My last attack ad on virtue ethics sent me spiraling down a rabbit hole, causing me to read after virtue and write a long book review. This time, I will resist the temptation. I will state, as succinctly as possible my case against deontology, while including scary images. Here it is.
1 Deontology prioritizes one’s desire not to sully themself over making the world a better place in a way that’s quite narcissistic and would be recognized as such if not wrapped in the façade of moralistic language.
2 There are no good arguments for it.
3 It has ridiculous conclusions if extrapolated.
4 It holds that third parties should hope that you act wrongly sometimes.
5 It holds that giving more options to perfectly benevolent omniscient beings can make the world worse.
6 It can’t provide a coherent account of rights, unlike utilitarianism.
7 It does terribly in terms of theoretical virtues.
8 It does poorly historically.
9 It is not able to make accurate predictions about what things will turn out to be intuitive upon reflection.
10 Attempts to derive it from first principles fail and either have insane results or give up on the principled derivation almost entirely.
11 It’s evolutionarily debunkable.
12
(Okay maybe that wasn’t so much an argument but this is an attack ad after all).
13 It privileges those who are well off, falling prey to status quo bias.
14 It only seems to reconcile unreflective intuitions
15 It has lots of paradoxes and contradictions .
16 It only seems to reconcile the intuitions based on the connotation of words, not based on careful reflection about cases,
17 The doing allowing distinction seems incoherent.
Many of these were inspired by Yetter Chappel