Is it absoluteness or some closely related concept that I am thinking of? Ordinarily, people seem to think the issue is as described in the post; if norms are absolute, I should not steal a dime from Elon Musk, even in the peculiar circumstance where I think stealing that dime might save the life of every human on Earth. But the real issue, it seems to me, is, after I steal Musk's dime, do I owe him a dime and maybe an apology? Or do I get to say, “I don't owe you a dime. I just saved the human species. You're welcome.”
The ordinary absoluteness (absoluteness 1.0?) is not an achievable ideal, and it’s not clear it is desirable, especially if we ignore, as people often do, people's tendency to make biased estimates of how other people will evaluate the consequences of various actions. This absoluteness 2.0 I have in mind seems like an improvement to me. Is it a kind of consequentialism, or some new flavor of deontology, or a third kind of thing? A hybrid?
Bernard Gert had a version of this idea, where he thought there were clear objective rules, which he specified, but people could make exceptions, so long as they did them publicly. I’m not sure exactly what that meant to him, whether he thought you should get someone to okay your exception before you took it, or just had to make sure all your rule breaking happened in front of lots of witnesses, so that you have to take responsibility for any subsequent complaints or disputes. I suppose that if you really save humanity from an extinction event by breaking some rules, someone might offer to pay for the damages out of gratitude.
"I cannot prove that particular moral beliefs are correct; I doubt that anyone can."
I think you forget the lesson of Isaiah Berlin; we can have ethical proofs just as easily as empirical proofs. They will, of course, not end up being impossible to deny, but neither will empirical proofs. Just as one can deny that it's wrong to torture infants for fun, one can fail to see a lion.
Here is, I think, a good example of an ethical proof. We have "proved" average utilitarianism is false. Of course, this proof relies on appearances, as does empirical proofs. Average utilitarianism implies that it's sometimes good to create unimaginably miserable people, as long as it increases the average (E.g. if everyone is as miserable as the most miserable person ever, it's good to create infinite people as miserable as the second most miserable person ever). It also implies that it can be better to create a small number of very miserable people rather than a much larger number of very happy people.
Conditional on morality being objective, which I'm only about 85% confident in, I'm roughly as confident that average utilitarianism is false as I am that the earth is round.
An effective means causes an end. In other words, one of the effects of a means is the hoped-for effect as the intended end. All other effects are its unwanted but inevitable side effects, ultimately the costs of an action. Imagine, there is only one possible means to achieve a specific end. Then it's just a question of wether the end or the side-effects "weights" more. Some weights of it are of "moral" nature. But where stem these moral weights from? I suspect, on the one hand, a protracted moral evolution arising from innumerable spontaneous interactions and, on the other hand, there will be certain common "apriori" parts in all human beings which gives structure to this moral evolution. But there is no universal morality at the beginning and also no pure universal manifestation later on.
Well, the deontologist isn't interested in ends. He isn't interested in the evolution of the "good" either. It has always been there. It just needs to be brought back to the surface by ethical insight. There is no bargaining. His morality and its observance out of felt eternal and universal duty is an aesthetic end in itself for him.
Michael Huemer writes about this in Knowledge, Reality, and Value in chapter 15 on deontology, first splitting into consequentialism and deontology, and then subdividing deontology into absolute deontology and moderate deontology, the latter of which seems similar to your point.
Is it absoluteness or some closely related concept that I am thinking of? Ordinarily, people seem to think the issue is as described in the post; if norms are absolute, I should not steal a dime from Elon Musk, even in the peculiar circumstance where I think stealing that dime might save the life of every human on Earth. But the real issue, it seems to me, is, after I steal Musk's dime, do I owe him a dime and maybe an apology? Or do I get to say, “I don't owe you a dime. I just saved the human species. You're welcome.”
The ordinary absoluteness (absoluteness 1.0?) is not an achievable ideal, and it’s not clear it is desirable, especially if we ignore, as people often do, people's tendency to make biased estimates of how other people will evaluate the consequences of various actions. This absoluteness 2.0 I have in mind seems like an improvement to me. Is it a kind of consequentialism, or some new flavor of deontology, or a third kind of thing? A hybrid?
Bernard Gert had a version of this idea, where he thought there were clear objective rules, which he specified, but people could make exceptions, so long as they did them publicly. I’m not sure exactly what that meant to him, whether he thought you should get someone to okay your exception before you took it, or just had to make sure all your rule breaking happened in front of lots of witnesses, so that you have to take responsibility for any subsequent complaints or disputes. I suppose that if you really save humanity from an extinction event by breaking some rules, someone might offer to pay for the damages out of gratitude.
"I cannot prove that particular moral beliefs are correct; I doubt that anyone can."
I think you forget the lesson of Isaiah Berlin; we can have ethical proofs just as easily as empirical proofs. They will, of course, not end up being impossible to deny, but neither will empirical proofs. Just as one can deny that it's wrong to torture infants for fun, one can fail to see a lion.
Here is, I think, a good example of an ethical proof. We have "proved" average utilitarianism is false. Of course, this proof relies on appearances, as does empirical proofs. Average utilitarianism implies that it's sometimes good to create unimaginably miserable people, as long as it increases the average (E.g. if everyone is as miserable as the most miserable person ever, it's good to create infinite people as miserable as the second most miserable person ever). It also implies that it can be better to create a small number of very miserable people rather than a much larger number of very happy people.
Conditional on morality being objective, which I'm only about 85% confident in, I'm roughly as confident that average utilitarianism is false as I am that the earth is round.
An effective means causes an end. In other words, one of the effects of a means is the hoped-for effect as the intended end. All other effects are its unwanted but inevitable side effects, ultimately the costs of an action. Imagine, there is only one possible means to achieve a specific end. Then it's just a question of wether the end or the side-effects "weights" more. Some weights of it are of "moral" nature. But where stem these moral weights from? I suspect, on the one hand, a protracted moral evolution arising from innumerable spontaneous interactions and, on the other hand, there will be certain common "apriori" parts in all human beings which gives structure to this moral evolution. But there is no universal morality at the beginning and also no pure universal manifestation later on.
Well, the deontologist isn't interested in ends. He isn't interested in the evolution of the "good" either. It has always been there. It just needs to be brought back to the surface by ethical insight. There is no bargaining. His morality and its observance out of felt eternal and universal duty is an aesthetic end in itself for him.
Michael Huemer writes about this in Knowledge, Reality, and Value in chapter 15 on deontology, first splitting into consequentialism and deontology, and then subdividing deontology into absolute deontology and moderate deontology, the latter of which seems similar to your point.