Various People on Deontology
My parody of Tucker Carlson, Trump, and Chomsky talking about deontology
Tucker Carlson
There is this view that’s called deontology. It’s a view defended by, you know, a lot of these high-minded academics. It’s of course incoherent—what does it mean? No one knows—you can’t ask that question. And if you do ask that question, you’re a bigot, you’re the bad guy. You can’t point out that no one knows what it is, and if you do point that out, they’ll shut you down. The elites want you to be docile, to not point out that the emperor has no clothes.
So why are so many people, and particularly young men becoming deontologists? Is it because their lives lack meaning? Because the elites in power have sucked the meaning out of their lives, reduced them to meaningless husks of what young men used to be—what they could be?
They say that there are side constraints. But constraints on the side of what? What are these so-called side constraints on the side of? No one can tell us. And that’s the point. It’s not supposed to make sense. They make sure it intentionally doesn’t make sense, to prove their power, to prove that if you challenge it, you’ll get crushed by the powers that be. Their answer to that question is “shut up, bigot.” And that’s always their answer.
Chomsky
There is, of course, a view called deontology. It says, among other things, that people have rights, duties, special obligations, and so on and so forth. The view is, of course, total nonsense—and everyone knows it. If you actually read the record of the deontologists—compiled by serious scholars like Clarke, Gibbons, and others—rather than the official deontological propaganda, the deontologists have been carrying out a savage war against the virtue ethicists, consequentialists, and so on and so forth. They’ve been carrying out really horrifying killings—torture, mutilation, and so on. Very brutal. You won’t read about it in the mainstream press.
Of course, the deontologists claim they’ve got a great view. Well that’s no shock, every empire or intellectual edifice claims that they’re on the right side. But if you read the relevant archives, in the U.S., Israel, and other places—France, for example—you’ll find that deontology is totally bankrupt, it’s totally wrong. You read, for example, Richard Chappell, who has proved the view is paradoxical and contradictory, or Peter Singer who has proved it rests on unreliable intuitions.
Of course, such findings were suppressed by the American, British, French, and Israeli Press, only reported in the journals. Of course, no one reads the journals, so it’s no surprise that, given deontology’s tendency to advance the interests of power and aid official propaganda, no one’s ever heard of the totally conclusive evidence against it.
Let’s just take a look at the facts. You have a moral theory built on intuitions. But we have an abundance of evidence—from Huemer, Norcross, and so on and so forth—that those intuitions are exactly the kinds of intuitions we shouldn’t trust. So why in the world would we trust them? Well, they can’t answer that question, and such questions are, of course, suppressed.
Trump
You have (pronounced slowly) dee-on-taw-lo-jee, right, deontology. They say “oh, this is such a great thing. Oh, Mr. Trump, deontology is tremendous, right?”
Deontology is the worst ethical theory in the history of our country and I have to say, frankly, the world. A lot of people don’t want me to say it. They say “oh this is such a terrible thing, sir, you can’t say that.” We’re gonna say it, and we said it frankly, very tough and now—I have to say—we’re getting a lot of credit for it from people who say “oh thank you sir, what you did and said with the deontology is really tremendous.”
Frankly, virtue ethics and consequentialism are much more popular than deontology. You have the phil papers survey, where they sent out mail in ballots—it was rigged, folks, it was rigged. In a lot of key states—Virginia, Pennsylvania, and many others—they rigged it in favor of deontology. Deontology got less votes than any other moral theory in the history of our country.
You have side-constraints, right, side constraints. My administration is going to ignore the side constraints like never before. They’re not real, and frankly, a lot of people know it. They know that there are no side constraints or special obligations or, frankly, a lot of other things.
I think we hit the deontologists very hard, but we hit them very fairly. We said “you can’t keep ripping off our country and our other moral theories like you’re doing now.” And they got mad. When deontologists send their people, they’re not sending their best, and I have to say it.
We’re loosing beelions and beelions of dollars to the deontologists, to the (slowly) side constraints. We’re getting ripped off, and when we win—by a lot—we’re gonna stop getting ripped off and do, frankly, a lot of winning.
I greatly enjoyed this.
What would Ibram X. Kendi say?