See also: [[Moral philosophy]] The normative theory which says we should ultimately evaluate actions according to the goodness of their consequences. It is a claim about what ultimately makes actions better or worse. It is sometimes confused with the claim that, in day-to-day life, we should try to assess the consequences of our actions, rather than relying on (e.g.) common sense commitments and rules of thumb. A lot of intuitive resistence to consequentialism comes from: - The idea that there is a very simple path from consequentialist theory to recommendations about every day decision-procedures, ideal dispositions, and so on. **There isn't.** - The misconception that consequentialism straightforwardly recommends apparently abhorrent actions in some circumstances (e.g. killing an innocent to placate the mob) [^1]. - Consequentialists often discuss simplified scenarios where "all else is equal" (e.g. Trolley Problems), but in real life, all else is rarely equal, and the actions available to humans are constrained by psychology, dispositions, and so on. The ideal psychology, disposition (etc.) for humans to have over time may generate apparently non-ideal consequences in some circumstances ("apparently" because in fact these constraints limit the options available to the agent). [^1]: [[Bernard Williams]] and others have complained that consequentialism makes moral dilemmas "too easy"—failing to recognise the common challenge of ethical complexity and moral considerations that pull in different directions, where it is extremely difficult to say which action is best. In its most common flavour, consequentialism involves two components [^2]: 1. **A theory of value (axiology):** such as (e.g) hedonism or welfarism, which is used to rank states of affairs from best to worst. 2. **A normative claim:** the right act in any given situation is the one which will produce the highest ranked state of affairs that the agent is in a position to produce. [^2]: Scheffler (1987) _Consequentialism and its Critics_, p.1 Key characteristics: - All plausible moral theories say that consequences matter; consequentialism says that **only** consequences matter. - Non-consequentialists say that some actions can be morally best even though the state of affairs that results would be worse than another state of affairs that could be realised. In practice this sounds kind of reasonable, but in theory it seems odd. Consequentialists usually endorse: - [[Impartiality]]: the idea that considerations like physical or temporal or tribal proximity are morally irrelevant. - Agent-neutrality, or objectivism: the claim that truths about the value of states of affairs, and ideal moral actions, are the same for all moral agents equally. - Separating the question of what actions are blameworthy from that of what action is best. Consequentialists sometimes endorse: - Metaphysical [[Moral realism]]: the idea that truths about the value of states of affairs, and ideal moral actions, are the same universally, i.e. independently of any particular agents or other contingent factor. - Rejection of agent-relative reasons as morally relevant. C.f. [[Agent-neutral vs agent-relative reasons]]. Consequentialists usually deny: - Act-omission distinction: in the abstract, it doesn't matter if a state of affairs is brought about by an action or a failure to act. In practice, upholding an act-omission distinction may actually be good from a consequentialist perspective, at least in some circumstances. Common motivations for consequentialism: - It's hard to generate a theory of what matters without talking about states of affairs, and from there it's hard to see how a normative theory could avoid paying serious attention to consequences. - The claim that, ultimately, consequences are the only thing that matters offers the promise of a neat justification of many higher level normative intuitions (e.g. the claim that particular rules or dispositions are justified because they tend to lead to good consequences). - Unfortunately, long-run consequences matter a lot, and these are very difficult to predict. This leads to concerns about [[Cluelessness]]. - [[Non-consequentialist theories are difficult to reconcile with various plausible axioms of rationality]]. - [[Agent-relative theories are sometimes criticised as paradoxical]] - We need to agree upon some stable principles to organise society, guide our governments and institutions. (See also: [[=Joshua Greene#On Deep Pragmatism]].) The motivations for consequentialism are mostly quite abstract. Some of the most powerful criticisms (see below) share, at heart, a claim that it is too abstract, and not sufficiently rooted in every day practice (c.f. [[Pragmatism]]), ethical intuitions (c.f. [[Ethical intutionism]]) and/or [[Ecological rationality]]. Flavours of consequentialism: - [[Maximising consequentialism says that only the action with best consequences is right, all others are wrong]] - [[Satisficing consequentialism says that many actions with good consequences are good enough]] - [[Scalar consequentialism ranks actions from best to worst, and encourages better action]] - [[Qualitative (aka pluralistic) hedonism says that the extent to which a pleasure or pain is good or bad is a product of intensity times duration times some quality rating (e.g. higher or lower pleasure)]] - Consequentialists may focus on evaluating different kinds of things: actions, norms, rules, dispositions, patterns of behaviour over time, social systems, etc. - Agent-relative constraints - Amartya Sen - Rights as features of states of affairs - Rankings of overall outcomes vary from person to person Criticisms: - Ecological rationality and robustness - Too abstract - [[Utility legions]] - [[Distributive concerns]] - [[Cluelessness]] - Thinking of our difficulty abandoning commitments and partiality as signs of moral weakness seems perverse. - [[Maximising consequentialism may constrain individual liberty to an unacceptable degree]] - [[The Very Repugnant Conclusion—a world with no unhappy people could be worse than a world with many unhappy people and very many happy people]] - [[Agent-relative theories seem to be a better fit with everyday thought]] - Foot (as described by Scheffler): it does not always make sense to talk about the goodness or badness of a state of affairs produced by an action. Expressions like "best state of affairs" only make sense within certain limited contexts where the virtue of benevolence provides them with a sense. - Millgram: The incoherence of utilitarianism has to do with the attempt to capture the **person-by-person importance of desires and projects** (consisting or expressed in being the source of a person’s own reasons for action) in an **impersonal theory** of what would be on the whole best. - There's something a bit weird about self-effacing theories. It's like you have to take the theory, then transform it into something humans can actually live with. And all the while you're kind of regretting the constraints imposed by human nature. This gives the feeling that something has gone wrong. But maybe not, maybe this is just the darker side of aspiration. Would I like humans, including myself, to have more benevolent consequentialist dispositions? Yes! (Imagine the reverse). ## Notes ### Holden Karnofsky on utility legions Here I'm also going to introduce the idea of a **"utility legion."** Where a utility monster is a single person capable of enough personal benefit (or cost) to swamp all other ethical considerations, a utility legion is a _set of persons_ that collectively has the same property - not because any one person is capable of unusual amounts of utility, but because the persons in the "legion" are so numerous. [...] **1 - They cause utilitarianism to make clearly, radically different prescriptions from other approaches to ethics.** A utility monster or utility legion might be constituted such that they reliably and linearly benefit from some particular benefit, and therefore ethics could effectively be reduced to supplying them with that benefit. For example, if a utility monster or legion reliably and linearly benefits from pizza, ethics could be reduced to supplying them with pizza. This would be a radically unfamiliar picture of ethics, almost no matter what we replaced "pizza" with. [...] Part of the reason I like the term "utility legion" is its association with homogeneity and discipline: what makes utility-legion-dominated morality unfamiliar is partly the fact that there are so many persons who benefit in a seemingly reliable, linear way from particular actions. [...] It seems to me that the biggest real-world debates between utilitarians (particularly effective altruists) and others tend to revolve around utility legions: sets of persons who can benefit from our actions in relatively straightforward and linear ways, with large enough populations that their interests could be argued to dominate ethical considerations. ### Avoid deontological framing of consequentialism https://www.philosophyetc.net/2021/12/consequentialisms-central-concept.html It's not a good idea to define consequentialism with a sentence of the form "an act is right iff". A better option is to sketch competing theories in terms of what they consider important: > Deontologists assign primary importance to acting in accordance with duty (with specific theories offering competing accounts of how those obligations are to be specified), virtue ethicists maybe something about acquiring and exemplifying virtues (?), and **consequentialists hold that what matters is promoting value**, or the realization of better outcomes. ### Thinking through utilitarianism Utilitarianism holds that an action is permissible if and only if, and because, it brings about the Complete State of Affairs that is best overall, and the best Complete State of Affairs is the one with the greatest sum total of pleasure minus pain. Accordingly, one way to understand Utilitarianism is to think of it as the view that lines up, in the most flatfooted way, the normative and the evaluative. Relevance Question: What descriptive facts are relevant? • Normative Version: What descriptive facts are intrinsically reason providing? • Evaluative Version: What descriptive facts are basically valuable? Significance Question: How significant is each relevant descriptive fact? •    Normative Version: What is the strength of the reason provided by a given relevant fact? •    Evaluative Version: How much Basic Value does a given relevant fact possess? Combinatorial Question: How do the relevant descriptive facts and their significance get combined? •    Normative Version: How do we arrive at the combined strength of the set of reasons for an action? •    Evaluative Version: How do we arrive at the Overall Value of a Complete State of Affairs? According to Utilitarianism the answer will ultimately come to what is good-for you and what is bad-for you. There is, on this view, a necessary connection between impersonal and personal value. That which is impersonally good is that which is personally good-for someone. Utilitarianism holds that the answer to this question is pain and pleasure. One’s welfare—one’s well-being or ill-being—depends solely on one’s experiences of pleasure and pain. Since Utilitarianism claims that impersonal value and {21} personal value track the same facts, it also holds that pleasure is not just good-for you; it is also basically good. normative predicates are essentially tied to agency. It only makes sense to talk about reasons for action in contexts in which agency is possible. There can be states of affairs that are good and bad, but because there is no agency, there are no reasons for action.11 The evaluative outstrips the normative. This difference between these two domains is important. It requires us to make a slight qualification concerning the facts that are reason providing. The Normative Version of the Relevance Question asks: What descriptive facts are intrinsically reason providing? Given the restricted scope of the normative, we cannot simply answer, being pained and being pleased. Rather, to account for the fact that the normative is linked with action, the relevant properties, according to Utilitarianism, are the property of being an Better as the Greater Balance of Pleasure over Pain: A Complete State of Affairs, S1, is better overall than a Complete State of Affairs, S2, if and only if S1 contains a higher sum total of pleasure minus pain than S2. Traditional Consequentialism: An agent’s Presently Available Alternative has the property of being permissible if and only if (and because) the performance of any of her other Presently Available Alternatives would not have brought about a Complete State of Affairs that’s better overall. It is the view that combines Traditional Consequentialism with Better as the Greater Balance of Pleasure over Pain. We can thus formulate the theory that is the focus of this book as Utilitarianism: An agent’s Presently Available Alternative has the property of being permissible if and only if (and because) the performance of any of her other Presently Available Alternatives would not have brought about a Complete State of Affairs with a higher sum total of pleasure minus pain. ... The first mistake is to hold that Utilitarianism requires agents to live directly as Utilitarians. Insofar as believing Utilitarianism is true or desiring what Utilitarianism holds to be desirable would fail to maximize the good, Utilitarianism will tell you to cause yourself to come to have different attitudes. The second mistake involves confusing Utilitarianism—an ethical theory—with the practical strategy we might adopt as Utilitarians in light of our various human shortcomings. Making decisions by calculating whether an act would maximize the sum total of pleasure minus pain, for example, would likely end in disaster. Think about how things would turn out if you drove a car by following this procedure. But Utilitarianism is an ethical theory. It should not be confused with the strategy we use, given our psychological makeup and circumstances, to approximate the moral ideal. ... Given their importance in contributing to pleasure production, Utilitarianism will tell us to take steps to secure the benefits of personal relationships, which will involve trying to form intrinsic desires for our loved ones. The kinds of creatures we are and the nature of close personal relationships leads to Self-Effacement. And this point concerning the near and dear can be generalized. Exclusively desiring pleasure and the absence of pain for their own sakes can be self-defeating. That is to say, adopting hedonic maximization as your sole end will almost guarantee that you fail to achieve this end. ... Approximation Strategy of a Utilitarian: The strategy that a Utilitarian agent believes would, if followed, bring about the greatest sum total of pleasure minus pain in the long run, given what she believes about her own psychology and circumstances. ... Just as you are going to fail to draw perfect circles, you are going to fail to act morally. But just as there are more and less egregious ways to fail at drawing circles, there are more and less egregious ways to fail morally. An approximation strategy is your attempt, given what you believe about yourself and your circumstances, to minimize the egregiousness of the failure. ... Decision Procedure: A set of rules that the agent can use, given her beliefs at the time of action, to identify whether an action is to be performed. The rules of a Decision Procedure pick out certain properties of acts that are immediately recognizable and then tells you to perform acts with these properties.22 The rule “do the first thing that comes to mind” could serve as a Decision Procedure. ... The need for a usable Decision Procedure takes us to the second main part of the Approximation Strategy of a Utilitarian, namely, the cultivation of a **Motivational Set**: A set of motives including such things as attitudes, emotions, loyalties, and projects.24 {33} Many items that make up your Motivational Set are outside of your control. Hunger, for example, simply befalls you. Yet many others are under your control. However, as noted above, it is not easy to quickly adjust our attitudes, emotions, loyalties, projects, and the like. **Our immediate, voluntary control over much of our Motivational Set is minimal.** ... The Approximation Strategy of a Utilitarian will likely include defeasible constraints against murder and torture, emphasize parental love and other forms of partiality, and promote the cultivation of strong aversions toward theft and promise breaking.