Tomorrow_Farewell [any, they/them]

Europe’s haunted

- Karl Marx

But that isn’t an equation

Diving up tasks by the skills of the people involved is a pretty classical example of division if labor

Meritocracy is not concerned with division of tasks by skills. It is concerned with rewarding people of merit, and providing them with power.

I am not talking about these things when I say “meritocracy”

Yeah, this is rather common, which is why I pointed out this discrepancy between how meritocracy is understood popularly and how it is understood academically.

I am sure you have encountered liberals who struggle to reconcile capitalism’s supposed meritocratic nature with the existence of inhereticance

A part of my interest in commenting here is not having prepared an answer quickly enough to one such person whom I did try to turn socialist. After one of our conversations, they said that they looked into and like ‘some right-wing ideas’, and, as an example they provided meritocracy. I already had my issues with meritocracy, but couldn’t provide a comprehensive critique at that moment, so I did not pursue that topic. This is kind of an outlet for my thoughts on that matter.

It’s more complicated with feudal lords. They portrayed themselves as God’s chosen, rulers by moral virtue rather than by skill

I’m confident that they also claimed to be more skilled than the non-aristocratic members of society, and that inheritance allowed them to produce most qualified people in the society.

Also, being a ‘god’s chosen’ is a merit under the relevant systems.

I don’t see how class systems based on rigid inheritance can even pretend to be meritocratic

You have people who believe that such traits are inheritable as well, and that educating their spawn from early age for rather specific tasks (such as ruling a fief) creates the most skilful members of society.

You would need at least some class mobility to make the illusion work

There was, indeed, some class mobility.
For example, unless I’m missing something and bourgeoisie was already dominant in the Russian Empire of the 18th century, there is Mikhail Lomonosov, one of the most important scientists of the time, who came from a peasant family and managed to become a noble by becoming a professor. The Russian Imperial table of ranks provided a systemic way of achieving inheritable noble status (starting with different ranks for military and civilian ranks).

Well, the latter is just called act utilitarianism

Given that, under that system, you have a duty to do something, it is deontological.

Basically, you create a deontological ruleset which tries to predict in advance what maximises utility

It’s not really predicting anything, not necessarily. Who or what evaluates the possible consequences of an action can be determined in a lot of ways that are more granular than just being on a per-rule basis.

It only approximates utilitarianism as I see it because once a deontological ruleset is laid out, you can’t change it

The same applies to all the other codes of ethics, considering that they are just systems of logic.

If you then encounter an action which will have negative conquerors, but you should do according to your ruleset, you have to do it, or else you are just doing utilitarianism and calling it deontology

If the predictions regarding the consequences of a particular actions are reevaluated and it is no longer a good action under a given utilitarian code of ethics, it also becomes a non-good action under the equivalent deontological code of ethics/you no longer have a duty to perform it.

I think, you have a very narrow and naive view of deontology, which seems to often be instilled in students when Kantian deontology is taught to them using very primitive examples.

But also, I very much do posit that, as prescriptive systems, deontological ones, consequentialist ones, and deontological-consequentialist mixed ones can’t really be distinguished in any significant manner. As such (provided that we are working with a utilitarian system that does not involve any elements of virtue-based codes of ethics), I can just say ‘utilitarianism is just deontology in a trench coat’.

You can improve the approximation arbitrarily by making a richer and richer ruleset

I have provided a method for finding an equivalent deontological code of ethics that differs from the original one in terms of the cardinality of the set of rules by an addition of just one axiom.

I don’t think you are using the word deontological correctly here. A deontological theory is one where you have a moral obligation based on the type of action you have performed rather than its concequencues

The thing is, we can always make an axiom of a consequentialist code of ethics (just in case, I use expressions ‘system of morality’, ‘morality system’, ‘code of ethics’ interchangeably) into an axiom of an equivalent deontological code of ethics by just saying that, (I am going to use square brackets ‘[’, ‘]’ to denote parts of the ‘instead’ clause for better clarity here) instead of [an action being good because it has such-and-such consequences], [you have a duty to perform actions that are evaluated to have such-and-such consequences]. I suppose, that does mean that it is possible for one action that is not evaluated to have particular consequences to lead to those consequences, and for an action that was evaluated a priori to lead to particular consequences to not actually lead to those consequences, and this is a refutation of my original claim, as these systems can end up with different a posteriori descriptions.

However, I do posit that, in a sense, there is still no significant difference in how deontological and consequentialist systems of morality work prescriptively, as you can’t actually know the future with absolute certainty, and every principled subscriber to a consequentialist code of ethics is going to act in accordance to what I previously called an ‘equivalent deontological code of ethics’ - they will try to evaluate an action’s consequences a priori, and act in accordance with said predictions.

However, meaningfully, for a human with limited knowledge, utilitarianism and deontology aren’t going to be isomorphic unless you really strecht the meanings of those 2 systems. A human will never be able to come up with a deontological ruleset rich enough to maximise utility in every possible situation they will encounter

I mean, you won’t be finding many people who actually adopt explicit codes of ethics in general, whether deontological, consequentialist, virtue-ist, or a mix of any of those, especially one that they would actually follow.
Also, I’m not sure why you think we can’t just find a deontological code of ethics from a given utilitarian one. You basically just add ‘you have a duty to do actions that satisfy such-and-such criteria for good actions in this given utilitarian code of ethics’.

I think it would be more accurate to say that utilitarianism in general can simulate deontology by assigning utilities to the type of action a person performs

I mean, we can also find a deontological code of ethics equivalent to a given utilitarian one using the method that I have outlined previously. It can even be done with just one additional axiom.

For the lack of a better term, I would consider utilitarianism a “Turing complete” moral theory, while deontology would be closer to combinatorial logic in moral terms

There are better analogies that would involve just using set theory, if I understand correctly what you are trying to say - that every deontological code of ethics has an equivalent utilitarian code of ethics, and not vice versa. I disagree, as I have provided a method for finding a deontological code of ethics that is equivalent to a given utilitarian one.

Also, neither utilitarian, nor deontological codes of ethics intersect well with virtue-based codes of ethics, as those tell us whether people are good or bad, and not whether actions are good or bad.

Well, the “academic” version of meritocracy would be more accurately described as the division of labor

Not sure how you can argue that. It’s not about a division of labour at all. The difference between the popular understanding and the academic one is in what can be considered a merit. The academic understanding is broader.

while the popular notion of meritocracy is how the bourgeoise justify their rule

It’s also how feodals did so, and basically every political system tries to be meritocratic in the sense of having qualified people in more powerful and/or more rewarding positions, at least for some positions.

I’m sure you have heard of the argument defending the bourgeoise as deserving power because they “work hard, are creative and skilled”. In fact, that is the most common argument in their favour I have encountered. You also hear similar justifications for colonialism and slavery

I am very well-aware of these arguments. I have even provided some of my thoughts regarding why those arguments are only appealing if one doesn’t think about them too much. This sort of justification, however, is not unique to the bourgeoisie’s usage of them, and also predates their dominance in the first place.

Some deontological systems can get really strict (ex - Kantian)

Sure. However, that’s not relevant, as the claim is that a consequentialist (or mixed, for that matter) code of ethics is isomorphic to some deontological one, and not the other way around.

and any 2 different utilitarians would probably have significant disagreements on how to actually calculate utility

Not sure why you are bringing that up, considering that that was neither in question, nor is it relevant to whether or not a consequentialist code of ethics can just be rewritten as a deontological one.

Maybe it won’t look too different in ethics, but in government policy the moral systems would produce very different outcomes

Not sure what you mean by this. Care to provide an example where two codes - one deontological and one utilitarian non-deontological that label the same actions as ‘good’ and the same actions as ‘bad’ would produce a different result depending on which a government (or any organisation, for that matter) would subscribe to?

For example, a scenario I was told about when learning about this stuff was that of a city government commissioning a factory in a poor neighbourhood. The factory will bring them jobs, but will negatively impact their health. How the situation should be approached is very different for the moral systems

It differs between different systems of morality, yes, but that doesn’t actually refute my claim that every consequentialist or mixed consequentialist-deontological system of morality is isomorphic to some deontological one.

Meritocracy isn’t really a ‘bourgeois’ ideology in the sense that it originated from favouring the bourgeoisie in some sense. However, meritocracy is still garbage, both in the sense that it is actually understood academically (i.e. broadly, where the relevant merits can be anything from one being skilled and/or knowledgeable to one being rich to one being an inheritor of a fief), and in the sense that it is understood more popularly (i.e. the skilled and knowledgeable people should be rewarded based on this particular merit). I’d argue that people should be provided for based on their capabilities and input (i.e. an old person shouldn’t be required to work 16 hours a day, 6 days a week to be able to satisfy their basic needs, while a person who does more should probably also be given more). I see no sense in having some people live in luxury (at the expense of everybody else) simply based on them proving that they have some merit in the past.

Utilitarianism and consequentialism in general, really. If one were to develop a utilitarian code of ethics, it would just be the same as a deontological code of ethics with the relevant rules. There isn’t much actual difference between ‘you have a duty to do what maximises happiness’, and ‘an action the consequences of which include maximisation of happiness is good’, and ‘a rule of ethics, satisfaction of which leads to maximisation of happiness is good, and so are the relevant actions’, etc.

‘The ends justify the means’ is actually a(n undeservedly-maligned) good take. The ends are a primary thing that determines what means are appropriate, and I’m not sure how anybody can argue against this.

Utilitarianism is just garbage that is no more insightful than vibes-based examination of actions.

Ethics in general is a field that I’d argue can’t produce a serious application in general in principle. At most, it seems to just be fun to think about. No state or other large organisation is going to just make a genuine code of ethics that puts people first and then derive the other rules from there in a way that can be enforced, and in the case of individual people consciously adopting any specific codes of ethics is just going to simply be a reflection of what they already like and dislike subconsciously.

That said, I’d argue that it’s impossible to have a utilitarian code of ethics that is distinguishable from a deontological one, contrary to the popular perception, and every purely utilitarian code of ethics is going to be garbage that is no more insightful than just judging things ad hoc based on emotions. I.e. it’s just going to be a vibe-based examination of morality of a thing.