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That's deontological, i.e. certain events have inherent value, instead of being judged by their effects. Deontological morality means the effects chain is terminated. Otherwise there is no termination and no value ascribed to an action.


[I'm not too familiar with the (English) vocabulary used in these discussions, so I'll try to expand my previous comment a little and lay off the jargon. If you still disagree, can you point out where?]

> If you agree moral relativism is bad, you agree consequentialism is bad.

I disagreed with this statement.

My examples were meant to say: it's possible to have "god-given morals" (and thus no "moral relativism") while still judging acts by their consequences ("consequentialism").

In such a universe, wearing a sexy dress into a bad neighborhood may be morally fine (act ok), but if this causes you to get raped (pre-marital sex bad) you're still going straight to Hell (so act ok, results bad -> bad). Conversely, if I'd kill my neighbour for no good reason (act bad), and my neighbour happened to be 1920's Hitler (results good), I will be rewarded richly (so act bad, results good -> good).

Some disclaimers: this may be based on a misunderstanding of the words you used; I don't think the universe I sketched is the universe in which we live; and of course rape is not the victim's fault, and not wearing sexy dresses may not be enough to prevent it from happening (for the sake of discussion, though, in this particular instance it wouldn't have happened if the victim had worn a more conservative garment instead.)


In my opinion this hypothetical God that judges actions based on their consequences simply allows you to derive a consequentialist position in a deontological framework.

In consequentialism, you adopt some set of moral axioms, and say "this is how I'm going to define what worlds are good and bad, and I'm going to judge actions according to the worlds they are likely to create". This deontological version is instead saying, "I'm going to imagine there's a god, who reasons morally as follows...", and then saying the god reasons consequentially.

I think this derivation path does get you away from the "moral relativism" that's at the bedrock of a consequentialist position --- you've got to adopt some axioms. But it only does this by imagineering this "god" that behaves in an arbitrary way. All this is doing is pretending that the axiom you desire is a property of the universe you inhabit, rather than a property of you.




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