I take it that "rights" are supposed to be deontological constraints on actions, i.e. rights prohibit the ways that we are morally permitted to use other agents to make the world better. So deontologists would say that agents should respect rights even in cases where violating rights would make the world better (unless the benefits are extremely large, according to moderate deontologists).
I also take it that to say world A is "better" than world B is just to say that there is more reason to prefer A be instantiated rather than B be instantiated. This seems to be what we mean when we say one world is "better" than another.
If that's the correct meaning of "better", then premise (5) will be question-begging to the deontologist. We can translate the statement "For any action N, if we should prefer a world in which N is taken to one in which N isn’t taken, then action N should be taken" to the statement "For any action N, if the world in which N is taken is better than the world in which N isn't taken, then action N should be taken". But that's just an explicit negation of deontology.
I know that some writers argue that deontologists should maintain the view that we should want agents to respect rights, even in cases where violating rights would make the world better. These writers are presumably using a different definition of "better" than the one I mentioned. On this view of deontology, premise (1) would be question-begging since it's an explicit negation of the view.
I don't see the motivation for 1). Almost everyone has the intuition that deliberate acts are worse than natural events with the same outcome, eg murder is worse than being struck by lightning.
Well, I don't think most have the intuition that a murder is worse than two being struck by lightning and dying (if you could prevent either one murder or two lightning strike deaths, you should do the latter).
Dominik beat me to it again. The deontologist is going to say that reasons are agent-relative. The use of the pronoun "we" in your argument smuggles in the assumption that everyone is going to have the same reasons.
I think I reject 2, in that the statement seems intuitively correct only because we use “bad” to mean different things when describing a moral agent vs general event/impersonal force
Yeah, in a pedantic/totally formal/isolated sense, I'd say that neither are "bad" at all because death doesn't inherently change the amounts of suffering or happiness that exist. But that's not how I'd use the term in a normal conversation about whether it's "{bad} that the man next door was murdered" for example
If by 5) you mean "then action N should be taken... BY ME, if I am in that situation", then almost every deontologist would deny that 5) is correct. This again comes down to a clash of intuitions - most of your arguments seem to be based on the intuition that one always should do what is preferable in an agent-neutral sense, but many people simply don't have that intuition because they believe in agent-relative reasons, i.e. what matters is that it is ME who doesn't kill
I take it that "rights" are supposed to be deontological constraints on actions, i.e. rights prohibit the ways that we are morally permitted to use other agents to make the world better. So deontologists would say that agents should respect rights even in cases where violating rights would make the world better (unless the benefits are extremely large, according to moderate deontologists).
I also take it that to say world A is "better" than world B is just to say that there is more reason to prefer A be instantiated rather than B be instantiated. This seems to be what we mean when we say one world is "better" than another.
If that's the correct meaning of "better", then premise (5) will be question-begging to the deontologist. We can translate the statement "For any action N, if we should prefer a world in which N is taken to one in which N isn’t taken, then action N should be taken" to the statement "For any action N, if the world in which N is taken is better than the world in which N isn't taken, then action N should be taken". But that's just an explicit negation of deontology.
I know that some writers argue that deontologists should maintain the view that we should want agents to respect rights, even in cases where violating rights would make the world better. These writers are presumably using a different definition of "better" than the one I mentioned. On this view of deontology, premise (1) would be question-begging since it's an explicit negation of the view.
I don't see the motivation for 1). Almost everyone has the intuition that deliberate acts are worse than natural events with the same outcome, eg murder is worse than being struck by lightning.
Well, I don't think most have the intuition that a murder is worse than two being struck by lightning and dying (if you could prevent either one murder or two lightning strike deaths, you should do the latter).
That's not what I said. I explicitly said *with the same outcome". Two deaths is not the same outcome as one death.
Oh oops, I forgot the argument I'd made. I think that when we really reflect on those cases, we wouldn't conclude that it's worse.
Anyone can say that.
I have arguments for it, which I'll write out at some point! But also, we can adopt the more modest principle that I described earlier.
Dominik beat me to it again. The deontologist is going to say that reasons are agent-relative. The use of the pronoun "we" in your argument smuggles in the assumption that everyone is going to have the same reasons.
I think I reject 2, in that the statement seems intuitively correct only because we use “bad” to mean different things when describing a moral agent vs general event/impersonal force
Bad can be used to apply to both semantically. Though aren't you a consequentialist?
Yeah, in a pedantic/totally formal/isolated sense, I'd say that neither are "bad" at all because death doesn't inherently change the amounts of suffering or happiness that exist. But that's not how I'd use the term in a normal conversation about whether it's "{bad} that the man next door was murdered" for example
If by 5) you mean "then action N should be taken... BY ME, if I am in that situation", then almost every deontologist would deny that 5) is correct. This again comes down to a clash of intuitions - most of your arguments seem to be based on the intuition that one always should do what is preferable in an agent-neutral sense, but many people simply don't have that intuition because they believe in agent-relative reasons, i.e. what matters is that it is ME who doesn't kill