MacAskill & Mogensen's Paralysis Argument (forthcoming in Phil Imprint) argues that deontological constraints entail paralysis, once long-term indirect effects are taken into account:
According to most non-consequentialists, reasons against doing harm are weightier than reasons to benefit. Since you have no greater reason to expect that benefits as opposed to harms will predominate among the indirect effects of any action you perform, it therefore seems that you should try as best you can to avoid bringing about any significant indirect effects through your actions at all. Since virtually anything you do will inevitably result in significant numbers of indirect harms, you should therefore try to do as little as possible.
It's a cute argument! I recommend reading the full paper, where they address (and handily dispose of) a number of possible responses on behalf of the deontologist. For example, the Arms Trader case (p. 17) shows that it won't do to exclude causal chains that involve others' voluntary choices. And Mystery Box cases (p. 20) similarly warn against excluding convoluted causal chains. They ultimately conclude that the best option for deontologists is to embrace extreme demands: "to escape paralysis, your every motion must be at the service of posterity." (p.34)
But I wonder if deontologists might get by with some more conservative revisions to their views. In our recent reading group discussion of the paper, David O'Brien (mentioned with permission) suggested that something like the Doctrine of Double Effect seems well-suited to resist M&M's argument. For even if we can, in some sense, foresee that our acts will have long-term effects some of which are harms, we generally do not intend those harms, or use them as a means to whatever everyday goals we are pursuing. So if deontic constraints are restricted to harms that feature in our intentions, or that we make use of as a means, paralysis may be avoided.
Of course, not all wrongs involve intended harms in this way. But that's fine. It's a familiar point that DDE is a supplemental principle, not the entirety of a moral theory. At a minimum, DDE proponents should agree with consequentialists that even merely foreseen harms (or "collateral damage") can make an act wrong if they outweigh the expected benefits. The trickier question is whether DDE suffices for all the distinctively deontological constraints that the non-consequentialist might have wanted. I'd guess that most additionally want some kind of harm/benefit asymmetry, e.g. to rule out fatally driving over one (as collateral damage) on the way to rescuing five (p.7).
At this point, I suspect that our deontological intuitions are mostly just tracking the salience of the harm. If you see or touch the harmed person, we're apt to attribute outsized importance to the harm. Distant future harms to unknown ("statistical") victims, by contrast, seem maximally non-salient, and so avoid activating deontological intuitions. As a result, the suggestion that there could be deontological constraints against these sorts of harms can seem intuitively absurd. But insofar as we doubt that salience provides a sufficiently principled basis for counting some harms more than others, we may be forced to conclude that deontological constraints against salient harms are ultimately in no better position.
It's a nice challenge, at any rate, which deontologists will need to address if they want to appeal to anything stronger than the Doctrine of Double Effect.
[Update: I've been pointed to Nye's very similar 2014 paper, 'Chaos and Constraints', which also contains some nice arguments against appealing to the DDE here, e.g. by comparing lesser means-harms with greater collateral harms.]
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