Debunking Criticism of Consequentialism

How do you respond when your wife asks you if she looks fat in her dress? Can lying sometimes be justified if it‘s done to protect someones feelings. Or is it bad across the board, no matter the circumstance?
Would you say you’re ever justified in killing an innocent child? Probably not. But what if that child grew up to be one of the most evil dictators of all time, and by killing him in his crib, you could avoid the suffering of millions?

If you judge the rightness or wrongness of an action based on what consequences it brings about in the world, you are a so called consequentialists.

Some argue that one ought to live by certain absolute principles, like the ten commandments or the code of human rights, because otherwise any atrocotiy no matter how horrible can be permissible in the name of a higher good. It‘s the danger of the mentality „you can‘t make an omlette wihtout breaking a few eggs“ that many despots of the 20th century espoused.

There‘s a thought experiment that attempts to show the problem with consequentialism: Imagine you‘re a jew in germany under hitler. You and your family of 5 are hiding in an attic struggling to keep quiet because the SS is downstairs searching the house. You have your 2 month old baby in your arms that is about to start crying, and the only way to prevent the nazis from discovering you, is by smothering it.

If you have some doubts that doing so wouldn‘t really be the most moral thing to do, you‘re not really a consequentialist, because from a strictly consequentalist point of view the death of one is better than the death of 5.

If we our goal is to save the most amount of lives, what‘s wrong with killing and harvesting a healthy persons organs to save 5 people who are in desperate need of an organ transplant?

This is used as an argument that theres a need for moral principles that should be applied universally no matter the circumstance or the consequences.

But there is no good reason why the only consequences to be considered should be the number of deaths resulting from an action, as if this were the only consequential difference in the given examples.

A society in which anyone walking into a hospital, has to live in fear that he might be killed and harvested for his organs has dire consequences on our psychological wellbeing. This would say a lot about how little value this society places on the wellfare of individuals generally, if it could so easily be sacrificed. Its strange that these considereations should be exluded from the summation of consequences this action has.

In the case of smothering the baby to save the rest of the family, we struggle to call this moral. But not because we are blind to the consequences. On the contrary we considere more than just the tally of deaths. Think of how it must be to live the rest of your life with the thought of having killed your own child with your bare hands. These are psychological consequences that shouldn‘t be left out of consideration.

Mere survival is not always the most desirable outcome. There are situation in which you would rather die, than having to live with unbearable guilt and shame.

What other options for evaluating the goodness of an action other than its consequences, do we have? I’d be highly suspicious of any moral code whose justification is completely divorcable from any consequences in the real world.

The reason for living by certain principle that we hold sacro sanct, is because they reliably produce good outcomes. Treating people as ends in themselves and not as mere tools of manipulation has good effects. It promotes altruistic behaivour and stable societies.

When it comes to any of our tried and true moral principles, only deviate from them with caution, and only if the consequences make it necessary.

[darkengine]

If any woman asks me if a dress makes her look fat, I always answer with 100% honesty and say, "Absolutely not!" [After all, it's not the dress making her look fat; it's her body]. 😀

I'm also entirely consequentialist though in thought. The way I like to justify the differences in answers to the trolley dilemma and its variants is similar to how you did.

Most specifically, I like to point things out in terms of public safety. It is largely inconsequential to future public safety whether or not someone pulls the lever in the original trolley dilemma, since it's highly improbable that we'll find repeated common occurrences of people lying down on tracks (and a simple way to avoid being run over by trolleys is to avoid doing that; the solution to protect public safety is to keep people off the tracks). It is very much a public safety crisis if we condoned pushing innocent people off of bridges or harvesting the organs of patients in hospitals against their will.

This doesn't highlight a difference between deontological and consequentialist moral reasoning as I see it; if anything, I think it highlights the inability of deontologists to understand the depth to which we consequentialists evaluate probable consequences.

From my blunt perspective, a person is either a consequentialist who thinks about the possible consequences of their actions or they're blind and unquestioning followers of rules. I don't trust deontological types, since they could easily start to blindly follow rules which are very counter-productive or even downright tyrannical if they don't make it a habit to consider the consequences of their actions and take responsibility for them.

Also very much agreed with you that it's preferable to die prematurely as a decent person than to extend our lives through malevolent actions directed towards innocent people.