9.3.11

Short answer to the problem posed here:

Critics of consequentialism often object that it is a "harsh" moral theory that fails to recognise the separateness of persons. Because consequentialism permits trade-offs it is typically characterized as a defective moral theory that fails to accord the appropriate moral weight to sacred or "serially ordered" values (to use Rawls's terminology).

And yet it is precisely this kind of absoluteness in deontological reasoning that makes it dangerous.

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What I take away as the moral of the story here... there might be less war in the world if we all thought like good consequentialists rather than good deontologists!

The problem is easy to get out of: deontology is able to separate ethics from morality in a way consequentialism isn't. On a consequentialist theory, we always do whatever produces the best consequences given whatever our measure of 'consequences' happens to be. There can be no moral dilemma, in which both options are morally bad: one is always better and so choiceworthy. Deontology, which recognizes the existence of moral dilemmas, allows for situations in which all options are, morally speaking, bad, and yet a choice must be made. War is a fine example of that kind of choice situation: the loss of life is a bad; in some circumstances, the failure to act is to permit a bad to occur. One can choose either, so long as one recognizes the cost of the decision. Hence deontology should be no more likely to lead to war than any other ethical theory.

('Sacred values' may present a wrinkle, if the idea of the value is that it must be upheld all times in all circumstances. Certainly Kant argues something like this; but Walzer in "Dirty Hands" offers another (to my mind superior) take on deontological theory.)

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