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**Super-Luser** · 10-08-2010, 07:31 AM

If there were a way to tell the future, your reasoning would be correct. There is no way, in a teleological ethical system, to determine with certainty that an action is 'right' before it is undertaken.

So? I've never, ever suggested that we have to find out all of the numbers to infinite precision, or always get the right answer - but mechanisms that, to the best of our knowledge, will get us in the right ballpark of the right answer are probably preferable to arbitrary guesswork.

That appraisal can only come after the action is long exercised and the consequences tallied. So instead, your ethical system becomes a matter of statistical probabilities. An action is 'right' under the assumption of a particular expected outcome but if the consequences differ from that outcome, it could become 'wrong'. What is the role of justice in such a system? How is the man who kills to save 2 people treated (net effect positive)? What if he mistakingly thought he could only save those 2 people by killing a person and they all died (net effect negative)? Welcome to the confusion that resulted in the trifurcation of ethics into consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics.

The answer to "what should I do?" is pretty clearly "the thing that, to the best of your knowledge, will produce the best outcome" etc. Unless our knowledge really really sucks, that rule should pretty consistently perform better than other rules, and we'll just have to live with the fact that sometimes our knowledge is wrong.

Of course, sometimes we end up having to adopt rules that produce locally suboptimal outcomes because otherwise we get a globally suboptimal system. e.g. I have to kill those German soldiers (who may be perfectly good people, whatever) so that we can get to Berlin and tear down Nazi Germany. Or I have to throw this guy in prison, even if I don't think he'll commit more crimes, because putting people in prison deters others from committing crimes in the first place. Deontology takes these rules we come up with and ingrain into our social norms and says that they are true in themselves rather than true as necessary results of consequentialism.

Virtue ethics comes about when we decide that we want to encourage people to follow these norms, and so say that people who behave morally are "good people" and people who behave immorally are "bad people". Good people are those that do good things and don't do bad things; we should and do want to be good people, so we do good things and don't do bad things. But, again, these are just constructs on top of consequentialism, not basic axioms of morality.

10-08-2010, 07:31 AM	#22
Super-Luser Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 561 Senior Member	If there were a way to tell the future, your reasoning would be correct. There is no way, in a teleological ethical system, to determine with certainty that an action is 'right' before it is undertaken. So? I've never, ever suggested that we have to find out all of the numbers to infinite precision, or always get the right answer - but mechanisms that, to the best of our knowledge, will get us in the right ballpark of the right answer are probably preferable to arbitrary guesswork. That appraisal can only come after the action is long exercised and the consequences tallied. So instead, your ethical system becomes a matter of statistical probabilities. An action is 'right' under the assumption of a particular expected outcome but if the consequences differ from that outcome, it could become 'wrong'. What is the role of justice in such a system? How is the man who kills to save 2 people treated (net effect positive)? What if he mistakingly thought he could only save those 2 people by killing a person and they all died (net effect negative)? Welcome to the confusion that resulted in the trifurcation of ethics into consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. The answer to "what should I do?" is pretty clearly "the thing that, to the best of your knowledge, will produce the best outcome" etc. Unless our knowledge really really sucks, that rule should pretty consistently perform better than other rules, and we'll just have to live with the fact that sometimes our knowledge is wrong. Of course, sometimes we end up having to adopt rules that produce locally suboptimal outcomes because otherwise we get a globally suboptimal system. e.g. I have to kill those German soldiers (who may be perfectly good people, whatever) so that we can get to Berlin and tear down Nazi Germany. Or I have to throw this guy in prison, even if I don't think he'll commit more crimes, because putting people in prison deters others from committing crimes in the first place. Deontology takes these rules we come up with and ingrain into our social norms and says that they are true in themselves rather than true as necessary results of consequentialism. Virtue ethics comes about when we decide that we want to encourage people to follow these norms, and so say that people who behave morally are "good people" and people who behave immorally are "bad people". Good people are those that do good things and don't do bad things; we should and do want to be good people, so we do good things and don't do bad things. But, again, these are just constructs on top of consequentialism, not basic axioms of morality.
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