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.
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
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.
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
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