I have a lot of sympathy with this. It’s also an argument that has been made by many prominent Western Marxists and seems quite close to G. A. Cohen’s view. Note though that the USSR did not officially reject human rights and other citizen rights (see the Soviet Constitution or the UNDHR, to which the USSR was a party). In Robert Conquest’s words there was ‘a set of phantom institutions and arrangements which put a human face on the hideous realities: a model constitution adopted in a worst period of terror and guaranteeing human rights, elections in which there was only one candidate, and in which 99 percent voted; a parliament at which no hand was ever raised in opposition or abstention’ (quoted in wikipedia).

Seems to me that, any way you define it, deontology is still just a variety of consequentialism. But then, what isn’t?

You rely a bit much on the ‘all’ there, and in the ‘all’ spanning across more than 100 years. It is possible that after seeing 70 years of brutality in a row, they decided to back down from communism.

Again, we are talking about a range of behaviors. The point is that the range appears to skewed far to the ‘more brutal’ side of things for communist countries, such that it only barely overlaps with where the Western-style countries fall on the scale.

Your second paragraph exposes why the consequentialist/non-consequentialist frame that Chris put on the piece was a poor choice (and one not actually used by Halliday). The problem isn’t that Communist countries were hyper-consequentialist while Western ones were consequentialist-free paragons of pure moral reasoning. Halliday’s contention is that Western countries embraced certain moral/citizen rights ideas as something important to be weighed in the consequentialist calculation while Communism actively rejected many of those same categories. Doing so seems to not have benefited citizens very much.

Some other examples of consequentialist reasoning to consider. Debates (unbiquitous in the US media) about whether torturing a suspected terrorist is morally justified in a ‘ticking bomb’ scenario. Debates in US and UK about abridging civil liberties for the sake of the ‘war on terrorism’. The pre-war discussion of the invasion of Iraq, including iirc the bulk of discussion on this blog, which focussed almost exclusively on attempts to predict the consequences of the invasion (and subsequent attempts to evaluate who ‘got it right’)…

I can’t figure out what you could possibly mean by “needs” that would make this true, or even arguably true. Could you explain in more detail how you define and recognize a need?

Also, regarding your claim that “If we all have the same needs, then we will all be made “better off” [in fact] if/when everybody acts in the same [moral] way.”, how do you judge movement along the Pareto frontier, in which some people’s needs are satisfied better, while others’ are satisfied worse?

Two people both needing food when there is only enough to feed one is one of the simplest such examples. A’s opinion of which person should eat is very likely to be different from B’s, but how does an impartial observer determine which one is objectively right and which is objectively wrong? And regardless of which one has a moral right to the food, it seems hard to argue that they are both made better off by acting accordingly.

In fact, it seems to me that this problem reveals that they don’t have the same needs after all: A and B both need to eat, but what this really means is that A needs for A to eat, and B needs for B to eat, which are not the same and are in some cases incompatible. Their needs are similar, but not identical, because the sets of circumstances in which they are satisfied are not the same.

I don’t know if biological needs are important here at all; I believe it’s the social and socioeconomic needs and circumstances that define morality. For example: in a small tribe avoiding conception may be immoral (the Onan story in the bible), while in today’s China having more than one child is.

So yes, it is possible for two different communities to develop opposite perceptions of how the members should behave with respect to [their reproductive activities], even though both communities are dealing with precisely the same needs. Homeostasis tells us that our need is not always to obtain more of a particular input.

Yes, there is complexity, but ultimately we are all dealing with the same needs. With perfect knowledge of all the environmental variables involved in our different circumstances, it would be at least theoretically possible for us to develop a moral outlook that would achieve an optimized level of need-satisfaction with respect to all of the members of society.

A difficult challenge? Indeed. As we know all too well from experience, it is not an easy matter to decide which pleasures in life must be given up in order for us to be delivered from addiction/obsession/impoverishment.

In your terms, I’d say it’s the comparison of best to best that shows a huge gap between the communist states and “the West”.

There’s perhaps something to this, but not too much, surely. For one, “better ones available” might not be easy to find out. For example, it turns out that public records available in the Soviet Union (reported in Pravda and the like) were much more accurate accounts of the Soviet economy and agricultural output in the 70’s and 80’s than were the US State Department’s (and the CIA’s) estimations. But, the State Department still has a policy of doing all of its own estimations and not using public sources. Now, maybe they did a better job on China than they did on the Soviet Union, but I’d want independent reasons to think that’s so before I gave much credence to their figures. (Maybe we have this- I don’t know about the particular case.) My point, though, is that when we know people have produced dodgy figures in the past, and might have some reason to do so now, then we have to be very careful using these figures even for estimations. And, when we know figures are dodgy, we have to have some way to account for that (and in which direction) before we can even use them as a starting point.

Another thing that accounts for the different ‘values’ people embrace is the fact that some people are right and other people are mistaken (or both are mistaken) re: their perceptions of the best means to employ to get their needs satisfied.

Yet another complication that leads many people to believe [incorrectly] that ‘different people have different needs’ is the fact that many people confuse means-to-ends (e.g., money) with ends-in-themselves.

When these and other variables are accounted for, what you are left with is the observable fact that all humans being born with the same identical needs (because a need is something that humans can neither create nor destroy).