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The eternal battle of deontology vs utilitarianism.

For example, just a few months the Polish government made emergency contraception pill prescription-only. This government is strongly against abortion of any kind, yet it passed a bill that will surely increase (illegal) abortion rates. Yet, it does not THINK about consequences of action, just if it supports "right" or "wrong" causes (for them any non-Catholic sex life is "wrong").



Quite a few people who oppose abortion also believe that emergency contraception commonly operates by killing fertilized eggs (by preventing implantation), which would qualify as abortion under their definitions. If that is your belief, and you believe that abortion is morally equivalent to murder, then banning emergency contraception would be a self-consistent thing to do. (Now, the studies I've seen suggest that emergency contraception does not often if ever work that way since it appears to be entirely ineffective when taken after ovulation has occurred, but that's a separate question.)


> This government is strongly against abortion of any kind, yet it passed a bill that will surely increase (illegal) abortion rates.

This isn't a very good argument. If you care about "abortion of any kind", then increasing the illegal abortion rate while decreasing the overall abortion rate is a perfectly sensible thing to do.


Unlike most EU countries, in Poland there is no legal abortion (except for rape and women's life in danger).

I added "(illegal)" as an indication that all of such abortions are illegal in Poland.


> The eternal battle of deontology vs utilitarianism.

When you are violently coercing people into some kind of behavior, one of those is objectively superior to the other.


So you're 100% on the side of deontology?


Whose deontology?


Yours. The statement "When you are violently coercing people into some kind of behavior, one of those is objectively superior to the other" is purely deontological, saying that violently coercing people is bad.


I'm not coming from "this is bad" (even more because lots of times I don't think it is). Just from "this is a social imposition".

Utility has a shared meaning among a population, ontology is meaningless over a group.


Where are you getting "objectively superior" from without reference to good/bad?


One exists, the other is meaningless.


Try again. In what sense are you using the word "superior"? To an English speaker, as you've used it, it means "better".


If you want to call deontological the argument that a tool that exists is better to solve a problem than one that doesn't, then, well, we are at a new level of meta that I really wasn't speaking at earlier.

Yet, social deontology is meaningless¹, and the people using it on political arguments are just using it as a decoy for doing something that they pretty much derive utility from (on my case from being able to eventually settle anything down, on the original comment, from commanding people around and in some cases, by watching them suffer).

1 - There exists a fuzzy kind of "partial" deontology that people often share in practice. Yet, the moment one starts coercing people, it's a symptom that it just isn't there.




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