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Resisting the Seductive Appeal of Consequentialism: Goals, Options, and Non-quantitative Mattering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Robert Noggle
Affiliation:
Central Michigan University, R.Noggle@cmich.edu

Abstract

Impartially Optimizing Consequentialism (IOC) requires agents to act so as to bring about the best outcome, as judged by a preference ordering which is impartial among the needs and interests of all persons. IOC may seem to be only rational response to the recognition that one is only one person among many others with equal intrinsic moral status. A person who adopts a less impartial deontological alternative to IOC may seem to fail to take seriously the fact that other persons matter in the same way that she takes herself to matter. This paper examines this ‘seductive appeal’ of IOC. It argues that IOC is not the only rational way to recognize the fact that each person matters. It presents an alternative conception of how to recognize the status of other persons as beingswho-matter, an alternative that has Kantian rather than consequentialist implications.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2003

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References

1 I borrow this idea from Nagel, Thomas, The Possibility of Altruism, Oxford, 1970, pp. 99109Google Scholar, though I do not draw the same conclusions that Nagel draws there. (In fact, Nagel himself no longer draws quite those same conclusions; see The View from Nowhere, Oxford, 1986, p. 169Google Scholar.)

2 Readers who do not think that persons are the ‘centrepiece’ of morality can translate most of what I say here with fairly little loss by replacing ‘persons’ with ‘sentient beings.’

3 In this context, I mean ‘action’ and ‘course of action’ to apply broadly so as to include deliberate inactions as well as actions. Also, to make the text less cumbersome, I have for the most part suppressed the usual language that would need to be included to deal with cases of probable effects of a course of action on the net aggregate satisfaction of the aggregate needs and interests of the set of all persons. I will understand the relevant ‘expected contribution’ clauses to be tacitly included in the simpler formulations given in most of the text.

4 I leave open the question whether such principles require direct application of the imperative to optimize one's contribution to the net satisfaction of interests and needs, or whether they require adopting intermediate action-guiding rules that, when followed, will have this effect.

5 There is some debate among consequentialists (particularly utilitarians) as to whether consequentialist theories are best seen as attributing moral status to persons primarily and deriving the moral status of utility from the status of persons, or as theories that see the moral status of utility as primary. Nothing here is meant to settle that issue one way or the other. All I claim here is that if we begin with the idea that all persons have an equally fundamental moral status, then there is still a very seductive line of thought that leads to some version of IOC. It is, of course, easier to get to utilitarianism from the claim that the value of utility is fundamental, but my point is simply that the appeal of consequentialist theories is still quite strong even if we begin with the idea that the value of persons is fundamental.

6 Consequentialists sometimes follow John Stuart Mill's remarks (in ch. 2 of Utilitarianism) in suggesting that it may be an empirical fact that an agent's total contribution to the aggregate benefit of the set of all persons is often greatest when the agent devotes most of her time, attention, energy, and other resources to the benefit of a small number of other persons, generally herself and those closest to her. Although some consequentialists are fond of pointing out the difficulties of adding to the impartial good by making others happy, and the ease with which we can contribute to the impartial good by ‘taking care of our own’, it is not at all clear that such considerations can really carve out significant moral elbow room. After all, it does not take any great feat of sympathetic identification or call upon any superhuman epistemic resources to know that people who are sick and starving need medicine and food, and it takes no more than a credit card and a phone or an Internet connection to contribute to providing them. It strikes me as somewhat far-fetched to claim that our ignorance of others is so great that the best we can do from a consequentialist perspective is to spend most of our time and energy looking after ourselves and our nearest and dearest.

7 To aid readability, I will abbreviate ‘those of us living in affluent societies’ as ‘us’ and ‘we’ in the rest of the paper. In so doing, I do not, of course, mean to imply that those of us who are not living in such societies are ‘them’ rather than ‘us’ in any sense deeper than the fact that the paper's author and most of its likely audience are a part of a relatively affluent subset of human beings.

8 See Scheffler, Samuel, The Rejection of Consequentialism, Oxford, 1982, especially pp. 1726Google Scholar.

9 This use of the term ‘project’ follows that of Bernard Williams. See ‘Persons, Character, and Morality”, repr. ed. A. O. Rorty, The Identities of Persons, Berkeley, 1976.

10 Depending on how one individuates reasons, needs, and interests, and how one counts the indirect effects of the satisfaction of needs and interests, one may need to understand ‘intensity” here as a shorthand for ‘intensity and any indirect effects on the satisfaction of other needs and interests’. To make the text less cumbersome, I will omit such qualifications here and in the rest of the paper.

11 Of course something can be almost square, but almost square is not square. Unlike squareness, ‘almost-squareness’ does seem to admit of degrees, since something can fall short of being a square by a greater or lesser degree. Thus, a circle is less ‘almost-square’ than a non-square rhombus. But though we might say colloquially that the non-square rhombus is ‘more square’ than the circle, I take it that what we really mean is that it is closer to being a square. It is not as though the non-square rhombus has more of the property of squareness than the circle.

12 See Kant, Immanuel, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Ellington, James W., Indianapolis [1785], 1981, p. 435Google Scholar. (All references to Kant's text are given in Prussian Academy pages.)

13 However, see Kant, , Groundwork, pp. 424Google Scholar and 428 f. for passages that have inspired much of the thinking in this paper.

14 See Hare, R. M., ‘Could Kant have Been a Utilitarian?’, Utilitas, v (1993)Google Scholar and Cummiskey, David, ‘Kantian Consequentialism’, Ethics, cviii (1997)Google Scholar and Kantian Consequentialism, New York, 1997Google Scholar.

15 See Kant, , Groundwork, p. 428Google Scholar.

16 See Kant, , Groundwork, pp. 430 fGoogle Scholar;, and the Doctrine of Virtue (part two of The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Gregor, Mary, Cambridge [1797], 1996), 6:387 fGoogle Scholar.

17 I will count expending resources to prevent a setback to a goal as a form of promoting that goal. The underlying idea is that to promote a goal is to expend one's resources in such a way as to bring it about that the goal is furthered relative to how it would be had the resources not been expended. When some outside factor will cause a setback to a goal unless the agent expends resources to prevent it, the expending of resources falls under this characterization of promoting the goal (since, ex hypothesi, the goal is furthered relative to the state it would have been in had the resources not been expended). In the rest of the paper I will generally omit explicit reference to this inclusion of preventing a setback to a goal in the same category as promoting it. Also, as a first approximation, I would say that an agent has expended resources if the agent's resources have been expended, and if the agent was in a position to control whether those resources were expended. The distinction between expending resources and failing to expend resources may cut across the distinction between actions and omissions. For example: If I set up an automatic payroll deduction to pay for my parking permit, then every month I am expending resources, yet it is not clear that I am acting each month.

18 For while Sophie may have been forced to make this choice, she would have chosen not to be in such a position in the first place. In fact, it was presumably the sadistic Nazi officer's intention to make Sophie think that she really had commodified at least one of her children. To infer from the fact that we are sometimes forced to choose between ultimate ends that we really do measure them out in some kind of common currency is much like mistaking a hold-up for charity: We may choose to hand over the money, but that is no sign that we really do value giving up our money to some ruffian. One way to tell whether someone does treat two goals as ultimate is to ask whether she would try to avoid situations in which she must choose between the two. This account of a ‘willing’ versus an ‘unwilling’ trade parallels Gerald Dworkin's account of choosing freely. See Dworkin, Gerald, ‘Acting Freely’, Nous iv (1970)Google Scholar. It is also indicative of a forced choice between ultimate ends that one is at a loss to know what to do, not simply because she does not know which ultimate goal is ‘more important’ but because she faces a genuine dilemma that cannot be resolved simply by acquiring more information or undergoing further reflection on her ultimate goals.

19 Similarly, if my goal of high-altitude hiking is gradually set back by spending most of the year in (the ironically named) Mount Pleasant, Michigan, elevation 230m., then it seems clear that I may retain the goal even though I am unable to prevent it from being set back at a certain time. This parallel between failing to promote a goal and failing to prevent it from being set back is additional evidence that they belong in the same category (see n. 17 above).

20 Presumably if an agent had unlimited resources and opportunities, then it would be irrational for her to fail to promote any ultimate goal.

21 While I think that this conception of an ultimate goal is a plausible analysis of our ordinary concept of an ultimate goal, even if I am wrong about that, I would argue that the Kantian alternative is free to treat it as a theoretical construct. In that case, the criteria for its defensibility would include whether it is logically coherent and the overall cogency of the theory in which it is embedded rather than whether it matches up exactly with our pre-theoretic notion of an ultimate goal.

22 See Kant, , Doctrine of Virtue, pp. 390 f., 393Google Scholar; for two important recent discussions of this distinction, with special attention to the question of the demandingness of morality, see ch. 8 of Hill's, ThomasDignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory, Ithaca, 1992Google Scholar and ch. 3 of Baron's, MarciaKantian Ethics Almost Without Apology, Ithaca, 1995Google Scholar.

23 A distinct though somewhat related question concerns whether or not the fundamental moral status that the Kantian alternative attributes to persons might depend on features of persons that are matters of degree, and that might be acquired gradually rather than all at once. This question, which was raised by an anonymous reviewer for Utilitas, raises important issues about the nature of the concept of personhood. Views that define personhood in terms of the possession of properties that a human being acquires gradually during childhood must claim either that personhood is acquired gradually as these properties are acquired, or that it is acquired all at once, perhaps when some threshold is reached. Obviously the first option is likely to be unpalatable to those who, like me, want to maintain both that persons have a fundamental moral status that is a matter of kind rather than degree and that children are persons. It appears, then, that proponents of the claim that children have the same basic moral status as adults are likely to need a theory of personhood that grants it all at once and at a low enough threshold for children to achieve it. Obviously, the presentation of such a theory would take me too far afield for this paper, but I have dealt with some of these issues in ‘Special Agents: Children's Autonomy and Parental Authority’, ed. Archard, David and MacLeod, Colin, The Moral and Political Status of Children, Oxford, 2002CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Shapiro's, TamarWhat is a Child?’, Ethics, cix (1999)Google Scholar for a recent discussion of this issue specifically within the context of Kant's theory.

24 For more on the notion of a covering value, see Chang's, Ruth introduction to Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason, ed. Chang, Ruth, Cambridge, Mass., 1997Google Scholar.

25 Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere, pp. 140–3Google Scholar. See also Mackie, J. L., Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Harmondsworth, 1977, pp. 3842Google Scholar.

26 By locutions such as ‘more adequate moral perspective’ and ‘improved moral perspective’ here and elsewhere, I simply mean that the moral perspective is better according to whatever criteria are appropriate for judging moral perspectives qua moral perspectives.

27 Of course this is an approximation. In practice, some temporal partiality is probably consistent with prudence simply because the future is uncertain. Whether or not any temporal partiality over and above that justified by the fact that the future is uncertain is rational remains highly controversial. These controversies will not concern us here, and those who believe that some temporal partiality is justified are free to read ‘temporal impartiality’ as ‘temporal near impartiality.’

28 This argument is similar in structure to the form of argument pursued in Kagan's, ShellyThe Limits of Morality, Oxford, 1989Google Scholar. My reconstruction of this part of the debate between the consequentialist and deontologist has been heavily influenced by Kagan's work, as well as that of Thomas Nagel and Derek Parfit.

29 See Kant, , Groundwork, p. 437Google Scholar.

30 I explore the question of the proper relationship between morality and the facts about human nature, the nature of persons, and the nature of agency in From the Nature of Persons to the Structure of Morality’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, xxxi (2001)Google Scholar.

31 For Kagan's notion of a pro tanto reason to promote the good, see The Limits of Morality, pp. 16–19.

32 An early version of this paper was presented at the University of Western Ontario's philosophy department on 11 November 2000, and I am grateful to audience members, especially Samantha Brennan, for comments and questions. The penultimate draft was completed while I was on a leave sponsored by the CMU's Research Professorship program, and I am grateful for that support.