Consequentialism

Varieties

• There aren’t really any plausible ethical theories that say consequences don’t matter at all. But consequentialism is distinctive because it says they’re all that matter. (Wiggins 2006).
• Recall: theory of right action, and decision criterion, are separate goals
  • Consequentialism makes the good prior to the right
  • Consequentialist theories have two components: an axiology (theory of value, about states of affairs), and a decision rule (telling you what kinds of acts are right).
• Act-utilitarianism is unattractive in that it is both too permissive (ends justify means) and too demanding (only the best possible action is permissible).
  • Permissiveness: kidnapping hospital patient; promise-breaking; Transmitter Room
  • Demandingness: George the Chemist; etc
• Theories of the good
  • Welfarism – nothing is intrinsically good unless it’s good for someone. Utilitarianism is the main form of welfarist consequentialism.
    • Hedonism is one theory of welfare: claims it consists only in pleasure & absence of pain
      • Hedonism + utilitarianism → classical utilitarianism
    • But you could have preference-utilitarianism, which endorses desire satisfaction
    • Or you could have a longer “objective list” of what constitutes welfare
  • Pluralist theories of the good (e.g. ideal utilitarianism from Moore, e.g. includes beauty and knowledge; sufficientarian / Prioritarian / etc)
    • But must be agent-neutral: an impartial ordering of outcomes
• Average vs total utilitarianism (only matters when population size varies)
• Maximising vs satisficing vs scalar
  • Maximising act-consequentialism: an act is right iff it brings about an outcome such that no better outcome could’ve been brought about.
  • Satisficing: an act is right iff it brings about an outcome good enough relative to other outcomes that could have been brought about
  • Against satisficing act-consequentialism: it loosens demandingness, but makes over-permissiveness worse (Bradley 2006).
    • Suppose it’s for the best for me to remain passive and let events unfold, or I could intervene and make the outcome Pareto-worse. Then, provided the initial outcome is sufficiently good and Pareto-worsening sufficiently small, satisficing consequentialism would allow me to do this gratuitous harm. But surely that’s wrong!
    • The more you lower the satisficing threshold (to weaken demandingness), the more you increase permission for gratuitous harm.
    • Example: “Magic Game” (Mulgan 1993) where you can just choose how many people to raise above poverty line. Surely you should do it for everyone.
  • One way to potentially rescue it: willpower-satisficing consequentialism (Chappell).
    • An act A is permissible iff it produces no less utility than any alternative the agent could perform at the cost of up to either (i) X willpower, or (ii) the willpower cost of A, whichever is greater.
    • So the satisficing threshold isn’t set on outcomes, but rather constraints on the agent. You’re never allowed to gratuitously do harm / fail to create good.
    • The relevant burden is demands on willpower, not welfare cost. We’re only boundedly rational/etc, and even prudentially beneficial demands (e.g. exercising) can feel burdensome.
  • Scalar consequentialism (Norcross 2006). There’s no further fact of the matter about “x is right”, or “x is demanded by morality”.
    • Arguments in favour: (a) no clear moral difference between right and wrong. E.g. compare you can bring about 10 vs 999 vs 1000. Deontic categories suggests that 999 vs 1000 is more morally important than 10 vs 999. Implausible.
    • (b) Good comes prior to right. And good is a “gradable property” i.e. continuous, so surely right would also be.
      • Though this has a false premiss (Lawlor 2009): if X is derived from Y, doesn’t mean they need to have the same properties. E.g. winner of long-jump competition.
    • Objection: seems to lack moral force. Doesn’t obligate you to do anything, which commonsense morality might need to (McElwee 2020). Moreover, it means nothing (not even genocide) is forbidden.
  • Chappell’s synthesis: we can accept all three, with different senses of “should”:
    • Ideally you save 1000
    • Saving 999 might be minimally acceptable in a way that saving 10 is not
    • Ultimately it’s a matter of degree, and saving 999 vs 10 matters more than saving 1000 vs 999
• Rule vs act [or, direct vs indirect]
  • Maximising rule-consequentialism: an act is right iff it is permitted by the set of rules whose {general / universal / …} acceptance would make the outcome as good as possible
    • Need to specify the compliance level, but any specific number seems rather arbitrary (Hooker likes 90%). The optimal rules under conditions of universal compliance prescribe acts that are obviously wrong in conditions of partial non-compliance:
      • Ten strangers are in front of buttons. Iff nobody presses their button, then 1000 people will be saved from death. Each stranger who presses their button receives £100. For each person who does not press their button when there is someone pressing their own button, an additional person will die.
      • Clearly best for nobody to press. But at 90% compliance, then 1 person presses, and it would be better if each of the others also press. So the optimal rule (with 90% threshold) is different from what is actually best.
    • In a non-ideal world of partial compliance, it’s not clear whether you are obligated to pick up the slack. E.g. if everybody gave their earnings above $10m, then poverty would be solved. But they don’t. So is it obligatory for you, on $100k, to give everything away? Unclear – maybe you should just give your “fair share”.
      • Murphy’s Collective Principle of Beneficence
      • Objection: suppose there are two children drowning in a shallow pond. There’s another person there who could save the second, but he walks away. Do you only need to save one?
  • Collapse or incoherence dilemma. Either rule-c collapses into act-c, or else rule-c is incoherent. (Smart, Lyons)
    • Suppose it isn’t extensionally equivalent. Then how can there be a rule that forbids you from bringing about the best outcome, when promoting the good is how you test the appropriateness of these rules?
    • Hooker response: define the optimal rule-set S in terms of acceptance – rules you’ve internalised to use within deliberation – not compliance.
      • When evaluating utility of general acceptance, we need to count the costs of training people to accept the rules. So the rules must be simple and learnable. Thus it doesn’t collapse; the rules aren’t going to be hyperspecific because that’s infeasible to internalise.
        • The optimal rules for general compliance need not be the same as the optimal for general acceptance.
        • But this seems like a bad reply; act-utilitarians are sophisticated!
      • Also Hooker admits that he thinks rule consequentialism isn’t motivated by making outcomes as good as possible, but rather impartial justification for intuitively plausible rules. So it’s not really consequentialist.
• Ex post vs ex ante
  • Does rightness depend on whether you in fact bring about the best outcome, or the expected value of your outcome was best?
  • Example: Drug A has 50:50 chance to kill or partially cure patient, drug B will mostly cure for certain. Doctor administers A and happens to completely cure. But seems like she acted wrongly.
    • Seems basically like a verbal dispute; they just have different purposes
    • Ex ante is useful for decision making and assessing the quality of others’ decision making.
    • Ex post is what a fully informed, morally ideal spectator would want you to do.
• Single-level vs sophisticated (i.e. non-naive) consequentialism
  • Nobody defends single-level utilitarianism. Cf Mill and Bentham on heuristics!
  • Self-effacingness objection – but it seems OK for decision procedure to come apart from the criterion of rightness. See below.
• Global utilitarianism: utilitarian standards of moral evaluation apply to anything of interest (e.g. motives, rules, character traits), not only actions.
  • Pure global utilitarianism doesn’t capture some moral intuitions. E.g. suppose moral disapproval was reliably counterproductive: blaming S for doing X makes them do X even more. Then pure global utilitarianism says only good acts (not bad ones) are blameworthy. But that’s puzzling: although it might not be efficacious to blame bad acts, surely they do merit blame.
    • A solution? Hybrid utilitarianism: the moral quality of an aim or intention can depend on factors other than whether it promotes overall wellbeing.
      • [hmm, connection to the praise/blame here a bit unclear. I guess it’s saying that the moral quality of the blaming bad acts is regrettable, or something like that?]
      • Example: if someone is unwittingly anti-reliable at achieving their goals, their intentions in aiming at the good may still be virtuous & admirable, even though it’s unfortunate they in fact fail to promote the good.

Demandingness, praise/blame, supererogation

• What exactly is demandingness?
  • McElwee: need to distinguish from objections that claim the theory is wrong about what matters (e.g. a theory that says I need to stand on my head). Demanding is only relevant if I think there are good moral reasons for S to X but that a theory asks too much if it requires that S does X
  • Sobel: compliance cost of a theory T for S – the counterfactual costs S incurs from following a theory as opposed to acting from pure egoism. (This cost would be different depending on whether everybody is also following the theory vs when everybody is being egoistic)
    • Then you might talk about demandingness overall but that needs aggregation.
    • Assuming you can do that, and look at the lifetime compliance cost, it’s not obvious that consequentialism is more demanding in aggregate.
  • Note that no consequentialist theory makes impossible demands, because ought implies can. Utilitarianism does take into account cognitive constraints etc.
• Intuition: some acts are supererogatory. Kagan (1984) surveys attempted justifications.
  • A successful justification needs to explain (i) why supererogatory acts are good, and (ii) why they are not obligatory.
  • Scheffler: each agent may multiply the weight of their own interests by a factor M, and then X is permissible iff the loss to others is <= M * gain to agent. (Consequentialism has M=1, egoism has M= ∞)
    • These are agent-centred prerogatives (i.e. it’s permissible to prioritise your interests suboptimally, making room for supererogation).
    • Problem: Scheffler rejects doing/allowing distinction, but this leads to counterintuitive results.
      • Suppose you set M to remove the obligation to donate £10k to save a stranger. But then the same M allows you to kill your uncle to get a £10k inheritance.
  • Nagel: pain generates agent-neutral reasons, but adopted, voluntary desires (e.g. to be a pianist) generate only agent-relative reasons. So sometimes you’re permitted to not to sacrifice, because agent-relative reasons outweigh agent-neutral.
    • Problem: can’t explain why you’re allowed to make the sacrifice, should you so choose – because according to the theory, the balance of reasons is in favour of not making the sacrifice.
  • Heyd: justice argument. Requiring someone to work ceaselessly for others’ welfare is unjust, similarly to punishing the innocent.
    • Problem: although it could be wrong for society to force S to X, that doesn’t mean it’s not morally required that S does X.
  • Or maybe incommensurability of reasons: you can’t compare reasons to promote welfare with reasons of autonomy. Problem: then it’s never required to aid anyone, even at negligible (nonzero) cost.
  • Also, maybe supererogatory acts are intrinsically good. And the demandingness of conseq removes the possibility for a valuable/virtuous kind of motivation underlying them.
• Sobel on impotence: Demandingness Objection is not a self-standing reason to reject consequentialism. It presupposes prior reasons to reject it – specifically, doing/allowing distinction.
  • Thought experiment: Joe has two kidneys, Sally needs one. DO says that it’s too demanding on Joe to require him to give a kidney. But what about Sally? Non-consequentialist theories say she has to die, and can’t steal his kidney etc. Seems very demanding!
  • DO assumes that costs a theory requires you to bear are more significant than those it permits to befall you. But this is just carving up costs borne by agent/costs borne by patients – i.e. the doing/allowing distinction.
  • Murphy claims only costs flowing from what a theory requires count as its demands. Costs of what it merely permits are attributable to the agents who act.
    • But suppose T said: “you can do whatever you want to Joe”. That does seem demanding on Joe, even though it’s only permitting harm to him.
    • Also, we know humans are self-interested, so we can predict that there will be more harm under a theory that allows self-interested harm. You can reasonably attribute those costs to the theory.
• Separately, you could reject moral rationalism – i.e. deny that moral requirements necessarily override all other reasons.
  • So morality is extremely demanding, but we just don’t always have most reason to do what it demands.
• Moral theories make very different kind of demands to humans / laws. Distinguish:
  • T says that X is the right action
  • T says S is obligated to do X
  • T recommends praising S only if they do X
  • T recommends blaming S if they fail to do X
  • T recommends punishing S if they fail to do X
• Ethical egoism is highly undemanding, but that’s not a reason to like it!
• Drowning child in a shallow pond
  • One objection: the difference between this and global poverty is the difference between saving an identified life vs a statistical life.
  • But you can reformulate thought experiment. Maelstrom: there are many children drowning in the pond, all swept about. It’s indeterminate who you’d save, but you would save one. Still seems obligatory to help. (Unger 1996)

Alienation and integrity

Rougher notes from planning an essay

• Three different versions of the alienation objection:
  • (1) Integrity objection (Williams) – can gloss it as: consequentialism undermines your relationship with your own personal projects and identity
  • (2) Alienation in relationships with other people (Stocker, Wolf)
  • (3) Consequentialism undermines your relationship with your own agency
• Consequentialists can address (1) and (2) relatively easily with sophisticated consequentialism, though residual objections remain; (3) is more challenging to rebut.
• (1) Integrity: George the pacifist chemist, offered a job at a chemical weapons factory which he could do deliberately badly
  • However, a utilitarian George wouldn’t be acting against his convictions by taking the weapons job! There’s only integrity-violation if you think he is non-utilitarian.
  • A reformulation: George lacks distinctive projects as a utilitarian, and that is a problem.
• (2) Relationships: visiting friend at hospital
  • “One thought too many” – the multi-level utilitarian justification goes something like “I should visit my friend because that promotes friendship, and that’s (heuristically) something to promote the good”.
• Stocker and “moral schizophrenia”
  • The complaint is that the multi-level utilitarian exhibits a worrisome disharmony between their justifications and motives.
    • The theory’s justification for visiting a friend is that it promotes utility.
    • But the motivating reason for the agent is something like love for their friend.
  • Stocker thinks a correct moral theory should let you live by it in an integrated way – i.e., the considerations that make your actions right are also the considerations which move you to act.
• One way you might try to address this: Scheffler’s agent-centred prerogatives. But these seem to fail and aren’t really consequentialist.
• Sophisticated consequentialism (Railton) can address this: adopt non-utilitarian goals.
  • Multi-level utilitarians distinguish between criterion of rightness and decision procedure, licensing use of e.g. rights-based heuristics to make decisions. But all they intrinsically value is the utilitarian good.
  • Sophisticated utilitarians go further, and adopt non-utilitarian goals/desires when this would have good results.
    • So, at the point of deliberation, there’s no gap between justifications and motives.
    • And adopting friendship / personal projects as goals does seem like it would be better on utilitarian grounds, given facts about human psychology!
• A problem with sophisticated consequentialism: genesis and conditionality.
  • From the inside and the outside, a sophisticated consequentialist looks identical to someone who straightforwardly intrinsically values those goods.
  • But the sophisticated consequentialist adopted those intrinsic goals only because they promoted utility. If valuing friendship ceased to promote utility, they’d drop it.
  • And moreover, they seem to have their motivations (valuing friendship) for the wrong sort of second-order reasons (to promote aggregate welfare).
• Chappell can partly address this with a “subsumption” strategy, based on his value receptacles argument.
  • Key idea: overall wellbeing matters only because each particular individual matters.
  • So concern for the overall good is instead built up out of concern for each individual. And you ought to go to visit your friend at the hospital because it would cheer him up – i.e., grounded in his individual welfare.
  • This doesn’t address Williams’s integrity objection so well, because e.g. sports & hobbies don’t have any other subject whose welfare you promote by engaging in them.
    • But this seems OK – intuitively sports & hobbies do just have instrumental value, as means to happiness / friendship.
    • And so sophisticated consequentialism (i.e. intrinsically valuing the sport, adopted because this will help utility-maximisation) appears less objectionable.
• Global utilitarianism might help separately: it says you can evaluate motives (and all other objects of interest) by utilitarian standards, not only acts.
  • So we can say that the motive of direct concern for your friend is itself good, which seems intuitive.
    • But still, it’s good only conditionally, because of consequences.
  • On hybrid utilitarianism, you can remove the conditionality: motive of direct concern can be good e.g., because of friendship.
    • But then you’ve given up on consequences as the sole standard of moral value.
    • If you’re committed to consequentialism, then you will just be OK accepting that ultimately your justifications need to bottom out at consequences.
• (3) Negative responsibility: alienation from your own agency
  • Williams objects that because consequentialism denies the doing/allowing distinction, it absurdly implies that you’re just as responsible for failing to mitigate omissions of other agents as you are for your own actions.
  • It’s true that utilitarianism can’t really get rid of this sense of alienation.
  • But this can be turned on its head like Sobel: other theories rob the less-fortunate of their agency. Cf also Ashford on the global poverty emergency.
• Insofar as it is alienating, that needn’t count against it too much.
  • Williams thought Kantianism could also be alienating; to some extent all moral theories will make demands of us on our agency, etc – so it’s not a weighty objection.
• Foot: utilitarianism and the virtues