Sean Carroll

David Maxwell says moral philosophy debates always surprised me by seeming to present a meta ethical dichotomy between consequentialism and deontology.

My intuition is that any sensible framework should be a hybrid.

Certain things like rape have no conceivable place, whereas lying surely must depend on balancing the consequences.

In my mind, some ethics are absolute while others are just good policy.

Why aren't hybrid approaches discussed more?

I maybe should have grouped this with the previous question about morality, but I think that there are hybrid approaches.

But I also think from talking to people like Peter Singer that there's more overlap with the practice of these moral philosophies than you might think, right?

Like you might say about if you want to make a cartoon version of utilitarianism, you say, well, all right, we're trying to increase the overall utility of the world, the overall happiness or whatever.

Therefore, an action I take should increase everyone's happiness as much as it can.

So I should give away all my money up until the point where I'm as happy as the least happy person or something like that.

But as Singer points out, like if everyone tried to do that, everyone would be unhappy.

You have not actually increased the happiness of the world.

So the way that you would actually end up acting, I think, in some versions of utilitarianism is not that different from how you would act if you thought deontology was a better approach.

You can absolutely fit the idea that rape has no conceivable place into utilitarian framework with

by saying that rape causes a huge amount of negative utility.

That's it.

So I do think that these approaches are more common in practice than they might be in principle.

I think that's an interesting kind of thing to think about.

I don't know if the principles are blended together very much, but I do think that that is a sensible thing to try to do.

But it's not like, um,