Debunking Criticism of Consequentialism

[@darkengine5931]

If any woman asks me if a dress makes her look fat, I always answer with 100% honesty and say, "Absolutely not!" [After all, it's not the dress making her look fat; it's her body]. 😀 I'm also entirely consequentialist though in thought. The way I like to justify the differences in answers to the trolley dilemma and its variants is similar to how you did. Most specifically, I like to point things out in terms of public safety. It is largely inconsequential to future public safety whether or not someone pulls the lever in the original trolley dilemma, since it's highly improbable that we'll find repeated common occurrences of people lying down on tracks (and a simple way to avoid being run over by trolleys is to avoid doing that; the solution to protect public safety is to keep people off the tracks). It is very much a public safety crisis if we condoned pushing innocent people off of bridges or harvesting the organs of patients in hospitals against their will. This doesn't highlight a difference between deontological and consequentialist moral reasoning as I see it; if anything, I think it highlights the inability of deontologists to understand the depth to which we consequentialists evaluate probable consequences. From my blunt perspective, a person is either a consequentialist who thinks about the possible consequences of their actions or they're blind and unquestioning followers of rules. I don't trust deontological types, since they could easily start to blindly follow rules which are very counter-productive or even downright tyrannical if they don't make it a habit to consider the consequences of their actions and take responsibility for them. Also very much agreed with you that it's preferable to die prematurely as a decent person than to extend our lives through malevolent actions directed towards innocent people.