.
This is not what this post is about, and what I’m arguing for goes mostly in a different direction. You basically take consequentialism as “true” and some ordering of good states of world states as given. Next, you notice that the act-based consequentialism is often computationally intractable, for humans, using their brains. (This seem different angle of view than most philosophy papers, which by default ignore the wisdom you get from computational complexity or information theory & physics.)
I think this is very much answered in the post, by the analogy to limiting cases:
The claim is not “all these theories are equivalent despite arriving at different conclusions”—but rather “these are what consequentialism boils down to under the assumptions that are in fact relevant to us most of the time”. Different limiting cases can have contradictory results, but that just means you need to know which one is a good approximation for your case and which one isn’t.