The Evil Outcomes of Consequentialism

justice statue
justice statue





The Good

  4. The ends do seem to possess some moral weight.

The Bad


  2. The ends do not justify the means.
  3. Too few “good” elements
  5. Utilitarian acts have no intrinsic value
  6. It’s too Impersonal
  7. Consequentialism Fails to Avoid Absolutism
  8. Discriminates Against Minorities
  10. “End” is ambiguous
  11. How long is the long run?
  12. Suspended “good”
  13. Character Is Good
  14. Consequentialism puts the locus of ethics beyond our reach
  15. Pleasure can be bad and pain can be good.
  16. The Utilitarian fallacy
  17. Consequentialism Struggles with Intrinsic goods
  18. Consequentialism Suffers Logical contradictions
  20. Consequentialism Suffers the Naturalistic Fallacy
  21. Consequentialism has no real metaethic
  23. Utilitarianism is Relativistic




5 thoughts on “The Evil Outcomes of Consequentialism

  1. Interesting read! I don’t agree with much of it, but I thought it was well-discussed. There are a few of your points I would like to specifically hit:

    1. I don’t see a problem with this, so long as people end up getting treated better than they otherwise would have. Imagine you are going to be placed into one of two societies. The first one will treat you as an end rather than a means to an end, but you’ll be treated badly. The second will treat you as a means to an end, but you’ll have a greater likelihood of being treated well. Which would you pick? I think most would pick the second. In fact, in these scenarios, I think “Which society will give me the greatest chance of being treated well?” is the only question we would care about.

    2. Sometimes the ends do justify the means. If you shoot an armed nighttime intruder to protect your family, what will be your justification for your actions? It will probably be something to the effect of “If I hadn’t shot him, he could have killed us all.” That is pointing to the ends to justify the means. It seems very odd to me to say that the outcome of our actions has no bearing on the justification of our actions.

    3. One can be a consequentialist about any of these things. One could be a virtue consequentialist, holding the view that whatever actions maximize virtue are good actions. Consequentialism is simply a view about how we should evaluate actions. It doesn’t specify any specific ingredient.

    5. This is an oversimplification of utilitarianism. It is perfectly consistent with many forms of utilitarianism to say that we should take actions that produce the greatest expected value of X, where X is the good we are pursuing. Trying to save a drowning child has a high expected value of good, even if we only have a 50% chance of being successful. A 50% chance of acheiving a great good is a worthy pursuit.

    6. Our aversion to this sort of impersonal view of morality is likely a product of our own evolutionary history, nothing more. It doesn’t seem obvious to me that governments should value their own citizens over other citizens. Rather, this simply sounds like the sort of “in group/out group” choices our evolutionary ancestors made for protection.

    8. Consequentialism doesn’t simply say that any action that is better than any other alternative is justified. Killing all of the minorities isn’t justified simply because it would be better than killing all of the majorities. Rather, the act of killing all minorities must be evaluated in both a counterfactual sense (What if the minorities hadn’t been killed?) and a best substitute sense (What other actions could have been taken rather than killing the minorities?). Killing all minorities would, in the vast majority of scenarios, fail these tests.

    11. We face a great deal of uncertainty when projecting outcomes into the far future. This uncertainty probably lets us off the hook for “down the chain” reactions that happen many years into the future. If I help an old lady across the street, the foreseeable aspects of my actions contain more good than bad. It’s possible that she will go on to save a child from drowning, and that child will grow up to become a horrible terrorist who kills thousands of people. But that outcome isn’t foreseeable from my epistemic vantage point, and the weighted average value of all possible worlds where I help the lady is almost certainly greater than the weighted average value of possible worlds where I let her get hit by a car.

    12. See my critique from #11. Many forms of consequentialism allow us to evaluate behaviors based on the expected value of the outcomes.

    1. Zack, thank you for your feedback. I’ll try to address your thoughtful responses. I appreciate the effort put into a thorough assessment.

      You said:
      “1. I don’t see a problem with this [treating people as means instead of ends], so long as people end up getting treated better than they otherwise would have.”

      It sounds like you just affirmed slavery, so long as people were rescued from an overall worse situation, say between warring tribes in Africa, into a society with more upward mobility and a higher standard of living than before. If they are “treated better than they otherwise would have been” then that still doesn’t justify doing unnecessary evil to them. You’d do better to appeal to a dilemma context, where a person has ONLY BAD OPTIONS to choose from (ex., prison camp versus indentured servitude). I’d suggest dilemma contexts can make many other ethical systems appear to be similar to consequentialism when they, in fact, are principally different.

      “2. Sometimes the ends do justify the means. If you shoot an armed nighttime intruder to protect your family,…”
      You gave an example of a dilemma scenario, i.e., kill or be killed. Just because many ethical systems can agree on a choice in a given scenario doesn’t mean they agree on the REASONS or the METAETHICS behind that choice. To put it another way, many ethical systems can agree that the “ends” have some moral weight, but they do not agree with consequentialism that the “ends” have ALL the moral weight. That’s what consequentialists need to prove, and so far, have not been able to prove that very well.

      “3. One can be a consequentialist about any of these things.”
      If you agree with me that non-consequences can serve the same role as consequences, then I don’t know what you mean by consequentialism. Your response suggests to me you don’t understand this critique, or else you are working on a different definition of “consequentialism” than I am. Perhaps I can clarify. I’m suggesting there are things, besides the “ends/consequences” which can and should impact our moral calculations. This is fundamentally antiethical to consequentialism. If one allows that non-consequences can be good-making properties then it’s no longer consequentialism. Perhaps we are equivocating on the word “consequentialism.”

      “5. [the notion that ‘Utilitarian acts have no intrinsic value’] is an oversimplification of utilitarianism”
      As I use the term “utiltiarian acts” i’m referring to some action performed within a moral event, where the “good-making property” for that act is located entirely in the outcomes (‘the ends”). If you disagree with this claim, it sounds like you are saying that something other than the outcomes can serve as a good-making property. If so, I think you might not be talking about utilitarianism. You might be talking about an accidental virtue ethicist, or some other school of thought where the ends, alone, do not justify the means. Remember, most every ethical system admits some moral weight to the outcomes, we just don’t grant that that outcomes are the only good-making property. In this way, I tend to suspect that many of the nuanced and qualified versions of consequentialism, aren’t really consequentialism at heart.

      This sounds like a reductive fallacy (a.k.a., “nothing buttery” fallacy). to say it’s “nothing but” some evolutionary accident is virtually impossible to prove, and amounts to a universal negative. You’d be safer to hedge your statement a little bit instead of putting confidence in, what appears to be, evolutionary ethics/social evolution. I’d suggest evolution has nothing whatsoever to tell us about morality, even if I thought some Darwinian or neo-darwinian evolutionary model were true. meanwhile, in philosophical ethics, it’s a stiff and powerful critique to identify where ethics is cold, robotic, and impersonal. That’s the implicit critique of consequentialist thinking the doomsday/dystopian scenarios we see in, for example, Age of Ultron, Terminator, Matrix, etc. When people are treated as objects and not subjects, we see some of the worst atrocities in human history. If you’ve read much about the Nazi rationalizations for the “final solution,” or the “tuskegee experiments,” or the eugenics projects in the early 20th century U.S. then you’ve seen how it’s a bad precedent to treat people as objects instead of subjects. this is also why Kant distilled this principle as the core of ethics, and it’s widely accepted and admitted across most ethical systems – people should not be objectified.

      “8. Consequentialism doesn’t simply say that any action that is better than any other alternative is justified.”
      Again, it sounds like you are not thinking consistently with consequentialism. with utilitarianism, the central guiding point is “greatest pleasure for the most people.” I don’t see how your explanation shows that your view of consequentialism fits with utilitarianism’s core principle. I don’t think you’ve effectively rebutted this point. And I’m not sure you understand it. You seem to suggest that alternative possibilities need to be considered. But, let’s say there is one scenario where 90% of the population can have 100 more units of pleasure, per person, by reducing the well-being of the remaining 10% by 100 units each. We’re talking a 80,000 unit net gain in pleasure. Now, I’m not saying utilitarianism requires that we take that action, but it at least permits it. And in democratically run and populists systems, we know that the majority often rules in these sorts of things whether that be slavery, sexism, trans/homophobia, etc. I don’t see why we’d need to appeal to to a dilemma context to identify if a given action is morally permitted within utilitarianism.

      “11. We face a great deal of uncertainty when projecting outcomes into the far future.”
      That’s my point. And that’s good reason to keep utilitarians on the hook. Since outcomes are future-oriented, utilitarianism is flawed for basing it’s ethical evaluation in something where, at best, we are only making educated guesses. Ethics involves too much guess-work already, it seems even more precarious when we realize that immediate outcomes aren’t certain, but utiltiarians still identify the core good-making property in something that’s subject to arbitrary and fickle fortune (i.e., the future). Furthermore, you didn’t really address the heart of my point. A given moral action can be “good” in the short run, “bad” in the mid-term,” “really bad” in the long run, but “really really good” in the extra-long run. Supposing that we are able to foresee (reasonably so) each of these stages, it seems a bit arbitrary to drop anchor at any one point and say “This stage of outcomes is what defines whether that action was good.” That’s hard to swallow because these different outcomes contradict each other ethically.

      12. . . .
      In light of my last response, and your reversion to comments on 11., I’d suggest you haven’t really addressed the core contention here. Expected outcomes are not outcomes. This may be a subtle deviation away from consequentialism. meanwhile, I reiterate my point from 11. above.

      1. 1. The slavery scenario IS a dilemma context. And you’re right: I do think slavery is the preferable option, at least in the hypothetical scenario presented here (I have no idea if it is an historic fact that slaves would have been worse off in Africa. I doubt it.). I think you are undervaluing the weight of what it means to say that a slave would have actually been better off as a slave than a free person in Africa. That assessment must include the subjective experience of slavery, not just superficial, objective assessments of the situation. If it is actually true that the slave, by his own subjective assessment, was better off as a slave than as a free African, why are you convinced he is wrong? Or, perhaps more accurately, why do you not think it is justifiable to give such a person what he or she prefers? Imagine there is a magic burglar who knows all future-facing propositions. In fact, he knows that if he were to rob my house today, I would go down to the police station to report the crime. He also knows that, on the way to the police station, I would meet the love of my life. Meeting her would improve my life immensely. What you are saying is that the all-knowing burglar should not rob my house, even though doing so would bring the greatest improvement to my happiness.

        2. Consequentialism doesn’t say that the ends have all the moral weight. That’s my point. “The ends justify the means” is a misunderstanding. People should instead understand consequentialism as saying “The ends, when weighed against the means, determine the moral status of an action.” To turn the question around, non-consequentialists must answer why we should sometimes take actions that produce a world with less of what we desire and more of what we don’t desire.

        3. I should have been clearer. Consequentialism is simply a view about how we should do the “moral math.” It says nothing about what things we should seek to maximize. Specific views within consequentialsim (such as utilitarianism) do, but consequentialism in general does not. We could devise a consequentialist system that seeks to maximize specific actions, certain values, etc. We could be a consequentialist about art, whereby we seek to maximize the amount of art produced.

        5. Our disagreement is about why non-good producing acts are still good in certain scenarios (such as a failed rescue attempt). No, consequentialism would not say that such acts are INTRINSICALLY good. But I don’t see why that is bad. Consequentialism would still say failed rescue attempts are generally good because they represent a possibility of producing a major good, such as saving a life. Intuitively, I don’t have a problem with that.

        6. You are suggesting that a moral theory that is impersonal is probably incorrect, and I understand you to be pointing to our intuitions as evidence. At least, that’s how I understood your argument. If it is indeed an argument about our intuitions, then evolutionary psychology certainly cannot be ignored. Keep in mind, I am referring to what I see as likely, not what is necessary. I am not saying it is necessarily the case that there are no other explanations for such an intuition. Rather, I am saying that, based on what we know about evolutionary psychology and the importance of pre-human primate in-group/out-group distinctions, it seems likely that we hold these intuitions due to our evolutionary past. That at least should reduce the importance we give to our disdain for impersonal moral explanations.

        The fact that people have committed unjustified actions due to a poor understanding of impersonal ethics is hardly a critique of impersonal ethical systems. Perhaps it gives us good reason to not try to convince our philosophically ignorant politicians to to be consequentialists, but it isn’t an argument against consequentialism.

        8. I don’t think you understood my critique. You are using dilemma scenarios, and my point is that utilitarianism seeks to maximize the GREATEST good for the greatest number of people, not simply greater good than some other option. In a dilemma scenario, such as the one you presented where we can gain 80,000 units, sure, utilitarianism (in a crude, non-rule form) would have us prefer the action that increases happiness by 80,000 units IF those are the only two options. But my point is that this doesn’t then give us license to perform any action that, in isolation, increases happiness. There are likely many other alternatives that would increase happiness even more (such as increasing everyone’s happiness by 99 units. There are further ramifications of our actions that might outweigh short-term happiness increases (such as civil war or general social unrest). In short, utilitarianism (in a crude, non-rule form) can give us some unpleasant results in dilemma scenarios that don’t always persist in the real world, where we have more than two options.

        One last thought on minorities and consequentialism: So far, you have been assessing only total utilitarianism. But there are many other forms, such as average utilitarianism. Maybe we should seek to make the average person as happy as possible rather than increase total happiness. One could also be a 10th percentile utilitarian or even a 1st percentile utilitarian, wherein we would seek to make the bottom 1% as happy as possible. It is even possible to imagine a system where one could be a Rawlsian and a utilitarian. The point here is that there are a lot of debates within utilitarianism that split along some of the issues you are presenting, but total utilitarianism is by no means a given.

        11. In your scenario, we should pick the option that produces the greatest overall amount of good, ignoring total/avg/etc. utilitarian considerations. If the action is “really bad” in the furthest timeline, and that “really bad” is bad enough to outweigh the short-term good, then it’s easy: Don’t do the action. If the short-term produces 100 units, the mid-term produces -50 units and the long-term produces -200 units, the action would produce -150 units. There’s no contradiction. I guess I also don’t get why it is bad to say that we should still consider the future when making moral decisions. We do this all the time in other arenas of life. You don’t know what will happen when you get in your car and drive to work, for example. You might be hit and killed, or your car might be stolen and used in a terrorist attack. But based on your best knowledge of the likelihood of outcomes, the benefit of you going to work via car outweighs the risk of not doing so. If that is sufficient for practical rationality, why is it not sufficient in moral decision making? To be clear, I am not saying we shouldn’t adjust for such uncertainties. But the existence of uncertainty doesn’t seem to me to be reason to ignore the future effects of our actions.

        12. I think the vast majority of consequentialists would endorse expected value decision making. Imagine I agree to haul a group of passengers down a mountainside road in a car that I know has faulty brakes. There is a 90% chance the brakes will fail and cause fatalities, but on this particular day, we make it down safely. Consequentialism doesn’t commit us to the idea that my act was a morally justifiable act simply because the outcome was positive. The expected value of my outcome was terrible, and I (along with my passengers) simply got lucky. A person who behaved like I behaved would not, over the long-run, maximize happiness and minimize suffering. Insofar as we know the likelihood of the various outcomes of our actions, we should evaluate the value of a given act based on the expected value of its outcome, not the actual outcome when all is said and done.

  2. 15. There are other forms of utilitarianism, such as preference utilitarianism. But I’m curious: Could you give me an example of a case where pleasure is bad? To clarify, I’m not asking for a scenario in which the way pleasure is being obtained is bad. I’m asking for a scenario in which the pleasure itself is bad (or conversely, the suffering itself is good)?

    16. This is a misuse of consequentialism. It has as much teeth as “Religion can cause violence, so religion is bad.” Simply because people have been bad consequentialists doesn’t mean consequentialism as a whole is bad. Consequentialism still permits moral agents to consider epistemic limitations, and accepting current atrocities for far future goods is often a fool’s wager due to the inherent difficulty of understanding the far future ramificiations of our present actions.

    18. This is a misrepresentation of consequentialism. All that matters is the net balance of all consequences produced by a given action. Of course, it is very difficult to foresee all consequences, but that doesn’t mean a consequentialist will believe a given action is both good and bad. Rather, there might be epistemic uncertainty regarding the status of a given action.

    20 and 21. You are confusing meta-ethics with moral theories here. Consequentialism is a moral theory. It is possible for two consequentialists to have different views about meta-ethics.

    This was a long response already, so I’ll leave it at that.

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