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Centre Of Bioethical Research & Analysis (COBRA)

ConSEQUENTIALISM

Consequentialism is a theory of the right – it sets out to show what it is for a right action to be right. The claim is that an action is right iff it produces the best available consequences. This captures a widely held moral intuition, namely, that it must be right to make the world a better place. Since “best” means “most good”, we need a theory of the good to make the principle produce determinate results.

Utilitarianism

One plausible view of the good is that the good is human happiness (a monistic theory of the good). On this view, the consequentialist principle tells us that the right action is the one that produces the most happiness. This form of consequentialism is known as utilitarianism. Act–utilitarianism is the view that the utilitarian principle (which can be summed up as ’maximise happiness’) should be applied to each act in turn.

Advantages of Act-Utilitarianism

(i) it meets the pro-consequentialist intuition that it must be right to make the world a better place.

(ii) it appears to provide a clear decision procedure for moral dilemmas and conflicts.

Disadvantages of Act-Utilitarianism

(i) difficulty in comparing and aggregating happiness (which we need to be able to do if we are to maximise it).

(ii) act-utilitarianism is silent about how happiness is to be distributed – but this seems to be morally important.

(iii) act-utilitarianism seems to endorse horrific acts if they will produce more overall happiness than any alternative.

(iv) act-utilitarianism is too demanding a moral theory.

Alternatives to Act-Utilitarianism

Objection (iii) can be met by rule-utilitarianism, which is the view that an action is right iff it conforms to a rule which, if everyone obeyed it, would maximise happiness. One objection to this view is that according to it, it will sometimes be the case that a particular action that would maximise happiness is not right (e.g. it goes against the rules) and a particular action that wouldn’t maximise happiness may nonetheless be right. So, the appealing connection is lost between the right and the good – a main attraction of utilitarianism has been lost.

Objection (iv) can be met by indirect act-utilitarianism, which is the view that the right action is always the one that maximises happiness, but if always aiming at the right action is so demanding that we turn into people who are not much good at maximising happiness, then we shouldn’t make our moral decisions by directly using the utilitarian principle. Instead we should use a set of rules, conformity to which will actually lead to happiness-maximisation. These rules may look very like typical deontological prohibitions and requirements (thus meeting objection (iii) as well). The theory of the right has now been separated from the theory of decision making. (The main problem with this view is that it seems to require us to be moral split-personalities, such that we are utilitarians in theory, but we mustn’t use our theory when making practical decisions).

Questions

Question: is there now any difference between indirect act-utilitarianism and deontology?

Answer: yes, there is: the deontologist denies that the various prohibitions and requirements are in place just because they will ultimately maximise happiness.

Perhaps this thought can be accommodated by abandoning utilitarianism and accepting a plurality of goods, thus giving us indirect act-consequentialism – the view that the right action is the one that will produce the greatest amount of good (construed pluralistically), but that we shouldn’t use this as a principle in deciding what to do, for the reasons given above.

Question: is there now any difference between consequentialism and deontology?

Answer: yes, there is: the consequentialist will sanction as right breaches of prohibitions if that’s the only way to prevent even more breaches of these prohibitions; the deontologist will not. That is, the consequentialist only recognises agent-neutral rules (of the form “ensure that x isn’t done”), whereas the deontologist also recognises agent-relative rules (of the form “ensure that you, the agent, don’t do x”).

The consequentialist argument here is that if x is prohibited, it must be because it is very bad and, if it’s so bad, surely it must be right to act so as to minimise the occurrences of x, even if it means that we have to do x ourselves in order to prevent others doing x more frequently. It is this claim that the deontologist denies.

Further Reading

Singer, P. (ed), A companion to ethics, Blackwell, 1991. Chapters 19 & 20.

Beachamp, T., & Childress, J., Principles of Biomedical Ethics, OUP, 1994. Chapter 2.

Links

The PHG foundation have created a very short, but interesting, description of what consequentialism is, and the "end justifies the means" attitude that underpins it, here. They also describe an ethical scenario where the principles of utilitarian thought are applied.

Another very interest link is Michael Sandel's seminar on the morality of murder, as part of his justice series, given at Harvard University. In the presentation he analyses the ethical dilemmas faced within the trolley problem, which was first established by Philippa Foot. It questions the ethical merit of both the utilitarian and deontological positions in these very complex ethical scenarios.  

    

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