Deontology Beats Consequentialism

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Deontology Beats Consequentialism

If some men harbour sadistic or paedophilic fantasies, why not let them act those obsessions out on humanoid machines: silicone skin, responsive AI with the full repertoire of: vain resistance, pleading, and then the cries? After all, no one is actually harmed: no bruises, no trauma, no need for police reports.

The philosophy of down-the-line consequentialism: count the casualties; if the body count is zero where's the problem?

We recoil from this stance. It assumes that only the object matters - whether a creature gratuitously suffers. It ignores the subject - the agent who chooses cruelty. To simulate an atrocity, even against a doll, is to will a certain concept of personhood:  domination as pleasure.

This is not merely the manipulation of plastic.

My take: some acts are intrinsically degrading because of what they express. We do not permit certain behaviours merely because the immediate victim is silicone and circuitry. The wrong lies in the stance adopted toward what is represented as a person.

The moral question is not only what happens, but what one chooses to will.

From an evolutionary perspective, we are hyper-social primates whose fragile, culturally-constructed norms of restraint ground cooperation. So systematically rehearsing cruelty - even in simulation - selects for dispositions that erode the very trust on which civilisation itself depends.

And so deontology.

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Draft Notes for My Obituary

From ChatGPT

We went to a funeral last Thursday. Iris Klim, aged 95, a parishioner. Her son gave a eulogy: pleasant, informative, affectionate, moving. A model of its type.

Nigel said he would prefer something different when his time comes …

Skate rapidly over my life, he said: youthful communist - a militant of the Fourth International; software developer turned researcher in Artificial Intelligence; successful freelance designer of telecoms networks.

Nigel's wife and children confirm his weird and bizarre opinions.

He claimed that the passage of time is a psychological illusion, that all times exist as if in amber. He claimed Albert Einstein as an authority on this. He said that, in any case, both space and time are not fundamental: the universe we live in is an emergent artefact of quantum entanglement - true reality is set in abstract Hilbert space.

Honestly!

Nigel had yellow belts in Judo and Karate, and years of T'ai Chi. He practised these arts to the end but never fought anyone for real (after an inconclusive  scrap when he was nine  - he was provoked!).

He died a Catholic, although for most of his life he was irreligious. He said that the apocryphal Martian anthropologist (a methodological nihilist) might say that human beings were simply biological machines. But ‘it is not like anything to be’ any of the machines we know about. The materialist faith that consciousness is reducible to neural net operations is no more than that; in any case explanations do not account for lived experience: that is the mystery and reality which theology encompasses better than anything else. Anyway, he was drawn more to Catholic deontology than any specific ontology: how we live is important.

Nigel puzzled over the continuity of personal identity. How do we know that we, now, are the same person who will wake up tomorrow morning? Actually, he said, we can’t know. Many people are quite like us, whoever we are. Personal memory is always mentioned, he said, but who’d die in a ditch for that when it comes to the foundational nature of our very selves?

So at this space-time moment, in this branch of the universal wave-function, you should say: Nigel has passed on. He wanted you to know that in the great enduring sea of consciousness and human experience, it’s not such a big deal. Except to those who shared our lives together, for whom it is everything.

Quo modo Deus exstat?

Michelangelo -The Creation  of Adam (Wikipedia)

Major is the family dog, recently taken to sheep-worrying/killing. The father will have to put it down. Owen, the godless younger brother, petitions his religious-curious older sister.

“'If you prayed for Major not to get shot would he not get shot?' said Owen in a demanding voice.

The thought of praying had never crossed my mind.

'You prayed you wouldn't have to thread the sewing machine any more and you didn't.'

I saw with dismay the unavoidable collision coming, of religion and life.

He got up and stood in front of me and said tensely, 'Pray. How do you do it? Start now!'

'You can't pray,' I said, 'about a thing like that.'

'Why not?'

Why not? Because, I could have said to him, we do not pray for things to happen or not happen, but for the strength and grace to bear what does. A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat. But I did not think of it. I simply thought, and knew, that praying was not going to stop my father going out and getting his gun and calling, 'Major! Here, Major -' Praying would not alter that.”

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‘Age of Faith’, in ‘Lives of Girls and Women’, Alice Munro (p. 145).

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Aged ten, I ask my father if he believes in God. “No I don't,” he says, “There is no way heaven could be big enough for all the people it would need to contain.”

A parish meeting in Andover, a Q&A. Hesitantly, a parishioner asks the priest, “Father, where is heaven?” The priest, equally hesitant, talks about quantum theory and the strange spaces within the atom. I cringe with embarrassment.

Rod Liddle writes in his Sunday Times column about asking a CofE bishop whether he believes in God. “Blessed if I know, Rod,” comes the reply, confirming Liddle’s sardonic take on England's institutional religion.

A liberal states their deepest attachment and loyalty: to democracy and the rule of law. But in what sense do those things actually exist? I ask. They don't understand the question.

Buddhists believe that the self is an illusion.

Freighted, that term ‘illusion’.

It appears that Buddhists believe the self is a process, an epiphenomenon of more basic physical and mental state transitions. Is that what ‘illusion' means?

It's natural to think naively that existence is a simple, obvious notion. Stones exist, your body exists. If something exists, you can poke or paint it. But most ‘things’ we deal with in life are not like this: contracts, democracy, numbers, freedom, oppression, patriotism, any -ism. Welcome to the social construction of reality and the ubiquity of reification.

Catholicism is more a framework than a set of definite precepts. It's not reducible to biblical literalism. Orthodoxy will tell you that the true nature of God is mysterious. Most Catholics opt for some manner of ontological realism but I'm more deontological…

A Better World, Where Are You?

 

"I was brought up as a member of the Church of England and simply follow the customs of my tribe. The church is part of my culture; I like the rituals and the music. If I had grown up in Iraq, I would go to a mosque… It seems to me that people who attack religion don’t really understand it. Science and religion can coexist peacefully — although I don’t think they have much to say to each other. What I would like best would be for scientists not even to use the word “God.” … Fundamental physics shows how hard it is for us to grasp even the simplest things in the world. That makes you quite skeptical whenever someone declares he has the key to some deeper reality… I know that we don’t yet even understand the hydrogen atom — so how could I believe in dogmas? I’m a practicing Christian, but not a believing one."

My position is not quite the same as Martin Rees's.

To be esoteric for a moment, I am a deontic Catholic: not one who buys into the Confessional ontology (i.e. a literal, uncritical, ahistorical reading of the sacred texts). Though paradoxically, it's only when the vast majority of adherents and clergy cleave to a Confessional ontology that the institution persists through the endless millennia. 

Nevertheless historical, materialist deontology is the right paradigm (Roger Scruton is my go-to guy here on deontology).

Sally Rooney hints that with the death of the Marxist-Leninist, communist ideal, Catholicism is one of the few remaining subversive forces insofar as - at its best - it counterposes and organises social solidarity based on high ethical principles against an alienated rootlessness taken to absurdity by a debilitating, progressive wokeness - from which elevated standpoint Catholicism is popularly ridiculed, or treated as absurd or incomprehensible.

(There are other countercultures which also deserve support: those arts which uplift, unify and empower ordinary people and exemplify unfashionable virtues: duty, honour, courage, competence, resilience.)

Sally Rooney's characters in "Beautiful World, Where Are You?" reflect on their ineffectual exposition of a fashionable, but sterile and impotent Marxism. They unwillingly experience the attraction of the granite, collective worldview of the eternal and universal Catholic Church: so often hijacked institutionally by bad people… so often bureaucratically underpinning reaction... but as John Dominic Crossan has so eloquently outlined, so revolutionary and omnipresent in its core doctrine.