Consequentialism is the doctrine that actions are justified by their ends. The most popular form in the last century has been utilitarianism. The determination of these so-called theories splits into the question of what is the general value which all actions realize as a consequence, and the question of what particular actions realize that value. Within the second question is not only whether an action does or does not realize such an end, but which action best realizes that end, i.e. maximization of the value. There is an unasked question: Can I know what the consequence of my action really is?
Insofar as consequentialism is empirical or hypothetical, the answer is swift and unerring: No, I cannot know the consequence of any empirical action. This being the case, I cannot have a theory of morality where a ‘good’ consequence justifies my action, for I do not know the consequence my action ultimately produces. What I can know with certainty is the logical consequence inherent in the engagement of a principle or concept. I can know that the universal consequence of lying is the loss of the trust in communication which is engaged on the assumption that truths are being conveyed. Deontology is itself a “consequentialism” of a categorical nature, not of a hypothetical or empirical nature.
The following is a conversation from mid 2023 with a consequentialist in a philosophy Discord server. It was between my friend Raining Outside, a stranger named Holo, and myself.
Raining Outside —
Consequentialism is an infinite regress. Everything is only the possibility of something else, and the further the range of consequences is expanded in space and time the more the impossibility of action is revealed. Equally, everything becomes only a means, an instrument for something else. It is the endless emptying of value with the expansion of facts, and the endless devaluing of every fact with the expansion of value. It’s an all consuming maw to which everything is sacrificed without end [intended double-sense of without purpose and the infinite extension of the sacrifice.] The world emptied of actuality and tangibility, a lamb sacrificed to an unknown beyond. Like the economy of endless growth, seeking some unknown quantity.
Holo —
@Raining Outside, In philosophical ethics, consequentialism is the thesis that “normative properties [if any] depend only on consequences” (Sinnot-Armstrong, “Consequentialism”, SEP). It seems that, according to consequentialism (on this interpretation), normative properties (if any) of consequences depend only on (further) consequences; and normative properties (if any) of those further consequences depend only on (still further) consequences; etc. But this doesn’t necessarily (or doesn’t obviously) form an infinite regress, because the sole dependence of normative properties on consequences doesn’t necessarily (or doesn’t obviously) entail or presuppose that those consequences, on which normative properties solely depend, themselves have normative properties. Put another way: if it is assumed that some consequences, on which normative properties solely depend, do not have normative properties, then there is no infinite regress of the (linear) type illustrated above; and such an assumption is, as far as I can tell, compatible with consequentialism after all (on the interpretation given above).
Raining Outside —
Something being right or wrong depending upon its result makes action undecidable because there is no principled way to cease expanding the considerations prior to acting. Every additional consideration bears out further consequences, and every consideration of each consequence bears further considerations. Ad infinitum.
Holo —
I don’t think I find any of those statements obvious.
Something being right or wrong depending upon its result makes action undecidable because there is no principled way to cease expanding the considerations prior to acting. Why do you think this is true? (If it isn’t true, then there is a point at which additional considerations may not be required, whether (or not) every additional consideration bears out further consequences.)
Raining Outside —
The only reason to be a consequentialist is by believing that we cannot know in principle the right thing to do prior to acting, as that is what confers the norm to the consequence rather than the principle. Otherwise we would be acting on principles and deducing the act from it, the consequences only being relevant to the extent that they follow from and are contained in the principle, which cuts off the regress of the acts connection with the endless causal manifold.
Holo —
There are many provided reasons to be a consequentialist (whether (or not) any of those provided reasons are compelling) that are distinct from the reason that “we cannot know in principle the right thing to do prior to acting”.
Also, consequentialists don’t have to accept consequences that follow from a principle (that covers actions of some kinds) as consequentially valid; consequentialists can just consider (say) only consequences of the actions themselves, or (say) only consequences of the motives of the decision-maker, or (say) only consequences of some particular evaluative status (e.g., perhaps “merely satisfactory” consequences might not be accepted), or (say) only actual consequences (whether (or not) they were correctly predicted by a principle if any). There are several flavours of consequentialism.
Raining Outside —
Unintelligible. For the norm to lie in the consequence means that everything about the actor is irrelevant.
Holo —
No. For a counterexample, consider Evaluative Consequentialism — the thesis that moral rightness depends only on the value of the consequences — where “value” is assigned by the actor.
Raining Outside —
In that case the actor is the source of the value not the consequence.
Holo —
I don’t understand. In general, consequentialism is a covering term for a (rather wide) range of consequence-based claims in philosophical ethics. It’s not some specific position. For example:
> Consequentialists can just consider (say) only consequences of the actions themselves
This is called direct consequentialism. Theories which accept direct consequentialism are direct consequentialist theories.
> only consequences of the motives of the decision-maker.
I don’t know whether this ^^ has a particular name, but I said this with Jennie Louise’s paper Right Motive, Wrong Action (2006) in mind. In it she argues against direct consequentialist theories on the basis that “a right motive may lead an [actor] to perform a wrong act”, even though there is a sense in which actors in such case still did something morally right (despite direct consequentialist theories denying so).
> only consequences of some particular evaluative status
This ^^ is a crude generalization of mine, under which evaluative consequentialism (which considers consequences associated with a value) and maximizing consequentialism (which considers consequences that are the “best” compared to other consequences) were intended to fall.
> only actual consequences
This ^^ is actual consequentialism.
(Of course, what I said above in the sandboxes are not literally the views with which I associated them above, but that’s only to save text space. I’m expecting the general idea to be made clear by context.)
I don’t know any of these views to a large extent, because I don’t think about philosophical ethics much at all, so I can’t elaborate on whether (and, if so, how) each of these views make sense, but perhaps you can research these views. I just have a surface-level understanding of the variety, mostly from my (recent) reading of the SEP article, Consequentialism.
Raining Outside —
Example:
Friends are camping in the forest. They leave food out around the campsite. There are bears in the area. Obviously it is wrong to leave out the food. Let’s see why. Leaving food out around the campsite has the consequence of attracting bears. The consequence of attracting bears endangers everyone. Endangering others is wrong.
The consequence is lead back to a principle. It is only because endangering others is wrong in principle that leaving food out is relevant because the consequence of attracting bears is connected with it.
So we are really moving from endangering others being wrong in principle to the connection of the act of leaving food out around the campsite being wrong under the condition that it may attract bears. The principle is what confers the norm, not the consequence. Consequences are consequences only because of the principle through which the act is concieved as the connection of the consequence anticipated by the principle through which the act is rendered. As an act the actor is made essential and hence we cannot detach consequence from the nature of the action as the embodiment of a principle.
The act which is only determinable as wrong through the principle and the identification of the consequence with it as inherently instantiating the principle. We cannot ground the principle on the consequence. The consequence is only a consequence because of the principle. Acts are determined as right or wrong by identifying their connection to the principle and the consequence only as conceived through the principle, where the act is now understood as the agent realizing principles through action.
If we try to make the consequence what confers the norm then we logically cannot connect the principle to the act because the act must flow from the principle. Moral reasoning requires the principle be the cause of the act and the consequence the effect of the act through the principle as the ground of the relationship. It follows then that moral action is intrinsically deontological.
A.W. —
@Holo, responding only to your provided summaries:
> direct consequentialism
There can be no nonarbitrary provision for what a completed consequence is. The thousandth domino in a sequence of dominoes I only directly knock the first of down is still my direct consequence.
> consequence of motives
This is literally unintelligible. A motive does not determine a consequence. Regarding right motives and wrong consequences, the opposite also holds: wrong motives and methods for right consequences. The infinite chain of consequence issue remains with no valid reason for a cutoff.
> only some consequences…
Arbitrary position with no philosophical import. Yet again the infinite chain remains.
> only actual consequences
The only distinction that can be had here is if actuality becomes the primary measure, not empirical consequence. If that is the case, this is not consequentialism at all. An actual consequence is a true consequence, and what brings its value as measure is its true or actual nature. Without a proper theory of actuality, this runs into arbitrary cutoffs of chains of consequence or arbitrary measures of what “actuality” means.
As Rain argues, consequence only means something by a principle which measures it. There is no sheer consequence, there are only flawed deontologies with no true knowledge of the necessity of their principle, and so there is an attempt to justify these principles by appeal to an empirical aggregate which implicitly appeals to deontology: the non-contradiction of being. The reason the consequences and their principles mean anything at all is that the appeal is to a posited goodness that should be maintained and not destroyed. The modulation of quantities, such as maximization and minimization, of the quality or principle, are just a failed attempt at justification just like induction is to deduction. One appeals to quantity to attempt to ape the infinite justification of quality as such, of a categorical principle that needs no empirical or logical quantity to make its case. No quantity, of course, reaches quality’s infinity. Consequentialism is, like empiricism, a pseudo-syllogism of a rather barbaric finite representation.
Unless you are willing to claim something ludicrous, that you can determine the cutoff of consequences of empirical nature (which is all consequentialism can do since deontology already claims the certainty of logical consequences)—which you in principle cannot—your claims to know the actual consequence of actions is impossible. We have every rational right to claim that all human history is the “actual” consequence of a microbe’s squirming 4 billion years ago just as a stranger’s kindness led to the birth of Hitler and the death of those under his rule… if your definition of actuality has no necessity inherent to it as a categorical consideration regardless of quantitative instances.
Holo —
> A.W. — There can be no nonarbitrary provision for what a completed consequence is. The thousandth domino in a sequence of dominos I only directly knock the first of down is still my direct consequence.
The name “direct consequentialism” is motivated by the kind of consequence on which moral rightness is taken to depend, namely, a consequence of the act itself. Any such consequences are said to be “direct” in that sense. In contrast, I would not prima facie think that the thousandth domino falling over, as a result of you directly knocking down the first domino, is a “direct consequence” of that act; rather, it’s more likely to be a direct consequence of the 999th domino falling over, which is not your act. I take this to mean that the 1000th domino falling over is not a direct consequence of your act, because I’m thinking of “direct consequences” as consequences that aren’t “intercepted”, as it were, by an intermediary consequence — e.g., your act A of knocking the first domino down has the consequence C(1) of the 999th domino falling down which has the consequence C(2) of the 1000th domino falling down, and I take this example to illustrate that C(1) is an intermediary consequence in the sense that it intercepts C(2) of A. In general, I don’t take direct consequences of (direct or indirect) consequences of an act, to be direct consequences of that act.
Here might be a good way of clarifying what a “direct consequence” should mean (distinguished from a “consequence” merely speaking) in a way that captures that intuition:
If an act A, at time t, is a direct cause of a consequence C, at time t*, under Suppes’s (1970) definition of a direct cause, such that t < t*, then C is a direct consequence of A.
(I don’t know what a consequence is, but if consequences exist then I assume (i) like acts, consequences are events; (ii) consequences are caused; (iii) consequences can be (directly or indirectly) caused by acts. This should be enough for the definition above.)
> A motive does not determine a consequence. Regarding right motives and wrong consequences, the opposite [also] holds: wrong motives and methods for right consequences. The infinite chain of consequence remains with no valid reason for a cut-off.
If motives can bring about acts, and acts can bring about consequences, then I think motives can bring about consequences, and whenever they do, if they do, can be enough to determine those consequences brought about.
Also, there is at least one reason for a cut-off for an infinite chain of consequences, but it is not in relation to a “consequence of motives”, it’s instead in relation to whether (or not) it is assumed that some consequences do not have normative properties, which I talked about in a previous message (see here: general-chat). Whether (or not) this adds up to a “valid” reason, I am not sure.
Raining Outside —
Accidents would like a word here.
A.W. —
@Holo >The Nth consequence is not my fault
Oh yes it is. You, the agent, started it. It is directly your fault and no one else’s. You are arbitrarily cutting off the consequences of your action.
Holo —
Do you agree that a direct consequence of a (direct or indirect) consequence of an act, is a direct consequence of that act?
A.W. —
Do you understand what a consequence is? Because it seems you are not understanding the inherent problem here. You don’t get to pick and choose where consequences end after you act.
You start a domino chain you don’t know the end of, and your ignorance or desire to absolve yourself of the Nth domino is not what gets you off the hook. Since your consequences are empirical, you have the problem of determining the final consequence of your empirical act. The deontologist has no such requirement.
Holo —
I don’t know what a consequence is (more specifically in the sense that I do not have a technical or theoretical definition of what a “consequence” is). I said this two messages ago. However, I have a prima facie understanding of what a consequence is, namely, an event C that exists as a result of an act A, where A began to exist at a time prior to the time at which C began to exist, with “as a result of” in the sense of C being caused or causally sustained by A.
Raining Outside —
The distinction has been made between logical consequence and causal consequence.
Holo —
I disagree, and I think the way you have phrased that statement is kind of misleading.
A.W. —
I am being clear, and speak of what you mean, not what you say or intend.
Raining Outside —
The logical consequence is a categorical connection between the principle and the acts connection to the consequence through the principle. A causal consequence is the point of detachment from the act and so has no intelligible connection to any principle, and no logical connection to the act. It is a mute causal occurrence.
Holo —
Okay, here is what I mean:
- If we understand “consequentialism” to mean “normative properties only depend on consequences of acts”, then, for a consequentialist (proponent of consequentialism), there is no infinite regress structure of dependence of normative properties on consequences if the consequentialist also accepts that some consequences (of acts or of consequences of acts) do not have normative properties. That’s it. (Even if they accept there exists, or can exist, an “infinite chain of consequences”.) This was my initial claim at the beginning of this topic.
- There are many varieties of consequentialism which are distinct from one another. All the varieties of consequentialism I described, except for “consequence of motives”, is found in Section 1 of the SEP article, Consequentialism, by Sinnot-Armstrong. That was my next claim. I didn’t mean to say that these positions make sense; I specifically wrote that I don’t know any of the views to a large extent and that I (thereby) can’t elaborate on whether (and, if so, how) each of these views make sense.
- I would not interpret the 1000th domino falling as a result of you directly knocking over the first domino, as a direct consequence of that, and I do not take this to mean I am “picking and choosing” consequences, instead I take this to mean that I don’t classify that as a direct consequence — but it is a consequence nonetheless. This was my next claim, and I wrote exactly what I mean by a “direct consequence” compared to a “consequence” merely speaking, and I gave necessary conditions for what a “consequence” is which I’m willing to accept, even though I don’t have all the sufficient conditions.
- There is a sense in which motives can determine consequences, the sense being that motives, through bringing about acts and through the acts’ bringing about of consequences, can bring about consequences. That was my next claim.
These are my four main claims.
A.W. —
Ok, you have repeated what you first posted. I already knew this, and I have made my case against these already. If you cannot provide the necessary cutoff as opposed to arbitrary ones, you cannot show you have a moral theory at all.
You tell me you consider consequences, and I have yet to see how you know the ultimate consequence of any action. Butterfly effect problem.
Holo —
> A.W. — If you started a chain, you caused the whole chain. It is all your direct consequence.
When I was talking about a consequence, I was talking about a consequence in a chain, not a consequence qua chain.
A.W. —
And? You don’t get to decide what is your consequence. The distinction of direct and indirect is meaningless. You started it, you are responsible for all of it since it is yours. The only indirect consequence that is real is another subject who you influenced, but who as subject could have chosen otherwise. In society you are responsible for unintended consequences beyond your knowledge or believed end. Why? Because you caused it and it’s your action. That’s why you have to respond for accidents. It doesn’t matter how many intermediate objects transmitted your action sequence, it is your fault to the degree you caused it.
Raining Outside —
Only deontology allows us to make a distinction between direct and indirect consequence of moral action. Direct consequence is logically entailed, indirect consequence is causally entailed.
Holo —
Responsibility in society isn’t relevant to whether a consequence, in a chain of consequences beginning from an act, counts as a direct consequence.
A.W. —
Your arbitrary definition counts even less.
Raining Outside —
You see someone walking by a heavy tall block. You push the block, it falls on them. Are you responsible for the first moment of tilting it? Tilting it past a certain point? For all the tilting that occurs up until you remove your hand? Until it falls on them? Just before it falls on them? What it does 2 hours from that event?
Perhaps the wind pushed it as it was falling and it would have missed them if it weren’t for the wind. Are you no longer responsible? Or are you responsible for pushing it while it was windy? What causal story could make sense here? How do we distinguish what is direct or indirect?
Holo —
> A.W. — Your arbitrary definition counts even less.
Do you think my definition of a direct consequence isn’t a good definition of the term?
A.W. —
It’s arbitrary, who cares what anyone defines it as. We need a necessary definition that categorically shows the necessity of the argument itself.
Holo —
I don’t know lol, and prima facie I don’t think “you see someone walking by a heavy tall block. You push the block, it falls on them” gives me enough information to decide on the questions.
A.W. —
Nothing could be enough information. You cannot cognize the actual consequence of any action or event. You only know relative and apparent consequences, your cutoffs are arbitrary.
The Empyrean Trail 