Something that I think is really important is a coherent moral framework—intuition is not enough. Mainly this is for the reason of not relying too heavily on black box, nonverifiable methods, for actions that definitely do have an impact on the outside world. My main reason for being against this is the compounding factor + nonfalsifiability of intuition. You can verify almost anything via intuition, and thinking your intuition is right promotes more actions. This snowballs to justify almost any action.

Making checks against things such as implicit biases and immoral things that might currently be societally normal (think how norms have evolved over the past ~150 years).

my thoughts on consequentialism!

So… consequentialism is deceivingly simple. Surely focusing on the impacts of your actions is a good way to live life—maximize happiness/utility/or some other metric that people can agree upon as “objectively good”. This seems obviously right, and you might even keep going on your day to day life thinking you’ve solved morality.

My key issue here is tractability. Can you functionally determine the impacts of your actions? What do you mean when you say “impacts”? The impacts that immediately follow your action? Maybe the impacts a week out? A year out? There has to be two scenarios. 1) You calculate the total consequences X moments after your action. This X amount is always arbitrary and can change the moral value of your action significantly.

Take the trolly problem. What if I say 5 minutes later by flipping the switch you kill 100+ people? What if 10 minutes later it saves 300?

In our day to day life, its extremely easy for us to use our intuition to make a moral guess, choose a time period that justifies this intuition, and move on feeling unburdened by the need to think about our actions (leading us back to functional intuitionism).

Especially astute consequentialists might make the claim that 2) You calculate total consequences as an integral to the heat death of the universe. This…. seems intractable. With so many variables and so many confounding factors, actually calculating this value is not only extremely hard, but straight up almost impossible in practice. There’s also no possible way that people are able to do this unconsciously everyday with every action they take ⇒ leading us back to intuitionism!

Another qualm I have with consequentialism is the lack of free will in the framework. Since gradients are used (ie. all actions are better/worse than another), there is only one action that maximizes utility in any given scenario. Any other action would be immoral. This seems initially weird, because not only am I unlikely to pick that action (ie. I’m always immoral) but I want to have free will with what I choose.

what now??

Okay now that consequentialism seemingly defaults onto intuitionism, can we come up with a moral framework that 1) doesn’t use consequences and 2) is simple enough to calculate easily unconsciously?

consent!

Consent! I think some version of the non-agression principle seems like a good moral framework! Specifically one should not violate the bodily autonomy of others, which can be extended via contracts to ownership etc.

There are only morally impermissible and permissible actions here.

Lets run through a couple scenarios just to get set up:

1. Trolley problem: Don’t pull the lever—the act of any death is wrong and therefore a violation of consent.
2. A murderer asks you where your family is—you are free to either lie or not lie in this scenario, there is no pre-existing contract of “telling the truth” to everyone.
3. Super trolley problem, kill one person to save the world—heres the most interesting thought experiment imo. Since there are no gradients, you would choose to not kill that one person no matter what. This is explicitly different from “consent maximization” which would lead yourself to choose the world over the person everytime.
4. Animals! Not included in the consent framework, more of an aesthetic problem.

So… whats so great about this framework? In my opinion it matches my intuitions a lot more, is much faster to compute (permissible/impermissible), and gives room for free will! I can choose to have my own subsystem, maybe intuition or something that guides me towards my own goals, while having good guarantees that I’m not actively disregarding everything else.

The wiggle room for free will + tractability is extremely important for me because I do have goals in life and don’t want to purely rely on intuition. I am firmly against intuition as a moral framework for all the basic reasons stated above, and find anything too complex just devolves to people using intuition in their day-to-day lives.

I’ve fleshed out a lot of this framework in my conversations with other people, and I’ll try to update this post as my views change on it!