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Acknowledgments
My first thanks go to all of the contributors to this volume for their commitment, inspiring ideas, and admirable openness throughout the project; it has been a pleasure and an honor to learn from them. I am deeply indebted to Peter Ohlin, Emily Saccharin, Andrew Ward, and Isla Ng at Oxford University Press for their help and patience throughout this process; to an anonymous reviewer for insightful and constructive comments; to Konstantin Weber for unfailing editorial assistance; and to Gerhard Ernst for invaluable encouragement and advice from the start. Most of all, I would like to thank Ulrike for her unwavering support and for being what she is.
Contributors
Monika Betzler holds the chair for practical philosophy and ethics at the LudwigMaximilians-Universität at Munich. Her main interests lie in moral psychology, theories of practical reason, and normative ethics. Her recent research focuses on the normative significance of close relationships and personal projects as well as on autonomy, weakness of will, and other challenges to our rational agency. She has a book in preparation on why personal projects matter, and her most recent coedited book is on familiar duties (2015).
Richard Yetter Chappell is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Miami. His primary research interests concern the defense and development of consequentialism, effective altruism, and robust (nonnaturalist) normative realism. Chappell blogs at http://www.philosophyetc.net about these and other topics (including philosophical zombies, peer disagreement, and personal identity). He has published articles in journals including Noûs, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, and Philosophical Studies, and was co-awarded the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress 2013 Young Ethicist Prize.
Dale Dorsey is a professor of philosophy at the University of Kansas and held fellowships at the Murphy Institute (Tulane University) and Australian National University. He has published widely on issues in normative ethics, metaethics, and political philosophy, and his research focuses on the intersection between morality, well-being, and practical reason. He is the author of The Basic Minimum: A Welfarist Approach (2012) and, more recently, The Limits of Moral Authority (2016). He is currently working on a large-form project on the nature of prudence and prudential rationality.
Jamie Dreier is a professor of philosophy at Brown University, where he has taught since 1988. Dreier has also taught at Monash University in Melbourne and has been the Harsanyi Fellow at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He is a founding editor of the online Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy and an associate editor of Ethics. He writes about metaethics, especially expressivism and relativism; about meta-metaethics, including the question of what the real difference is between metaethical theories that end up saying similar-sounding things; about practical rationality and decision theory; and about the more abstract parts of normative ethics, including the structure of normative theories and the project of consequentializing traditionally deontological theories.
Jan Gertken is a lecturer in philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His main research interests include issues in normative ethics and value theory, as well as questions concerning reasons and rationality. His book Prinzipien in der Ethik (2014) discusses the prospects of moral particularism. Currently, he mainly works on the “numbers problem” in ethics, that is, the question of whether the number of persons affected by one’s actions is of moral importance.
Tim Henning is a professor of practical philosophy at the University of Stuttgart. He has worked on personal identity and autonomy (the topic of his first book, Person sein und Geschichten erzählen, which was awarded the Wolfgang-StegmüllerAward), on metanormativity, practical rationality, and the philosophy of language (the topics of his second book, From a Rational Point of View, 2018), on Kant (a German introduction to Kant’s ethics was published in 2016), and on various issues in normative ethics and applied ethics. His work has appeared in Ethics, Philosophical Review, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Philosophical Quarterly.
Paul Hurley is the Edward J. Sexton Professor of Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, The Claremont Colleges. His research focuses on central questions in both normative ethics and metaethics and has appeared in numerous journals, including Ethics, Mind, Philosopher’s Imprint, Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, Journal of Moral Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies. In addition he is the author of Beyond Consequentialism (2009). His current project is to demonstrate that the case for outcome-centered moral theories such as consequentialism is rooted in outcomecentered accounts of reasons, values, attitudes, and actions, and, in challenging these accounts, to challenge consequentialism at its roots.
Elinor Mason is a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, having previously held positions at Arizona State University, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and most recently at Princeton University as a Laurence S. Rockefeller visiting fellow.
She has published on a wide range of topics in normative ethics (especially consequentialism), moral responsibility, and feminism. She has just completed a monograph on the connections between normative concepts (such as wrongness) and responsibility concepts (such as blameworthiness).
Martin Peterson is the Sue G. and Harry E. Bovay Jr. Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University. Prior to coming to Texas A&M in 2014, he held academic posts at universities in the Netherlands (Eindhoven), UK (Cambridge), and Sweden (KTH Royal Institute of Technology). Peterson has published about sixty peer-reviewed papers on normative ethics, applied ethics, and decision theory. His books include The Dimensions of Consequentialism, The Ethics of Technology: A Geometric Analysis of Five Moral Principles, An Introduction to Decision Theory, and Non-Bayesian Decision Theory.
Douglas W. Portmore is a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University. His research focuses on morality, rationality, and the relationship between the two. In his widely discussed book Commonsense Consequentialism (2011), he defends a version of consequentialism that unites commonsense moral convictions with a teleological conception of practical reasons. This version of consequentialism accommodates commonsensical ideas such as the idea that we’re not permitted to commit murder even to prevent two others from each committing murder, but it does so while holding on to the teleological notion that the deontic status of act is just a function of how its outcome ranks in comparison to those of the alternatives. Currently Portmore is working on his second book, Opting for the Best: Oughts and Options, which concerns the principle that agents ought always to perform their best option—best, that is, in terms of whatever ultimately matters.
Jörg Schroth teaches philosophy, with a focus on ethics, at the University of Göttingen. He is the author of Die Universalisierbarkeit moralischer Urteile (2001) and editor of Texte zum Utilitarismus (2016). For further information please visit his website, http://www.ethikseite.de.
Christian Seidel is a professor of philosophy at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His main interests include personal autonomy (the topic of his book Selbst bestimmen: Eine philosophische Untersuchung personaler Autonomie, 2016), issues in moral and political philosophy (consequentialism, moralism, distributive justice, egalitarianism, climate ethics, and the ethics of risk), as well as British moral and social philosophy in the nineteenth century (John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick). He was previously a lecturer at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zurich’s Centre for Ethics, where he worked on questions of intergenerational and global justice.
Contributors
Together with Dominic Roser, he has authored a book on climate ethics (Climate Justice: An Introduction, 2017).
Steven Sverdlik is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where he has taught since 1982. He has published papers on ethics, moral psychology, and action. His Motive and Rightness appeared in 2011. He is currently working in the philosophy of punishment. His most recent papers in this area are “The Origins of ‘The Objection,’ ” History of Philosophy Quarterly (2012); “Punishment and Reform,” Criminal Law and Philosophy (2014); “Giving Wrongdoers What They Deserve,” Journal of Ethics (2016); and “Public Policy and Philosophical Accounts of Desert,” in Routledge Handbook of Moral Epistemology (forthcoming).
1 NEW WAVE CONSEQUENTIALISM
An Introduction
Christian Seidel
Consequentialism has been a focal point of discussion and a driving force behind developments in normative ethics ever since Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick articulated (what is today believed to be) its most prominent version, classical utilitarianism.1 Indeed, major parts of the “history” of modern moral philosophy from then on—the works of Moore, Ross, Anscombe, Foot, Rawls, Williams, Nozick, Hare, Nagel, Scheffler, Parfit, to name but a few—can be understood in terms of fierce criticism and illuminating defenses of consequentialist moral theories. Until today, proponents of rival ethical perspectives (e.g., deontology, contractualism, and virtue ethics) continue to motivate and elaborate their accounts by contrasting them with consequentialism.
But what, exactly, is consequentialism? This is a hard question, because “[i]t is not easy to identify any definition of consequentialism that would satisfy all those who have invoked that idea.”2 It may help to remember that “consequentialism” is
1 Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Mill, Utilitarianism; Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics. For the claim that Mill was actually a nonconsequentialist utilitarian, see Jacobson, “Utilitarianism without Consequentialism.”
2 Sen, The Idea of Justice, 217.
a philosophical term of art that is invoked to serve a theoretical purpose:3 the term should be useful in moral theorizing, by marking a helpful distinction between classes of theories. Such a distinction is helpful if it guides us in choosing between theories on account of their advantages and disadvantages, i.e., if the distinction is closely connected to positive or negative features that are relevant for theory selection and that all theories falling on one side of the distinction share. The concept of consequentialism is thus an instrument to classify moral theories under some heading and to frame (and simplify) the discussion between competing theories in terms of general (positive or negative) features that all theories under this heading share: if we had shown that some candidate theory T is consequentialist, and if we had some general objection to (or attractive feature of) a theory in virtue of its being consequentialist, then the objection (or attractive feature) would apply to T as well. One implication of this view is that consequentialism is not itself a moral theory but rather a class of moral theories that share some common property that makes them consequentialist.
Which property? This will depend on the nature of the objection (or attractive feature) that is to be generalized to a class of theories. To illustrate: When Anscombe coined the term “consequentialism” in 1958,4 her aim was to mark a distinction between theories of English moral philosophers from Sidgwick onward (“consequentialists”) and theories of earlier philosophers. The notable thing is that she explicitly placed Mill in the nonconsequentialist and Ross in the consequentialist camp,5 while from a contemporary perspective, we would classify them the other way round. What explains the difference is that Anscombe’s classification has a different point.6 She wanted to classify theories according to whether they allow actions, once they fall under a moral principle or (secondary) rule, to be treated (in practical deliberation) as if they were consequences objects of maximization and weighing— such that an unjust act (in spite of being generally prohibited and prima facie wrong under one aspect) might nevertheless be all things considered right if it produces the greatest balance of happiness or balance of prima facie rightness over prima facie wrongness. Anscombe thought that Mill did not believe this, while Ross (or rather every English moral philosopher from Sidgwick on) did.7 Her point of introducing
3 Similarly, Portmore, “Consequentializing Moral Theories,” 61; Jacobson, “Utilitarianism without Consequentialism,” 164; Brown, “Consequentialize This,” 751; Dreier, “In Defense of Consequentializing,”97; Portmore, Commonsense Consequentialism, 37.
4 Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 12f.
5 Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 9, 9n.
6 As has been pointed out by Diamond, “Consequentialism in Modern Moral Philosophy and in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy.’ ”
7 For evidence on Ross, see Ross, The Right and the Good, 41. Note that Anscombe was to some extent correct in picking the term “consequentialism,” since the terminology within the utilitarian tradition indeed begins
the term “consequentialism” was to highlight the distinctive property that marks this difference and to advance an objection that applies to all theories with—and in virtue of—the highlighted property (viz., that in consequentialism so construed, there are no actions which are absolutely ruled out in advance of deliberation; everything might, in principle, be outweighed in some circumstances).8 If today we regard Mill, unlike Ross, as a consequentialist, this is presumably not because we think that Mill, rather than Ross, satisfies Anscombe’s distinctive property; rather, we think that other properties are distinctive of consequentialism. Our disagreement with her is rooted not in different views on a given concept’s extension but in different concepts.
So our concept of consequentialism has evolved considerably, but what is our current concept? Given the connection between distinctions and objections (or attractive features), the conceptual change is intimately linked to and driven by debating consequentialism. Our current concept of consequentialism is therefore the result of attempts to identify a class of moral theories that are subject to (or can be defended against) a number of characteristic objections and that have (or fail to have) certain attractive features. The following section retraces how this debate and the concept of consequentialism developed.
1.1. Three Waves of Discussing Consequentialism
1.1.1 The First Wave: Consequentialism’s Conceptual Emancipation from Utilitarianism
The debate on consequentialism gained momentum in the 1970s, when a first wave of influential and forceful objections was raised against utilitarianism: that it cannot account for distributive justice because it “does not take seriously the distinction between persons”9; that its doctrine of negative responsibility triggers excessive demands that alienate agents from their most personal commitments and that attack their integrity;10 that it cannot accommodate rights but sacrifices everyone in
to change with Sidgwick: Moore was the first to explicitly state his (version of a utilitarian) theory in terms of “effects” and “consequences” (Ethics, 35, 70). Though Sidgwick’s “official” statement of the utilitarian doctrine (The Methods of Ethics, 411) does not refer to consequences (or effects), it is quite clear that he thought of the utilitarian doctrine in terms of consequences throughout book IV (see, e.g., 416, 425, 429). Previous “official” statements of the utilitarian doctrine by Bentham or Mill did not refer to consequences (or effects) either, but rather to the promotion or production of happiness (Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 11f.; Mill, Utilitarianism, 210). But note that Mill elsewhere claims that “[t]he morality of an action depends on its foreseeable consequences” (“Bentham,” 112).
8 The subsequent departure from Anscombe’s notion becomes evident, for instance, when Bernard Williams rejects the interpretation of nonconsequentialism as absolutism. See Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” 90.
9 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 27.
10 Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism.”
the utility monster’s maw;11 that pleasurable experiences (which could be simulated by a machine) are not the only things of intrinsic value;12 and that it does not fit well with moral considerations rooted in agent-relative reasons and values (e.g., that an agent’s killing someone herself is morally worse than her failing to prevent another person from killing someone).13
These objections, however, were primarily14 directed at maximizing (hedonic) actutilitarianism. This is a very specific moral doctrine according to which an action ϕ is morally permissible if and only if (and because), among the alternatives available to the agent, ϕ maximizes total utility, where total utility is (i) the aggregate sum of (ii) equally weighted (iii) net well-being (in its hedonic version: pleasures minus pains) of all morally relevant beings. Several moral philosophers noted that the canonical objections tend to lose their force when we consider moral theories that are close in spirit15 (or “structure”) to this utilitarian doctrine, but part company with some of its distinctive features, such as its exclusive focus on acts, its hedonistic and monistic axiology, or its impartial sum-ranking.
For instance, utilitarians tried to address implausible implications (e.g., that maximizing utility may require us to inflict horrendous harm or to abandon friends and projects) by developing versions of rule-utilitarianism16 or motiveutilitarianism:17 They argued that utilitarianism determines the general rules of behavior or patterns of motivations that are best to have (in terms of utility), and that these rules and motives override a case-by-case utility calculation; what we ought to do in the allegedly counterintuitive cases is to continue to act in accordance with the utility-maximizing rule or motive. On this account, an act’s deontic status no longer depends on whether it maximizes utility, but on whether it is recommended or demanded by rules or motives that maximize utility. The assessment of actions is
11 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 28–42; the utility monster appears on 41.
12 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 42–45.
13 Nagel, “The Limits of Objectivity”; Nagel, The View from Nowhere, chs. 8–9. The idea of agent-relativity has been carefully analyzed in McNaughton and Rawling, “Agent-Relativity and the Doing-Happening Distinction.”
14 Primarily, but not exclusively; see, e.g., Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” 81–93.
15 The received view today is that utilitarianism is not only close in spirit to but by definition a version of consequentialism. See, e.g., Sen and Williams, “Introduction,” 4; Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 26; Bykvist, Utilitarianism, 19; and many others. For reasons why this might not be the best view, see Eyal, “Non- Consequentialist Utilitarianism.”
16 Brandt, A Theory of the Good and the Right. See also Hare, Moral Thinking, for a combination of act- and rule-utilitarianism at different levels of moral thinking that is supposed to deflate the standard objections which, according to Hare, are based on the “commonest trick” of confusing both levels (“Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism,” 123).
17 Adams, “Motive Utilitarianism.”
only “indirectly” utilitarian, because what makes actions right or wrong is not their maximizing utility but their conformity to something else that maximizes utility. Instead of changing the criterion of rightness and keeping the focus on (direct or indirect) evaluation of acts, other philosophers took a pluralist approach that allowed multiple forms of utilitarian (or, as it then began to be called, consequentialist) evaluations. For instance, Parfit made clear that such evaluations may apply to everything (not just acts),18 and that therefore consequentialists can weaken the force of objections (e.g., based on special duties toward one’s own children) by more nuanced descriptions of the moral landscape that allow for blameless wrongdoing and similar phenomena: though giving a small benefit to one’s own child rather than a greater benefit to a stranger is wrong because it fails to maximize the good, the father is not blameworthy because he acts from a motive that maximizes the good. Railton addressed the alienation objection by endorsing a pluralistic axiology with several intrinsic values19 and by arguing that a form of sophisticated act-consequentialism “can approve of dispositions, characters, or commitments to rules . . . that do not merely supplement a commitment to act for the best, but sometimes override it, so that one knowingly does what is contrary to maximizing the good.”20 And Sen21 showed (i) how to accommodate rights by conceiving of them as features of outcomes that are subject to consequentialist assessments (thus introducing an early form of consequentializing) and (ii) how this nonwelfarist consequentialist evaluation allows rankings of outcomes that vary between persons (thus accounting for agent-relativity).22
The result (or achievement) of this discussion was consequentialism’s conceptual emancipation from utilitarianism. It became increasingly clear that different components of standard utilitarianism have to be carefully distinguished and that different objections aimed at different components and do not easily generalize to structurally similar theories.23 At the same time, the question was whether there is some such “core” structural element of the (monistic, welfarist, agent-neutral) utilitarian doctrine that—although suitable for flexible combinations with pluralistic, nonwelfarist, or perhaps even agent-relative axiologies—is still susceptible to revised and more abstractly rephrased versions of the canonical objections, as
18 Parfit, Reasons and Persons, 24–27, 31–35.
19 Railton, “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality,” 149.
20 Railton, “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality,” 159.
21 Sen, “Rights and Agency.”
22 Sen called this approach “consequentialist evaluation” rather than “consequentialism” because he wanted to stick with the then common association of consequentialism with agent-neutrality (“Rights and Agency,” 30). This association loosened later on in new wave consequentialism.
23 See, e.g., the introductory sentences in Sen, “Utilitarianism and Welfarism.”
Williams conjectured in his earlier critique of utilitarianism. It was around then that consequentialism—the sought-for core element—took a life of its own, was recognizably distinguished from utilitarianism, and became the established focal concept in the discussion, e.g., when Foot noted that “what is most radically wrong with utilitarianism is its consequentialism.”24 It is not surprising that consequentialism’s conceptual emancipation was reflected in the title of influential books too.25
Given this emancipated concept of consequentialism (which was often a concept of act-consequentialism), a consequentialist theory has two components: it first ranks outcomes (understood as states of affairs), which the available actions bring about, in terms of their impersonal (or agent-neutral) value, from best to worst; it then determines an action’s deontic status on the basis of this ranking such that an action is right if and only if it produces the highest-ranked outcome.26 As a first approximation, we might explicate the first wave’s concept of consequentialism as follows:
A (logically consistent)27 moral theory T is consequentialist with respect to the rightness of acts if and only if T contains an instance of the following scheme: (C1) For all acts x: The right x is the one that is ranked highest in terms of the (impersonal) value (or goodness) of the outcome x brings about (where the ranking ranges over all alternatives to x).
1.1.2 The Second Wave: Elaborations, Generalized Objections, and a Dialectical Impasse
Premised on this preconception of consequentialism, a diversified second wave of debate built up. It was marked by two connected threads. First, there was a refined differentiation within the consequentialist “research program.” Drawing on the groundwork of the first wave, consequentialists tried to gain a better understanding
24 Foot, “Utilitarianism and the Virtues,” 197. This was also a major concern in Williams’s critique: “[S]ome undesirable features of utilitarianism follow from its consequentialist structure” (“A Critique of Utilitarianism,” 81).
25 Compare Scheffler’s The Rejection of Consequentialism and Consequentialism and Its Critics to Smart and Williams’s Utilitarianism and to Sen and William’s Utilitarianism and Beyond
26 Compare Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” 87; Sen, “Utilitarianism and Welfarism,” 464; Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism, 1; Scheffler, Consequentialism and Its Critics, 1. John Broome prefers a different analysis: on his narrower understanding, consequentialism is a claim about how the goodness of acts is determined. Then a theory is consequentialist as it is commonly understood if it is (1) teleological and (2) “consequentialist” in Broome’s narrower sense; i.e., if it claims that (1) an act’s rightness is determined by the goodness of acts (represented in an ordering) and that (2) the goodness of an act (and thus the ordering) is determined by the goodness of the prospects (roughly: possible outcomes, broadly construed) it leads to (Weighing Goods, ch.1; Weighing Lives, 31, 41).
27 For instance, a theory that contains an instance of (C1) but also claims that, e.g., the rightness of actions is never determined by the value of their consequences should not be counted as consequentialist.
of consequentialism by elaborating important concepts. The aim was, of course, to respond to the standard objections against utilitarianism insofar as they had a bearing on consequentialism. The debates thus focused on developing a proper—and often complex—axiological basis (to resolve problems about, e.g., sadistic pleasures);28 on developing distribution-sensitive consequentialism by addressing questions about the aggregation and distribution of the good (e.g., to rebut the implications of unweighted sum-ranking in cases of acts that benefit the well-off more than they harm the worse-off);29 or on best responses to the problem of demandingness.30 By examining its basic notions of “outcome,” “consequence,” and “alternative,”31 consequentialism gained further flexibility: consequences were construed very broadly so as to include everything that would be the case as a result of performing an act— which includes the fact that the act has been performed as well as facts about the history of that act. Sophisticated versions of indirect (rule-)consequentialism32 and the option of sidestepping the problems associated with maximizing goodness by a form of satisficing consequentialism33 were intended to bring consequentialism even closer to common sense.
With all these refinements, consequentialism moved far away from classical utilitarianism by dismissing the idea of maximizing the unweighted sum of a single good. Consequentialist theories became increasingly flexible, but also increasingly diverse. To conceive of them as members of a single family, these diverse theories had to fall under the same concept of consequentialism, and so consequentialism had to be understood at a higher level of abstraction. If we generalize (C1) and start with the idea that consequentialism identifies the right act with the act that maximizes value, and if we want to include different conceptions of outcomes (actual, foreseen, foreseeable, intended, expected, etc.) and the possibility of indirectly evaluating actions in terms of other things that are related to them (e.g., sets of rules that permit an action), then we get the idea that a theory is consequentialist if it says something like this:
For all acts x: The right x is the one that is ranked highest in terms of the (impersonal) value in some type C of outcomes of something related to act x, G(x) (where the ranking ranges over all alternatives to G(x)).
28 Griffin, Well-Being; Sumner, Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics; Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life
29 Broome, Weighing Goods; Parfit, “Equality and Priority”; Broome, Weighing Lives
30 Kagan, The Limits of Morality; Mulgan, The Demands of Consequentialism.
31 Vallentyne, “Utilitarianism and the Outcomes of Actions”; Broome, Weighing Goods, ch. 5; Sosa, “Consequences of Consequentialism”; Carlson, Consequentialism Reconsidered.
32 Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World; Hooker et al., Morality, Rules, and Consequences
33 Slote, Common-sense Morality and Consequentialism.
In this explication, the rightness of act x is determined by the evaluative ranking through a specific function, which is maximizing. But to include satisficing and other nonmaximizing approaches, we should more generally consider arbitrary rightness functions.34 And if we want to include the idea that actions are assessed in terms of other moral categories than being right (e.g., being supererogatory, being wrong), we should consider not only rightness functions but more generally N functions (where N is some normative property). Something like the following seems to be a descriptively adequate explication of the second wave’s concept of consequentialism:
A (logically consistent) moral theory T is C-outcome G-consequentialist with respect to normative property N of acts if and only if T contains an instance of the following scheme:
(C2) For all acts x: The normative property N of x is determined by a function F of a ranking in terms of the (impersonal) value in some type C of outcomes of something related to act x, G(x) (where the ranking ranges over all alternatives to G(x))—and by nothing else.
If G(x) is different from x, we have an indirect version of consequentialism.35 For instance, let G(x) be the collective internalization of a set of rules (a code) that permits or forbids act x. Then actual-outcome rule consequentialism with respect to the permissibility of acts claims that we first rank the collective internalization of the various codes in terms of the value of their actual outcomes, and that the rightness of each act is then fully determined by a function of this ranking. If, e.g., the function is a maximizing one, it picks the highest-ranked code and says that x is permissible if and only if this code permits x.
Three things are noteworthy about (C2): first, the assessment was more or less focused on acts; second, outcomes of acts were ranked in terms of value or goodness; and third, value and goodness were (implicitly or explicitly) understood as impersonal, impartial, or agent-neutral. 36 All three preconceptions were relaxed later on
34 Perhaps not fully arbitrary. A plausible constraint on the function is that it is “increasing” in the sense that if O1 is a better outcome than O2, then the act that brings about O1 will not be deontically inferior to the act that brings about O2
35 Of course, G(x) can also be the identity function, thus allowing for direct evaluations of actions in term of the outcomes they bring about.
36 See, e.g., Scheffler’s characterization of consequentialism as “a moral doctrine which says that the right act in any given situation is the one that will produce the best overall outcomes, as judged from an impersonal standpoint” (Scheffler, Introduction to Consequentialism and Its Critics, 1), where “the rankings generated by the designated principle are not agent-relative; they do not vary from person to person” (Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism, 1). Sen’s perceived need to distinguish between consequentialism and consequentialist evaluation (noted in note 22) also suggests that agent-neutrality was seen as a defining mark of consequentialism.
in response to the second wave’s other thread: intimately connected to the refined differentiation of the consequentialist “research program” was the critics’ endeavor to generalize the traditional objections and to detach them from the special features of utilitarianism.37 For instance, Foot noted that certain implausible implications— that one is obliged to torture one victim if this is the only way to prevent an evil person from torturing five victims—are implications “not of utilitarianism in particular but rather of consequentialism in any form.”38 Scheffler added a further step of generalization by pointing out that this objection and other traditional problems (in particular issues of demandingness) are rooted in the agent-centered character of commonsense morality:39 common sense seems to allow for agent-centered restrictions or constraints like Foot’s (it is sometimes impermissible to bring about the impersonally best outcome) and agent-centered prerogatives or options (it is sometimes permissible not to bring about the impersonally best outcome), but both are incompatible with the consequentialist view that it is always required to bring about the impersonally best outcome. But Scheffler also noted that, on the other hand, agent-centered restrictions are puzzling or paradoxical.40 They claim that the minimization of morally objectionable conduct is morally unacceptable, which seems hard to square with an intuitive conception of practical rationality: that it is rational to choose the option that best accomplishes the goal one deems desirable.41 The upshot of the second wave was a growing awareness of a fundamental dialectical impasse between consequentialism and competing (commonsense) theories.42 On the one hand, consequentialism seems to comply with an appealing conception of practical rationality, which supports the compelling idea “that it can never be right to prefer a worse state of affairs to a better.”43 But on the other hand, consequentialism seems to clash with intuitive judgments rooted in the agent-centered character of commonsense morality. And while theories that include agent-centered elements can vindicate such judgments, they conflict with the appealing conception
37 Foot nicely summarizes the connection between the two threads when she claims that “the modifications have never been able to catch up with the objections” (“Utilitarianism and the Virtues,” 197). Of course, recasting the objections at higher levels of abstractions matched and reinforced the trend for an increasingly abstract understanding of consequentialism.
38 Foot, “Utilitarianism and the Virtues,” 198.
39 Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism
40 For versions of the paradox, see Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 30; Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism, 133f., 141–143.
41 Scheffler’s own “hybrid” view therefore rejects agent-centered restrictions but accepts agent-centered prerogatives. Given his understanding of consequentialism as fully agent-neutral, this makes his view nonconsequentialist.
42 Compare Scheffler, Introduction to Consequentialism and Its Critics
43 Foot, “Utilitarianism and the Virtues,” 62.
of practical rationality and thus appear paradoxical. So the problem was seen as one of reconciling agent-centeredness and practical rationality.
1.1.3 The New Wave: Abstraction, Reasons, and Consequentialism’s
Conceptual Emancipation from Agent- Neutrality and Value
This was the starting point for two further developments in the recent debate on consequentialism, a “resort to abstraction” and a “turn to reasons,” which have shifted the debate considerably both in focus and in style: First, in response to the dialectical impasse, consequentialists have quickly identified the culprit—agentneutrality44 and tried to model agent-centeredness within a consequentialist framework. Continuing the second wave’s trend of arming consequentialist theories with increasingly complex axiologies, some consequentialists have appealed to agentrelative axiologies (and corresponding rankings) instead. This way, they claimed, any moral theory—in particular those with agent-centered characteristics—can be couched in consequentialist terms such that both the theory and its consequentialist counterpart yield exactly the same deontic verdicts.45 A technical maneuver, known as “consequentializing,” is doing the trick here:
“[T]ake whatever considerations that the non-consequentialist theory holds to be relevant to determining the deontic statuses of actions and insist that those considerations are relevant to determining the proper ranking of outcomes. In this way, the consequentialist can produce an ordering of outcomes that when combined with her criterion of rightness yields the same set of deontic verdicts that the non-consequentialist theory yields.”46
In order to properly model agent-centeredness, the consideration that is built into the consequences is not the agent-neutral fact that, say, a lie has been told, but the agent-relative fact that I have told a lie. This will yield agent-relative rankings of outcomes: the outcome O1 in which I rather than you told a lie is ranked lower, relative to me, than the outcome O2 in which you rather than I told a lie, while O2 is ranked lower, relative to you, than O1. Such a theory does not count as consequentialist
44 See, e.g., “[C]onsequentialism’s counter-intuitiveness derives from its agent-neutrality” (Portmore, “Combining Teleological Ethics with Evaluator Relativism,” 107).
45 This is known as the deontic equivalence thesis (Portmore, Commonsense Consequentialism, 85), the extensional equivalence thesis (Dreier, “In Defense of Consequentializing,” 98), the representation thesis (Oddie and Milne, “Act and Value,” 44), or the consequentialist umbrella (Louise, “Relativity of Value,” 518).
46 Portmore, “Consequentializing Moral Theories,” 39. This maneuver is based on earlier work: Sen, “Rights and Agency”; Sen, “Evaluator Relativity and Consequential Evaluation”; Vallentyne, “Gimmicky Representations of Moral Theories”; Oddie and Milne, “Act and Value”; Dreier, “Structures of Normative Theories.” For a detailed discussion, see Portmore, “Consequentializing.”
on the second wave’s notion of consequentialism, but on the new, expanded notion it does. Consequentializing thereby contributed to consequentialism’s conceptual emancipation from agent-neutrality, with which consequentialism has traditionally—either implicitly or definitionally, as we have seen—been associated throughout the second wave, such that most of the previous “discussion of consequentialism has really been a discussion of agent-neutrality.”47
Consequentialism was thus conceptualized at a more abstract level. This tendency was reinforced by two simultaneous trends: (i) advancing Parfit’s thought that consequentialism applies to everything, some theories have changed their focal points of assessment and consequentialist evaluation from acts or rules to motives, virtues, decision procedures, or attitudes.48 And (ii) others have changed the mode of assessment from one- to multidimensional assessments that take into account several irreducible moral aspects,49 or from a single evaluative ranking to a dual-ranking structure.50 In both cases, consequentialism becomes even more flexible: changing the focal point enables consequentialism to assess not just acts but arbitrary entities X (e.g., motives, dispositions, or beliefs) in terms of outcomes of something that is related to these entities (e.g., the outcomes of general compliance with a rule that permits an action x, the outcomes of those acts that are triggered by motive x, the outcomes of having a disposition x, etc.). And changing the mode of assessment enables them to determine the normative property N by a more complex structure than a single ranking in terms of a single aspect (viz., the goodness or value of these outcomes). These two trends fueled the resort to abstraction: generalizing (C2) in the light of these two developments, we get the idea that a theory is consequentialist if it says something like this,
(C3) For all x that are X: The normative property N of x is determined by a function F of a set of rankings {R1, . . . , Rn} in terms of the value in some type C of outcomes of something related to x, G(x) (where the ranking ranges over all alternatives to G(x))—and by nothing else.
47 Broome, Weighing Goods, 5. The case for emancipating consequentialism from agent-neutrality is also made in Dreier, “Structures of Normative Theories”; Louise, “Relativity of Value.”
48 See Kagan, “Evaluative Focal Points”; Pettit and Smith, “Global Consequentialism”; Driver, Uneasy Virtue; Sverdlik, Motive and Rightness; Driver, Consequentialism. For a critique, see Streumer, “Can Consequentialism Cover Everything?”
49 Peterson, The Dimensions of Consequentialism
50 See Portmore, “Dual-Ranking Act- Consequentialism,” which generalizes an idea of Sider, “Asymmetry and Self-Sacrifice.” The point is, roughly, that in order to model, e.g., supererogation, the deontic status of an act must be determined by two rankings: one in terms of moral reason, and the other in terms of reason, all things considered. An action is permissible if and only if its outcome is not outranked by any other action on both rankings. This allows for cases in which a permissible act ϕ has an outcome that is ranked higher than the outcome of any other permissible action on the moral ranking only; then ϕ is supererogatory.
