Consequentialism tells us that the thing to do is the thing with the best results. But, this is a ridiculously high standard, that nobody can actually live up to. Thus, consequentialism tells us that everybody is bad, and we should all condemn everybody and all feel guilty.
In these scenarios I like point out that the other party is using an appeal to consequences as the justification for rejecting consequentialism.
There's an argument I've seen a number of times on the internet about the failings of consequentialism as a moral system. ... The argument goes roughly like so: Consequentialism tells us that the thing to do is the thing with the best results. But, this is a ridiculously high standard, that nobody can actually live up to. Thus, consequentialism tells us that everybody is bad, and we should all condemn everybody and all feel guilty.
I like Scott Alexander's response to this kind of argument, from his Economic Perspective on Moral Standards:
But I find the “good person”/”not a good person” dichotomy helpful. I’m not claiming it objectively exists. I can’t prove anything about ethics objectively exists. And even if there were objective ethical truths about what was right or wrong, that wouldn’t imply that there was an objective ethical truth about how much of the right stuff you have to do before you can go around calling yourself “good”. In the axiology/morality/law trichotomy, I think of “how much do I have to do in order to be a good person” as within the domain of morality. That means it’s a social engineering question, not a philosophical one. The social engineering perspective assumes that “good person” status is an incentive that can be used to make people behave better, and asks how high vs. low the bar should be set to maximize its effectiveness.
Consider the way companies set targets for their employees. At good companies, goals are ambitious but achievable. If the CEO of a small vacuum company tells her top salesman to sell a billion vacuums a year, this doesn’t motivate the salesman to try extra hard. It’s just the equivalent of not setting a goal at all, since he’ll fail at the goal no matter what. If the CEO says “Sell the most vacuums you can, and however many you sell, I will yell at you for not selling more”, this also probably isn’t going to win any leadership awards. A good CEO might ask a salesman to sell 10% more vacuums than he did last year, and offer a big bonus if he can accomplish it. Or she might say that the top 20% of salesmen will get promotions, or that the bottom 20% of salesmen will be fired, or something like that. The point is that the goal should effectively carve out two categories, “good salesman” and “bad salesman”, such that it’s plausible for any given salesman to end up in either, then offer an incentive that makes him want to fall in the first rather than the second.
I think of society setting the targets for “good person” a lot like a CEO setting the targets for “good vacuum salesman”. If they’re attainable and linked to incentives – like praise, honor, and the right to feel proud of yourself – then they’ll make people put in an extra effort so they can end up in the “good person” category. If they’re totally unattainable and nobody can ever be a good person no matter how hard they try, then nobody will bother trying. This doesn’t mean nobody will be good – some people are naturally good without hope for reward, just like some people will slave away for the vacuum company even when they’re underpaid and underappreciated. It just means you’ll lose the extra effort you would get from having a good incentive structure.
So what is the right level at which to set the bar for “good person”? An economist might think of this question as a price-setting problem: society is selling the product “moral respectability” and trying to decide how many units effort to demand from potential buyers in order to maximize revenue. Set the price too low, and you lose out on money that people would have been willing to pay. Set the price too high, and you won’t get any customers. Solve for the situation where you have a monopoly on the good and the marginal cost of production is zero, and this is how you set the “good person” bar.
This is in contrast to consequentialism as a part/tool of other moral systems
If there is a deotological rule don't murder, then the question becomes, what makes an action murder.
Murder is when you kill someone. (Obviously).
That is, murder is an action with the consequence of death (to rounding)
So there is a sense in which consequentialism is also for saying which actions fall into which categories in some other moral framework.
This might lead to a misreading of consequentialism from moral frameworks that use this sort of consequentialism, where consequentialism is viewed as using the above tool for the categories right and wrong the way that is obvious to them from the consequential argument (the action with the best outcome is good and all else are bad), but it does not lead to the automatic inference of the gap between these categories in consequentialism and other moral theories.
You are right.
I had an interesting conversation about this.
This is in contrast to consequentialism as a part/tool of other moral systems
If there is a deotological rule don't murder, then the question becomes, what makes an action murder.
Murder is when you kill someone. (Obviously).
That is, murder is an action with the consequence of death (to rounding)
So there is a sense in which consequentialism is also for saying which actions fall into which categories in some other moral framework.
I retract.
"What actions are what" is a question only a consequentialist would ask (consequentialism grows out of the ontology of figuring out the consequences of actions).
Other moral systems can/do exist in ontologies where you do not believe that is possible, or do not trust that it is possible to be good at that, and so judge on other grounds.
This argument is based on a conflation. It assumes that there’s one single thing, “morality”, and this one thing produces not only answers to “what should you do”, but also, what should we condemn, what should we punish, what should one feel guilty about, and other similar questions; and that, moreover, the answers to these questions are identical (or opposites, as appropriate; here the first one would be the opposite of the others).
Yes: consequentialism, deontology, etc, are are different aspects of morality, and even relate to different things...the permissible versus the desirable, etc. Yet they can be reconciled:-
One of the areas of debate about ethics is where the locus of ethical concern is .. whether it lies in persons (an approach known as virtue ethics), rules (deontology) or the consequences of actions (consequentialism). (There are also other axes, such as objectivity versus subjectivity and cognitivism versus non cognitivism). Consider a case where someone dies in an industrial accident , although all rules were followed: if you think the plant manager should be exonerated because he folowed the rules, you are siding with deontology, whereas if you think he should be punished because a death occurred under his supervision, you are siding with consequentialism.
Many people encounter deontology in the form of "ten commandments" style religious law. From a rational perspective, this kind of deontology is unsatisfactory: for one thing, there are multiple competing systems, and it is not clear why any system should be followed, and it is difficult to adapt traditional deontology to new circumstancs. Likewise, virtue ethics suffers from disagreements about what is virtuous.. for instance, the stength-and-independence cluster of virtues versus the kindness-and-cooperation cluster.
To those who are looking for a rational basis for ethics (which includes most of theose seeking to find a motivating basis for ethics), consequentialism is more attractive. A basis in the preferences and values people actually have, which are cognitevely accessible. Being based on the preferences and values people actually have, goes a considerable way to finding motivation to behave ethically (although there is a considerable wrinkle in blancing "my "preferences against "yours").. And it is possible to adapt to changing circumstances in terms of the results we would wish to get out of them. These are the advantages of consequentialism.
On the other hand, ethics as it is exists in human societies doesn't have a strong rational basis. Psyhcological studies show that people's thinking about ethics is instead intuitive, and often centered on rules and virtues which are taken for granted. However, the arguments for consequentialism so far given don't add up to arguments for pure consequentialism. The more sophisticated defences of rational ethics can include aspects of deontology and virtue ethics.
The disadvantages of (most forms of) consequentialism include the fact that consequences are impossible to calculate exactly, in general. Secondly, different individuals, approximating conseqential decision making differently, would lead to lack of coordination. For instance, . Thirdly, it is unreasonable to punish people for consequences of intentional actions whose outcomes they could not forsee. Fourthly, it is unreasonable to punish people for what unintentional actions.
Rules that are commonly agreed, and which lead to (approximately) desireable outcomes, in the consequentialist sense solve all these problems. Firstly, it is possible to memorise a set of rules. Secondly, if everyone follows the same rules, it is possible to co-ordinate. Thirdly, it is reasonable to punish someone for failing to follow a rule they knew about and knew they should be followed. Fourthly, new rules can be formulated in response to to changing circumstances, since it is possible to choose rules that lead to desirable expected outcomes.
("Right" and "wrong", that is praisweorthiness and blameability are concepts that belong to deontology. A good outcome in the consequentialist sense, one that is a generally desired, is a different concept from deontological right. Ethics does not have a single subject mtter ..it is about goodness in the sense of desireable ends and goodness in the sense of right behaviour and goodness in the sense of virtue.)
The advantages of consequentialism can still be retained by basing rules on expected consequences. That is very much a compromise, though. A finite and cognitively manageble set of rules can only approximate the case-by-case calculations of an ideal ethical reasoner. But ideal ethical reasoners don't exist. (But some people reason better than others, even though everyone is obliged to follow the same set of rules...)
The explicit construction of rules is apparent in modern, tenchologically advanced societies, since such societies face challenges to adapt socially to their technological innovations. Nonetheless, the rules of a more traditional society can be retrospectively seen as gradual adaptations, existing in order to bring about desirable consequences. And inadmuch as ethical rules exist to fulfil a purpose, bringing about desirable consequences, they can be seen as doing so better or worse.
People need to actually be able to act on morality, which is where virtue (in one sense) comes in. Virtue can mean moral fibre, an inner capacity to do what is not in your selfish interest, or , alternatively moral standing or status that rewards people for being moral. Virtue correlates more with reward, deontology more with punishment.
if you think the plant manager should be exonerated because he folowed the rules, you are siding with deontology, whereas if you think he should be punished because a death occurred under his supervision, you are siding with consequentialism
This is missing the point. Consequentialism is about making decisions, not about judging past decisions. Consequentialism says that if punishing the manager would (in expectation) have better consequences than not punishing them, then they should be punished, and otherwise they shouldn't. Deontology says that if the rules say to punish the manager, they should be punished, and if the rules say not to punish the manager, they shouldn't be punished.
(Thought I'd try posting here some various rationality "quick thoughts" that I feel like I haven't seen expressed overtly enough -- sometimes I've already written about these elsewhere, but thought would be good to get them down here. Adapted from this old blog post of mine but not claiming any originality here. Edit: Here is an earlier similar post by Neil.)
There's an argument I've seen a number of times on the internet about the failings of consequentialism as a moral system. (Often this is phrased in terms of utilitarianism, since the term "utilitarianism" is better known than the more general term "consequentialism", but this is pretty clearly about consequentialism in general.) The argument goes roughly like so: Consequentialism tells us that the thing to do is the thing with the best results. But, this is a ridiculously high standard, that nobody can actually live up to. Thus, consequentialism tells us that everybody is bad, and we should all condemn everybody and all feel guilty. (There are a number of variants.)
This argument is based on a conflation. It assumes that there's one single thing, "morality", and this one thing produces not only answers to "what should you do", but also, what should we condemn, what should we punish, what should one feel guilty about, and other similar questions; and that, moreover, the answers to these questions are identical (or opposites, as appropriate; here the first one would be the opposite of the others).
(Yes, you can add wrinkles like supererogatory acts and such, but that's not particularly relevant to the argument so I'll ignore it.)
But actually, these questions are not identical! The result is that the above reasoning is incorrect. Consequentialism answers one question -- what to do. It is for making decisions. It does not, directly, tell what you should feel guilty about; only what you should do.
But notice that word "directly" there -- since these other questions are also decisions, consequentialism can be used to answer them as well. However, one must answer them as their own decisions, yielding different answers from the conflation above. What should we punish? Whatever it would yield the best result to punish! Not, whichever acts failed to yield the best result and are therefore "bad".
Indeed consequentialism doesn't even have a notion of "good" and "bad" acts, only better ones and worse ones. But that's another matter, so I won't discuss that here, although it does also serve to illustrate how it's just using a different framework than many of its critics are using, and they frequently implicitly assume in their arguments. (See also: this Object of Objects tweet.)