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Dominik's avatar

Yetter-Chappel is a very smart person, likely much smarter than myself, but this seems like such a strange argument to me. P2) is basically just the assertion "Consequentialism is true" put into different words, noone who isn't already predisposed to accept consequentialism should ever accept it.

"If we assume that deontological reasoning is false, then deontology has paradoxical results" isn't a paradox of deontology, but just a question-begging argument.

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

No -- it's that we should want people to act rightly -- but that's perfectly obvious.

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Dominik's avatar

Almost all deontologists - from Kant to Ross - believe that what matters is that YOU act rightly. That's the very essence of agent-relative deontology, so to just assume that it is false is just a weak argument (remember that deontologists like Kant don't just assert this but have given very sophisticated arguments for it!).

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Bentham's Bulldog's avatar

But doesn't it seem at least prima facie plausible that we should want people to do the right thing. Chappell also gives arguments for it in the paper.

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