Comments on: Consequentialisms

By: sennoma

sennoma — Tue, 23 Dec 2003 16:34:34 +0000

Robin, Matt—in re: collective action, I haven’t read Reasons and Persons (it’s on my guilt list), but I wonder if Parfit’s fudge is along the lines of good/bad faith? That is, each agent must determine, in good faith and from as much of the evidence as they can see, their own right course of action. If it is reasonable to expect a given agent to have seen the big picture, then taking part in the collective wrongdoing was wrong on that agent’s part. This at least avoids the recursive nature of trying to work out what each agent would have done if some other agent/s had done this or that or the other, and allows one to focus on what each actually did. Example: the “tragedy of the commons” model wherein the commons is ruined by each agent maximising his/her own utility always seemed a bit bogus to me, because it is not difficult to incorporate “having a viable commons” into the idea of maximal personal utility.

By: robin green

robin green — Tue, 23 Dec 2003 08:54:22 +0000

Matt – You bring up a very important point about collective action which I don’t have a good answer to. I remember reading Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons”, which is supposed to be a very good book on consequentialism and personhood, and I remember putting the book down because he completely fudged and/or ignored the vital question that you have raised. It was a good book up to that point, but I just couldn’t continue after I’d thought through the implications of that hole in the theory. It seemed to me then, and still seems, insoluble. Roger’s parent example – in its clarified form – seems to me to be a fascinating, more convuluted example of the kind of collective action problem that consequentialism does badly at. Roger – I don’t see what follows from taking into account a person’s personal history, or whatever, which isn’t necessarily relevant. Where does this lead? As for bad thoughts, let me modify my absolutist and simplistic “anti-thought-crime” stance, which as you rightly pointed out is untenable. Yes, a thought can be bad, but only because of what it predisposes us to do , if anything – and it can’t ever be as bad as the actual act. If it is only a “joke thought” that does not have any serious intention to do anything in reality attached to it, then it’s less harmful still. For me, moral actors are distinguished by a very simple pragmatic criterion – their ability to comprehend moral judgements. It is pointless to upbraid a lion for “inhumanely” killing its prey. As an aside, the “ability to comprehend” has to be defined quite loosely if you want to include full-blown psychopaths as moral agents – because they appear to have no functioning conscience, but we still want to be able to talk about them doing bad things.

By: roger

roger — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 16:31:16 +0000

Oops—I’m TERRIBLY sorry—my browser has been hanging up. I only meant the last thing to get on line.

By: roger

roger — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 16:28:18 +0000

Robin, I’m sympathetic to the motives for consequentialism—which I take to be the effort to embed ethical judgments in the world of practice. But I don’t think consequentialism quite gets there. 1. Levels of description. The problem with starting out with on the level of the most general description and then descending to the next level, in which human relationships are fleshed out, is that it isn’t logically clear how you make that move. In other words, the hierarchy Brian presents is linear—you merely add things to worlds and to humans and you get doctors and parents. But I think that it is more likely that the moral world is non-linear—that there isn’t a “human being” to which you add the “doctor” formula and you get a doctor. This actually vitiates the whole point, which is to understand practice—how doctors are made, etc. etc. 2. When you write: “As the film Minority Report I think shows, we should not be condemned for “evil thoughts” that we might have – no matter how horrible – before we have had the chance to enact them,” the scarequotes around evil don’t rescue it from its moral status. But of course, if evil—or any moral judgment—only attaches to acts, then how can there be such a thing as evil thoughts. It would be like thoughts that are colored blue. I think that there are bad thoughts—and that the thinker reacts to them as bad thoughts. This is the whole phenomenon of conscience. A moral theory that has no place for, or explanation of, conscience is not without problems. 3. Perhaps by condemnation you meant merely that we describe something as evil—but there is a larger sense in which this is the flaw in consequentialist reasoning. I think we have to disjoin punishment or reward from good or bad. The consequentialist seems to think that the essence of bad is punishable. This, I think, reproduces the worst habit of utilitarianism. Ultimately, we know that punishment and reward stem from a different class of motives—motives circulated within various social institutions—then the motives that prompt us to describe an act or a thought as good or bad. It has long been a philosophical platitude that a good act is not good because it makes us feel good—but philosophers have a much harder time decoupling bad acts from punishment. 4. I presented a confusing interpretation of the parent example, you are right. Here’s what I meant. If the one hundred parents decide to rescue children regardless of relationship, the homicidal parents could then rescue a child—something good—only to cover up their wager—admittedly a long shot—that their own child wouldn’t be rescued. Now, would we say this was bad? 5. Speaking of which—if we do exclude all mention of motive or thought from our moral talk, it is puzzling how we pick out moral actors. Why distinguish humans from guppies, morally? It seems that you need some way of packing in certain distinguishing things about humans to begin with. And surely that can’t be derived from their acts—it has to be derived, somehow, from what they think of acts, and that they think of acts.

By: sennoma

sennoma — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 16:25:41 +0000

Who thinks that morals can be determined by processes most people can’t handle? Singer (in Practical Ethics; he’s discussing someone else’s ideas, but I can’t remember whose) makes a distinction between day-to-day ethical decisionmaking and carefully, critically reasoned ethical decisionmaking. He suggests that it is useful to have a set of carefully worked-out guiding principles on which to base those day-to-day choices which must be made without devoting hours of introspection to each one. I think (and I could be very wrong in this) that most people can handle statistical principles if they have time to sit down and nut them out, so that such principles can at least play a role in, er, pre-emptive ethical decisionmaking.

By: roger

roger — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:56:34 +0000

Robin, I am not averse to consequentialism, but I do think that it too hastily decouples motive from act in order to reach an admirable goal: embedding ethics in practice. To do this, I think you have to move from talk about worlds and humans to talk about situations and human relationships. As I said, I think that the assumption that you can move logically from one level of description reproduces all the problems of a more Kantian moral theory—and this is a problem, insofar as consequentialism is supposed to be an alternative to Kantian moral theory. As an example of what I mean: when you say “As the film Minority Report I think shows, we should not be condemned for “evil thoughts” that we might have – no matter how horrible – before we have had the chance to enact them…,” the scarequotes don’t rescue “evil” from its moral value. How, actually, can these thoughts be evil if evil is defined solely on actions? Of course, you can speak of thought acts that are like speech acts, but at that point you have dissolved the distinction you are trying to preserve. That you, as an Other, embodied in some social institution, shouldn’t punish evil thoughts tells us only, or at least tells me only, that punishment and reward are not the necessary coefficients of moral judgement. If I were to pinpoint the one problem I have with both Kanian and consequentialist moral theory, it is the move that identifies judgments of good and bad with punishment and reward. As to mixing in the motive of the parents, this comes from positing that the parents are rescuing children regardless of their personal relationship to the rescued child. For 99 parents, this comes from a consequentialist p.o.v.; for one, it comes from a small homicidal wager: that their child won’t get rescued. Oh, and here’s one further problem for consequentialism—it does make it rather difficult to pick out moral agents. After all, it is only because human beings have something like consciousness and they act that we distinguish their killings and charity from the acts of, say, a guppy. On the level of pure action, however, a guppy killing its thousand children and a homo sapiens killing its one aren’t morally distinguishable.

By: roger

roger — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:56:22 +0000

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:05:11 +0000

Backword Dave hits on something that bothers me about the drowning-children example: How do you calculate consequences of your action when many people are acting? Do you simply hold everyone else’s actual action fixed, or calculate what they would have done if you had done it—in which case the policy with the best consequences is to save the child that no one else is actually saving? The problem with this view comes when many people do things that collectively overdetermine something very bad, but individually have small positive consequences past the threshold for the bad thing. If you calculate the consequences of an individual agent’s actions, holding the rest fixed, the consequences are positive—the bad thing would have happened anyway. But the agents collectively did something bad. (A canned example is: Two people are pointing guns at a third. Each simultaneously resolves a minor itch by squeezing their trigger finger. If A had not squeezed the finger, the target would have died anyway, so A’s action has the net consequence of relieving the itch, and so is right.—That can’t be right.) You could say—we wouldn’t choose to live in a world where so many people sully themselves by collaborating in a collective bad action. But that seems like smuggling in deontology, as I think Chris B is saying. This is much treated in the literature I’m sure, so I’d be happy if more clued-in people spoke up.

By: Backword Dave

Backword Dave — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 09:46:45 +0000

Surely there is a huge problem with the way the question is formulated? How can anyone know in advance that the first action will lead to 98 lives being saved and 99 lives in the second action? Kanneman and Tversky (spelling?) have lots of examples which show that common-sense ignores statistical principles. Who thinks that morals can be determined by processes most people can’t handle? I don’t expect to rescue anything 100 drowning kids in my lifetime, so for most people, either course of action works. Finally, at risk of sounding like a heartless Tory, if you plan to take your kids to the beach, learn to swim first. And of course save your own, do you really think the next person on the beach is (likely to be) an ethicist?

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 08:33:01 +0000

I guess I’m sceptical. If the consequentialist test that you advance here merely tracks the right answers then we don’t have anything like a consequentialist theory in the traditional sense. And it looks like you’ve just found a way of incorporating some deontological constraints within a system that looks consequentialist. I’m also puzzled about the connection (if any) to ordinary ethical judgements and decisions. So take the decision to visit your friend in hospital. You rightly identify the reason-giving (and right-making)features of the situation. But it looks as if you should want to say that there are circumstances where that decision should be overridden. No doubt there are. But I doubt that the best way of capturing those circumstances is to say that you should do something else instead just in case doing that other thing leads to a better world in the sense specified… But then perhaps you want to say that from behind the VoI we’d judge that we don’t want commitments to be too easily overridden by the application of the test itself. But when the test gets self-referential in that way I find myself staring into a hole with n-different meta-levels, regresses, no proper control on what is and isn’t allowed to count &c).

By: robin green

robin green — Mon, 22 Dec 2003 07:38:44 +0000

Brian – nice formulation, and exposition of the advantages over other consequentialisms. I had despaired of ever finding a “realistic” consequentialism, but I will have to think about this some more. Roger – Yes, ethical decisions depend on context. This is obvious. So what? The beauty of pure act-consequentialism is precisely that it fails to make any hard-and-fast rules that can be thwarted by contextual surprises (apart from the defining principle, which is so general as to be supposedly almost perfect). So your argument seems to be pro-consequentialist to me. Is that what you intended? And I’m not sure what you mean by “the result was wrong”. How would that be phrased? “It was wrong for the child to have died?”

But in order to make a moral judgement about a person we have to be able to say that their actions (or inaction) was/were right or wrong, no? So do you mean that the honourable action was bad because it was performed by someone with dishonourable intentions – not someone intending to kill the child now, but later?

Or do you mean instead that the parent in question surreptiously let their child drown, but pretended to try and save them? That would be quite different, and is obviously a wrong act. But that doesn’t seem at all consistent with what you said. In fact, what you said seems incoherent. How can someone be held responsible for anyone’s death when they performed the “maximum effort” possible to try and save them? As the film Minority Report I think shows, we should not be condemned for “evil thoughts” that we might have – no matter how horrible – before we have had the chance to enact them. Of course, that doesn’t mean that preventative measures are never in order – and it also shouldn’t be taken to apply to imminent actual threats to life or limb (so, it’s a fuzzy line). degustibus – I’m not sure how Mark Twain’s refutation works against the “expected utility given what you know” type formulations. Since you could only have expected those life saving acts to have good consequences (er… assuming you aren’t a serious misanthrope) the actions were still right and no-one could have expected you to have done anything better. Simple. End of story. I think where “morally impermissible” comes into the equation with things like Iraq is things like demonstrators, like myself, walking past Downing Street and shouting “Shame on you!” in Mr. Blair’s general direction, into the video cameras of the helpful policeman standing guard. If “Shame on you!” isn’t a moral exclamation, what is? Of course, you don’t need very complicated ethical theories to see that the Iraq war was wrong on many levels. Matt – The purpose of ethical argument is argument. Not as in ranting for rantings sake, but as in persuading your codisputant of the rightness of your position – or, alternatively or additionally, the rightness of the principle(s) from which your position spring. The well-known Hareian refutation of the crude emotivism you espouse there (“Ethical debate is merely dressed-up Yays and Boos”) is that it implies that ethical arguments are not actually arguments worth having, when clearly they are. They are because it is possible – it may be rare, but it is possible, I know as I have been on the receiving end – to convince someone that the principles that you and I share, when viewed correctly and without fear or favour, motivate my position, not yours. Without some bedrock of relevant shared principles, however, debate is fruitless. This is why the abortion debate, for example, is so intractable. There may be some shared principles on the table, but not, it seems, enough.

By: roger

roger — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:58:17 +0000

There is. I think, a problem with the general statement of consequentialism and the articulation of the counter-example. The problem has to do with levels of description. The notion of a world populated by humans is one level of description, and on this level, one doesn’t want organs harvested from one human to benefit another human. But in your example, you can go down, without semantic loss or gain, from that level to the level in which the harvester is a doctor and the human is a poor person. I’d question that logical continuity, and the premise that these descriptions are unproblematically held within your general description of “humans.” I think that filling out of humans by their relationships one to another requires a thicker description of those relations before you can move from ethical judgements that are valid on level one to ethical judgments that are valid on the micro-level, level two. In fact, I would think that the mismatch between descriptions of worlds in terms of complete generality—Kant’s world, for instance—and worlds that are captured only by a thicker description of human relationships is the whole impetus behind some version of consequentialism. In a sense, this transposes the sorites paradox into ethical terms. Just as there is no formula for getting heaps out of sand, there is no formula for getting doctors and poor people out of humans. The drowning child example is a good case for the transformations that thicker descriptions can bring about. From one end, the rescue of 99 children is equivalent to the rescue of 99 children. But introduce a variable into the mix: what if—looking into the minds of the participants—there was an intention, on the part of his parents, to murder him? The intention, however, is not to murder him by drowning, but murder him in some other way. Accidentally, his drowning, in spite of the maximum effort put in by all parents to save the children, fullfilled that parental will to murder. One would want to say that the result, then, could be judged to be wrong vis a vis the intent of the murderous parents. On the other hand, the same result could have happened without any bad intentions in the minds of the rescuing parents. Now, a consequentialist, trying to get out of the tar baby posed by motive, has a problem here. This problem is invisible from the macro level, but very visible from the micro level.

By: Matt McIrvin

Matt McIrvin — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 15:47:54 +0000

These discussions of moral systems, whether they be utilitarianism or divine command theory or something else entirely, always seem strange to me: they amount to attempts by someone to axiomatize their gut feelings about right and wrong, and then they always seem to founder on some situation in which they give an answer contrary to our gut feelings about right and wrong. But if that’s really the decisive criterion—if we’re going to regard any abhorrent-sounding consequence of a consistent moral system as fatal—why do we need anything other than the gut feelings in the first place? (This idea of “worlds in which we would prefer to live” is perhaps a stab in that direction.) Maybe the thoughts of a well-brought-up moral agent constitute an essentially irreducible system. Or, given that we know that gut feelings are sometimes wrong (consider the many bigotries which have been discarded by the enlightened), are we trying eventually to establish some higher-level criterion for when to follow our guts and when to follow an axiomatic system? And if so, is there evidence that we can make any progress?

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 15:39:40 +0000

Yep, it’s meant to be about which actions are morally right. It’s meant to apply to action tokens not types, and for now I’d just be happy if it were extensionally correct – i.e. if it tracks those actions that are right. So the claim is just that an action is right iff it leads to a better world than its alternatives, where a is better world than b iff we’d prefer being in a to being in b from behind the veil of ignorance. (I’ve assumed there the objective version rather than the subjective version. If need be replace would lead to with ‘would be expected to lead to’. I’ve also assumed something like causal determinism – that there’s one world an action would lead to. Removing that requires complicating the formulation, but only in familiar ways. It also requires us to have preferences over lotteries from behind the veil of ignorance. I think that’s OK, but others might disagree.) I certainly don’t think it’s an account of the right-making features of actions. It’s right to visit your sick friend in hospital because she’s your friend, and she’s sick, and she could use the company. Those reasons, I think, set out the right-making features of the action. It’s possible that the consequentialist claim could be read as an explanation for why those things are right-making features. I’m mostly interested in the weaker claim that the consequentialist theory tracks the right actions.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 11:10:17 +0000

Reading my last comment I realise that it might come across as that staple of philosophical seminars: the deliberately disingenuous question. But it wasn’t meant that way – I’d really appreciate some clarification and unpacking.