7.1) you could come up with better horribly “seeming” outcomes that consequentialism would result in. For example, consequentialists who believe in heaven and hell and think they have insight into how to get people into heaven would be willing to do lots of nasty things to increase the number of people who go to heaven. Also, dangerous sweatshops in poor countries that employ eight-year-olds become praiseworthy if they provide the children with better outcomes than the children would otherwise receive.
8.1) Does “lack of will” account for failure to solve collective action problems?
Also, dangerous sweatshops in poor countries that employ eight-year-olds become praiseworthy if they provide the children with better outcomes than the children would otherwise receive.
This is actually a serious, mainstream policy argument that I’ve heard several times. It goes like “If you ban sweatshops, sweatshop workers won’t have better jobs; they’ll just revert to subsistence farming or starve to death as urban homeless”. I’m not getting into whether it’s a correct analysis (and it probably depends on where and how exactly ‘sweatshops’ are ‘banned’), but my point is that it wouldn’t work quite well as an “outrageous” example.
Interesting observation: You talked about that in terms the effects of banning sweatshops, rather than talking about it in terms of the effects of opening them. It’s of course the exact same action and the same result in every way- deontological as well as consequentialist- but it changes from “causing people to work in horrible sweatshop conditions” to “leaving people to starve to death as urban homeless”, so it switches around the “killing vs. allowing to die” burden.
(I’m not complaining, FYI, I think it’s actually an excellent technique. Although maybe it would be better if we came up with language to list two alternatives neutrally with no burden of action.)
“consequentialists who believe in heaven and hell and think they have insight into how to get people into heaven would be willing to do lots of nasty things to increase the number of people who go to heaven.”
I fully agree with this (as someone who doesn’t believe in heaven and hell, but is a consequentialist), and also would point out that it’s not that different from the way many people who believe in heaven and hell already act (especially if you look at people who strongly believe in them; ignore anyone who doesn’t take their own chances of heaven/hell into account in their own decisions).
In fact I suspect that even from an atheistic, humanist viewpoint, consequentialism on this one would have been better in many historical situations than the way people acted in real life; if a heathen will go to hell but can be saved by converting them to the True Faith, then killing heathens becomes an utterly horrific act. Of course, it’s still justified if it allows you to conquer the heathens and forcibly convert them all, as is killing a few as examples if it gets the rest to convert, but that’s still better than the way many European colonizers treated native peoples in many cases.
6.4) In the United States at least there are so many laws that it’s not possible to live a normal life without breaking many of them.
See: http://www.harveysilverglate.com/Books/tabid/287/Default.aspx
7.1) you could come up with better horribly “seeming” outcomes that consequentialism would result in. For example, consequentialists who believe in heaven and hell and think they have insight into how to get people into heaven would be willing to do lots of nasty things to increase the number of people who go to heaven. Also, dangerous sweatshops in poor countries that employ eight-year-olds become praiseworthy if they provide the children with better outcomes than the children would otherwise receive.
8.1) Does “lack of will” account for failure to solve collective action problems?
This is actually a serious, mainstream policy argument that I’ve heard several times. It goes like “If you ban sweatshops, sweatshop workers won’t have better jobs; they’ll just revert to subsistence farming or starve to death as urban homeless”. I’m not getting into whether it’s a correct analysis (and it probably depends on where and how exactly ‘sweatshops’ are ‘banned’), but my point is that it wouldn’t work quite well as an “outrageous” example.
That’s why I wrote “horribly ‘seeming’” and not just horribly.
Interesting observation: You talked about that in terms the effects of banning sweatshops, rather than talking about it in terms of the effects of opening them. It’s of course the exact same action and the same result in every way- deontological as well as consequentialist- but it changes from “causing people to work in horrible sweatshop conditions” to “leaving people to starve to death as urban homeless”, so it switches around the “killing vs. allowing to die” burden. (I’m not complaining, FYI, I think it’s actually an excellent technique. Although maybe it would be better if we came up with language to list two alternatives neutrally with no burden of action.)
“consequentialists who believe in heaven and hell and think they have insight into how to get people into heaven would be willing to do lots of nasty things to increase the number of people who go to heaven.”
I fully agree with this (as someone who doesn’t believe in heaven and hell, but is a consequentialist), and also would point out that it’s not that different from the way many people who believe in heaven and hell already act (especially if you look at people who strongly believe in them; ignore anyone who doesn’t take their own chances of heaven/hell into account in their own decisions).
In fact I suspect that even from an atheistic, humanist viewpoint, consequentialism on this one would have been better in many historical situations than the way people acted in real life; if a heathen will go to hell but can be saved by converting them to the True Faith, then killing heathens becomes an utterly horrific act. Of course, it’s still justified if it allows you to conquer the heathens and forcibly convert them all, as is killing a few as examples if it gets the rest to convert, but that’s still better than the way many European colonizers treated native peoples in many cases.