Doesn’t “harm”, to a consequentialist, consist of every circumstance in which things could be better, but aren’t ? If a speck in the eye
counts, then why not, for example, being insufficiently entertained ?
If you accept consequentialism, isn’t it morally right to torture someone to death so long as enough people find it funny ?
I’m picking on this comment because it prompted this thought, but really, this is a pervasive problem: consequentialism is a gigantic family of theories, not just one. They are all still wrong, but for any single counterexample, such as “it’s okay to torture people if lots of people would be thereby amused”, there is generally at least one theory or subfamily of theories that have that counterexample covered.
Isn’t it paradoxical to argue against consequentialism based on its consequences?
The reason you can’t torture people is that those members of your population who aren’t as dumb as bricks will realize that the same could happen to them. Such anxiety among the more intelligent members of your society should outweigh the fun experienced by the more easily amused.
I typically argue against consequentialism based on appeals to intuition and its implications, which are only “consequences” in the sense used by consequentialism if you do some fancy equivocating.
The reason you can’t torture people is that those members of your population who aren’t as dumb as bricks will realize that the same could happen to them. Such anxiety among the more intelligent members of your society should outweigh the fun experienced by the more easily amused.
Pfft. It is trivially easy to come up with thought experiments where this isn’t the case. You can increase the ratio of bricks-to-brights until doing the arithmetic leads to the result that you should go ahead and torture folks. You can choose folks to torture on the basis of well-publicized, uncommon criteria, so that the vast majority of people rightly expect it won’t happen to them or anyone they care about. You can outright lie to the population, and say that the people you torture are all volunteers (possibly even masochists who are secretly enjoying themselves) contributing to the entertainment of society for altruistic reasons. Heck, after you’ve tortured them for a while, you can probably get them to deliver speeches about how thrilled they are to be making this sacrifice for the common morale, on the promise that you’ll kill them quicker if they make it convincing.
All that having been said, there are consequentialist theories that do not oblige or permit the torture of some people to amuse the others. Among them are things like side-constraints rights-based consequentialisms, certain judicious applications of deferred-hedon/dolor consequentialisms, and negative utilitarianism (depending on how the entertainment of the larger population cashes out in the math).
Doesn’t “harm”, to a consequentialist, consist of every circumstance in which things could be better, but aren’t ? If a speck in the eye counts, then why not, for example, being insufficiently entertained ?
If you accept consequentialism, isn’t it morally right to torture someone to death so long as enough people find it funny ?
I’m picking on this comment because it prompted this thought, but really, this is a pervasive problem: consequentialism is a gigantic family of theories, not just one. They are all still wrong, but for any single counterexample, such as “it’s okay to torture people if lots of people would be thereby amused”, there is generally at least one theory or subfamily of theories that have that counterexample covered.
Isn’t it paradoxical to argue against consequentialism based on its consequences?
The reason you can’t torture people is that those members of your population who aren’t as dumb as bricks will realize that the same could happen to them. Such anxiety among the more intelligent members of your society should outweigh the fun experienced by the more easily amused.
I typically argue against consequentialism based on appeals to intuition and its implications, which are only “consequences” in the sense used by consequentialism if you do some fancy equivocating.
Pfft. It is trivially easy to come up with thought experiments where this isn’t the case. You can increase the ratio of bricks-to-brights until doing the arithmetic leads to the result that you should go ahead and torture folks. You can choose folks to torture on the basis of well-publicized, uncommon criteria, so that the vast majority of people rightly expect it won’t happen to them or anyone they care about. You can outright lie to the population, and say that the people you torture are all volunteers (possibly even masochists who are secretly enjoying themselves) contributing to the entertainment of society for altruistic reasons. Heck, after you’ve tortured them for a while, you can probably get them to deliver speeches about how thrilled they are to be making this sacrifice for the common morale, on the promise that you’ll kill them quicker if they make it convincing.
All that having been said, there are consequentialist theories that do not oblige or permit the torture of some people to amuse the others. Among them are things like side-constraints rights-based consequentialisms, certain judicious applications of deferred-hedon/dolor consequentialisms, and negative utilitarianism (depending on how the entertainment of the larger population cashes out in the math).