13.2 — Consequences

The simplest ethical theory, and the one nearly everybody reaches for first.

An action is right if it produces the best outcome, and wrong if it does not.

Utilitarianism

The developed form, from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Bentham's principle: the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

And his foundation: pleasure is the only thing good in itself, pain the only thing bad in itself, and everything else matters only through its effect on those.

Which produces a decision procedure. Add up the good and bad consequences for everybody affected, and choose the option with the best total.

And the feature that made it radical: everybody counts equally. Bentham's phrase is "each to count for one, nobody for more than one" — which in the eighteenth century meant the poor counted as much as the rich, and he applied it consistently, arguing for prison reform, women's suffrage, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, and the moral consideration of animals.

His argument about animals is the one that lasted: the question is not, can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?

Utilitarianism arrived as a reforming philosophy and did an enormous amount of good.

Mill's correction

Bentham treated all pleasures as equivalent, differing only in quantity — which produces the objection that a life of simple stimulation could outscore a life of thought.

Mill's answer: pleasures differ in kind as well as amount, and the test is what people who have experienced both prefer.

His line: it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

And the standard objection: this introduces a value that is not itself derived from pleasure, which means the theory is no longer purely about pleasure. Which is a real problem, and Mill's version is more attractive and less consistent.

The strengths

Three, and they are substantial.

It takes suffering seriously. Any theory that lets you say "the rule was followed" while people are being harmed has a problem, and this one cannot say that — 2.15 and 3.2 are exactly the failure it prevents.

It is impartial. Your suffering and a stranger's count the same. This is genuinely demanding and it is the basis of most modern arguments about global poverty and about animals.

And it forces you to look at effects. A very large amount of harm is done by people who checked their intentions and never checked what happened.

The problems

And they are severe, and each one is a case where the theory gives an answer almost nobody accepts.

It permits anything if the numbers work

The transplant case. A surgeon has five patients who will die without organs and one healthy person in for a check-up. Killing the one saves five.

The arithmetic is clear and the conclusion is monstrous.

And the standard reply — that a society where this happened would be worse off overall, so the arithmetic actually goes the other way — is a good reply and it is a repair rather than a refutation. It concedes that the raw calculation gave the wrong answer.

It has no place for rights

A right is a claim that holds even when overriding it would produce a better total (10.9).

Pure consequentialism cannot accommodate that by definition. If violating your rights produces more good overall, it should be done.

Which is why the twentieth century's worst projects were all justified consequentially — a large present cost for a larger future benefit, in a calculation nobody could check.

The calculation is not actually possible

You cannot know the consequences. They ramify indefinitely and you have access to almost none of them.

You cannot compare across people. There is no unit in which your suffering and mine can be added.

And the calculation is trivially manipulable. Anybody can adjust the estimates until the answer comes out where they wanted, and everybody does, and the appearance of arithmetic makes it look rigorous.

And it demands too much

If everybody counts equally, then every hour and every rupee you spend on yourself or your children could have done more good elsewhere.

Strictly applied, the theory permits no personal life at all.

And the reply that a rule permitting some partiality produces better outcomes overall is again a repair, and it concedes that the direct version fails.

Rule utilitarianism

The main attempted fix.

Judge rules rather than individual acts. Follow the rule that would produce the best outcome if generally adopted.

Which handles the transplant case: a rule permitting surgeons to kill patients is catastrophic, so do not do it even when this instance would help.

And the standard objection: what about a rule with an exception for cases where breaking it is better? Follow that consistently and you are back to act utilitarianism. The position collapses in one direction or the other under pressure.

Where it is genuinely the right tool

Because the criticisms above are not a dismissal, and this book will say where it wins.

Policy. When you are deciding for a population rather than for a person, consequences are the appropriate frame. A health system allocating a limited budget cannot use virtue ethics; it has to count.

Triage. Emergency medicine is explicitly consequentialist and correctly so.

Any decision where the alternative is doing nothing because the rules do not cover it.

And the expansion of the moral circle. The strongest arguments for taking animals seriously, and for taking distant strangers seriously, are consequentialist, and they have been effective precisely because "can they suffer" is hard to answer around.

The correct use

And here is the position this Part takes.

Consequences are a necessary input and an insufficient decision procedure.

Use them to check. Whatever you are about to do on principle, ask what will actually happen and to whom. A principle that produces a catastrophe is 2.15's problem and it needs to be caught.

Do not use them to justify. The moment a calculation is being used to license something you would otherwise refuse, look at who did the calculation and what they wanted the answer to be.

And notice the asymmetry: consequences are much more reliable as a veto than as a permission. **"This will cause serious harm, so no" is a strong argument. "This will produce more good, so the normal prohibition does not apply" is the argument every atrocity uses (2.7, 4.11).

What to carry from this page

Can they suffer? Bentham's question is the single most productive one ever asked about who counts.

Everybody counts equally is a demanding claim and most of the theory's achievements come from it.

A calculation that licenses what you would otherwise refuse should be examined for who made it and what they wanted.

And use consequences as a veto rather than as a permission. That single asymmetry preserves what the theory is good at and blocks what it is dangerous for.

Next: 13.3 — the second answer, which says some things are simply not to be done, and which meets a wall.