I don’t think the process can ever really be quantifiable in a mathematical sense. It is more like the weighing of issues a judge must conduct when deciding a civil case. They include the interests of those directly and indirectly involved, the incentives being created, the strength of evidence, etc.

There is a lot of confusion as to what counts as deontology. Sure, it means rules, but what sort of rules? We call Kant a “deontologist” but he has only one rule. So, if you say consequentialists have a “rule” in the form of the greatest happiness principle, then there are no more “rules” in Kantian morality than in Mill’s.

I agree that they are not as distinct as sometimes portrayed. For instance, there are lots of cases in which it makes sense to adopt a rule as shorthand for what would arise from a consideration of consequences.

If you want to know what it is to be moral, find some moral people, and see what they do.

This is not too far off the judging model I mention above. Looking at examples certainly helps us clarify our moral reasoning. For instance, we can evaluate our domestic laws against those that exist in other states – both the sort that we consider admirable and those we consider deplorable.

A question related to the ones above is the importance of intention. How do we deal with people who are doing harm from our own perspective while they are making a genuine attempt to do good according to their own ethical understanding? Where does the moral authority that would let us aid or resist them arise from?

There is a lot of confusion as to what counts as deontology. Sure, it means rules, but what sort of rules? We call Kant a “deontologist” but he has only one rule. So, if you say consequentialists have a “rule” in the form of the greatest happiness principle, then there are no more “rules” in Kantian morality than in Mill’s.

We can say it means “the good is prior to rules, rules are made for the sake of the good”. But, to be serious, this is true for deontology aswell. It follows from the nature of the good, for deontologists, that it can be determined by rule(s). Any deontologist would admit that if the good is a quantity, then deontological frameworks need a consequentialist justification (i.e. you need to prove that your set of rules will result in the greatest good compared to other sets of rules).

I think we’d have a lot more luck at figuring out what it means to act morally by using the principle of demonstration – and Hume agrees with me on this. If you want to know what it is to be moral, find some moral people, and see what they do. You could demand I give a justification for calling them “moral” before deciding which ones are moral and which ones arn’t, but that would be the fallacy of equivocating circular reasoning with vicious circular reasoning – if the goal is clarification of concepts, then a circular argument is not invalid – it is invalid only for the determination of concepts.

I certainly didn’t mean to imply support for cultural relativism. There are definitely kinds of societies that are morally superior to others, partly because they are founded on values that produce a good level of human welfare along with protection against the things (tyranny, oppression, discrimination, genocide) that are most strongly associated with bad human lives.

I agree that quantification is a big problem, and one that can never really be solved. In the end, we need to make guesses about the magnitude of consequences based on what we can know.

It still seems to me that nobody has presented an alternative deontological framework that provides decent guidance on what it means to be moral.

Again, only if the good is quantifiable (“15″, “100″), will consequentialism be a candidate for providing guidance.

Then your analysis reduces “the good” to what “society values”.

The problem with this is a) it’s full bore cultural relativism. You can’t say a value is wrong. You can only criticize the Nazi’s for poorly fullfilling their own values.

b) what proof do you have that the thing society values is quantifiable? Are social values always quantifiable, or sometimes qualifiable, and sometimes neither? If that was the case, you couldn’t conclude consequentialism had any more inherent priority than virtue ethics or deontology anyway.

True, it is simply unwieldy to use a word like ‘teleological’ too frequently in a piece of writing.

Although it partly depends what those numbers actually stand for – that is, what the lives of the two people are actually like – it seems obvious to me that a) 15,15 is better than 100,1 and b) 100,1 is better than 15,15 in terms of the consequences of the choice.

What non-consequentialist framework would provide clearer guidance?

I agree that some consequences should not be taken into account – for instance, the displeasure of bigots who were displeased when the vote was extended to women. That being said, the reasons those consequences are invalid are themselves consequential: if society did value them, overall outcomes would be worse.

For example, in your police officer argument, you offer no argument as to why the fact that “justice” is not produced in this case is actually an argument about consequences. You just hope we were basing our reason on future welfare, and not on the upholding of justice.

Similarly, even the thesis statement “Indeed, I think the transition from an outcomes based view to a rights based view is likely to lead to less effective moral deliberation.”, is basically an example of circular reasoning, because what counts as moral deliberation will give the answer to your question.

The fourth ‘family’ is especially odd. It basically centres around the rejection of the phrase ‘the end justifies the means.’ What they mean by this, essentially, is not to circumvent procedures that exist for good reasons to achieve some narrow objective. What seems foolish about it is the fact that the ethical yardstick remains the ends. It is inappropriate to fast-track an excellent seeming job candidate past normal checks because of the risk that your intuition is wrong, and the possibility doing so will undermine the system. Both objections are ultimately based on a comparison between two sets of means (sloppy and rigorous) and two sets of outcomes.