Share this comment
I feel like the disagreement here is not about meta-ethics but ethics and values. Your post suggests consequentialist meta-ethics must care only about individual preferences, but I don't think that's necessarily the case.
Let's take the example of Herostratus burning down the Temple of Artemis, but stipulate that no one was harmed or upse…
I feel like the disagreement here is not about meta-ethics but ethics and values. Your post suggests consequentialist meta-ethics must care only about individual preferences, but I don't think that's necessarily the case.
Let's take the example of Herostratus burning down the Temple of Artemis, but stipulate that no one was harmed or upset by this act. Was it still wrong?
A deontologist can say it was since Herostratus had wrong motives. A virtue ethicist can say it was since Herostratus behaved viciously. Can a consequentialist say it was wrong? Yes: this act reduced the amount of beauty in the world, and one can be a consequentialist about beauty.
And I don't feel like that's a prima facie absurd example. Certainly, I would prefer a dead world with a Temple of Artemis standing to a world of complete nothingness. How does suffering trade-off against beauty? I don't know, but it's far from obvious any amount of suffering is always more important.
Likewise, conservative sexual morality could still be consequentialist, just about values alien to our ethical systems. I think they are wrong, but because they have wrong priorities, not because they are deontologists.
Ah, I should clarify that I just mean that *our concern for other individuals* is independently comprehensible only when it tracks their real interests (rather than moralizing). But I agree that consequentialists might value other things entirely, such as aesthetic value. That can also make sense. But again, I'd suggest only in consequentialist form: a *moralized* form of environmentalism, e.g. that prioritizes "purity" preferences (like anti-nuclear) over actually improving environmental outcomes, seems like something we should also be skeptical about.
It's interesting to imagine a "consequentialized" version of these views. Like, someone who says, "I agree it's worse for people, so I don't hold this view for their sake, but I just directly care that nobody is ever used as a means (no matter how much worse off this makes each person in expectation)." Or, "I agree it's worse for the environment, so I don't hold this view for the environment's sake, but I just directly care that we prohibit nuclear power (no matter how much coal we burn in its place)." I guess you're right that these values are then simply *alien* rather than mystical.
But perhaps that's another way of getting at my point: these are values that seemingly *make no sense* to us when taken at face value. So when people hold them, they presumably must be doing something other than taking the values at face value: instead they've been imbued with an extra mystical essence of "objective rightness" that's needed to transform them into something comprehensible (believing, falsely, that they're part and parcel of properly valuing *individuals* or *the environment*). But in fact there is no such mystical transformative essence. We must instead take them at face value. And we then find that deontology rests on incomprehensibly alien values.
Yep, conservative sexual morality could very obviously be consequentialist, given literal belief in God and Hell as often described.