Hanoi, 1902: a bounty reasoned about rats and not about people.
Consequences
Judging an act by what it brings about - and the difficulty of knowing what that is.
- Theme
- Ethics and character
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term fixed
- 1789
In plain terms
An action is right if it makes things go better. That is the whole idea, and its appeal is that it is about the world rather than about rules - it asks what actually happens to people, which is what most people think ethics is for.
The difficulties arrive with the arithmetic. Which consequences count, and for how long? Everything has effects forever, and no one can trace them. If only the foreseeable ones count, then a well-meant catastrophe is fine. If all of them count, nobody has ever known whether any act was right.
And there is the standing objection: if only outcomes matter, then anything is permitted provided the total comes out ahead - including things almost everyone regards as impermissible whatever the total. Consequentialists have answers, and the answers are where the theory gets complicated.
As a philosopher would put it
Classical utilitarianism is the paradigm: an act is right if it maximises aggregate welfare. The structure generalises - any theory making rightness a function of outcomes is consequentialist, whatever it takes to be good.
The main internal divisions are between act and rule versions, and between maximising and satisficing ones. Rule consequentialism assesses rules by their consequences and acts by the rules, which blunts the standard objections at the cost of the charge of rule-worship: if breaking the rule would produce more good, adherence looks irrational.
The standing external objections are three. Demandingness: if one ought to maximise, then almost every act is wrong, since something better was available. Integrity: Williams's argument that the theory requires a person to treat their own deepest commitments as one input among many. And the separateness of persons: Rawls's charge that aggregation extends to society a principle of trade-off that only makes sense within a single life.
Where you meet it
In colonial Hanoi the French administration wanted fewer rats in the sewer system. In 1902 it offered a bounty, payable on presentation of a rat's tail.
Tails arrived in very large numbers. Inspectors then began finding live rats in the city with their tails cut off, released to breed. Some entrepreneurs set up rat farms on the outskirts. The rat population did not fall, and the programme was abandoned.
Michael Vann's archival account establishes the details and corrects the tidier versions in circulation. What the case demonstrates is not that consequences do not matter but that the consequences of an act include the responses of everyone who learns of it. The administration reasoned about the effect of the bounty on rats and not about its effect on people, which is the standard failure - and it is a problem for any theory that requires an act to be assessed by its results, since the results include what other agents do next.
What is actually disputed
Whether outcomes are all that matter.
The permanent objection is that consequentialism licenses anything given a large enough benefit - convicting an innocent to prevent a riot, harvesting one person's organs to save five. Sophisticated versions block these by noting that the practices would have terrible effects if generalised, which critics regard as getting the right answer for the wrong reason: the act is wrong because of what it is, not because of what a policy of doing it would produce.
The defence, made forcefully by Smart and by Singer, is that the objection amounts to preferring clean hands to better outcomes, and that a moral theory which lets an avoidable disaster happen in order to preserve someone's integrity has its priorities inverted.
Neither side has moved the other in fifty years, which suggests the disagreement is about what ethics is for rather than about which acts are right.
Commonly confused with
- thinking ahead Everyone considers consequences. The theory is the claim that they are the only thing that determines rightness.
- the end justifies the means A slogan for one crude version. Sophisticated forms deny that most means are justified, because the means have consequences too.
Defined against
- Duty The central division in modern ethics, between what an act produces and what an act is
Philosophers
- Jeremy Bentham The systematic method, with a unit of account
- John Stuart Mill The refinement, with higher and lower pleasures
- Mozi Consequentialist reasoning two millennia earlier
- Peter Singer The demanding modern version, applied
- John Bordley Rawls The separateness-of-persons objection
Works
- An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation The systematic statement
- On Liberty Where the framework is applied to liberty
- Mozi The early Chinese consequentialist arguments
- A Theory of Justice The most influential objection
- Principia Ethica Where the good is held to be indefinable, complicating the whole project
Schools
- Classical Utilitarianism The paradigm case
- Mohism Where consequential reasoning appears independently
- Carvaka (Lokayata) Where only observable effects count
- Classical Pragmatism Where consequences are the test of meaning as well as of action
- Communitarianism Where aggregation is resisted
Related concepts
Utility 1789 · Duty 1785 · Double effect c. 1270 · Moral luck 1976 · Responsibility c. 340 BC
Mozi argues from consequences in the fifth century BC and the Chārvāka school earlier still; Bentham's contribution is a systematic method with a unit of measurement, and Anscombe coined consequentialism in 1958 as a criticism.