Consequentialism
Consequentialism is the theory that the right act in any situation is the act which will lead to the most good. The most famous example of a consequentialist theory is utilitarianism which famously equates good with the sum of human happiness. Other consequentialist theories give different accounts of what is good. For instance, they might say that satisfying one’s preferences or benefiting one’s children are good in and of themselves. However, all consequentialist theories are united in holding that we are morally obliged to simply maximise this good and that this is the only moral constraint.
Utilitarianism and other consequentialist theories have been shown to provide a very simple yet powerful account of what makes right actions right, but they also lead to several important conflicts with our intuition and a few theoretical complaints. One such complaint that is often raised against consequentialist theories is that by following such a theory we must painstakingly calculate the goodness of each option whenever we make a choice. This would be self-defeating since such difficult and stressful calculation would at times lead to a worse outcome than if we just followed simple rules of good conduct.
However, it has been recognised for some time by consequentialist thinkers that this argument does not refute consequentialism itself, but instead it just tells us that the naïve strategy of attempting to calculate the expected good of each action is not always the strategy that a consequentialist should adopt. Instead, it appears that they should adopt whichever strategy for decision making will actually lead to the best outcome. If this happens to be an approach that uses hard and fast rules rather than calculation, then so be it.
This move to using consequentialism to assess decision making procedures in terms of their outcomes is very promising, for not only does it resolve this theoretical complaint, but it also shows how consequentialism can be more in tune with our moral intuitions. For instance, moral philosophers have attacked utilitarianism (and consequentialism in general) for demanding cold calculation and not taking sufficient account of personal relationships. However, adherents to this more sophisticated version of consequentialism can say that decision making strategies involving cold calculation and indifference to personal relationships may well lead to worse outcomes than other, more ‘human’ approaches and, if so, we would be under no obligation to adhere to them. Indeed, in this case consequentialism would compel us to use the more intuitive approaches.
In fact, I think that the separation of morality into a criterion of rightness and a decision procedure is the key to resolving the dispute at the heart of ethics between consequentialists and deontologists. Serious consequentialists should accept that the best decision procedures will be deontological in their structure, even though they are justified on consequentialist grounds, while serious deontologists should accept that this is the true role their theories play. Such an approach acknowledges the strong intuitive pull of each class of theory and suggests that they have not been so much in conflict, as talking past each other. Resolving this dispute in such a way is not a trivial task, but I believe it can be done.
In my BPhil thesis, Consequentialism and Decision Procedures, I took these ideas (which until now had not received more than a few pages scattered across the literature) and expounded such a version of consequentialism. Where most explanations of consequentialism focus on the question:
'What should I do?'
I tried to uncover a consequentialist approach to a subtly different question:
'How should I decide what to do?'
In doing so, I examined several tensions in the new theory and showed how they could be resolved without sacrificing any theoretical simplicity. This work was very well received by my examiners, but the time constraints meant that I had not been able to address the topic as fully as it deserves. I am thus extending this work into a doctoral dissertation under the supervision of John Broome and Derek Parfit.