What’s gone wrong? “Consequentialism” is used in philosophy as a term for the view that the morality of an action depends only on the consequences of that action.
Worse, the idea of consequentialism (or “utilitarianism”) is often taken by people with a little philosophy awareness to mean the view that “the ends justify the means” without regard for actual outcomes — that if you mean well and can convince yourself that the consequences of an action will be good, then that action is right for you and nobody has any business criticizing you for taking it.
What this really amounts to is not “the ends justify the means”, of course, but the horrible view that “good intentions justify actions that turn out to be harmful.”
Ambiguity on “ends” probably does some damage here: it originally referred to results but also came to have the sense of purposes, goals, or aims, in other words, intentions.
Thanks for making this obvious. Yes, this is the typical consequentialism strawman, but I did not notice how exactly are the meanings of the words redefined.
I’m confused. Consequentialists do not have access to the actual outcomes when they are making their decisions, so using that as a guideline for making moral decisions is completely unhelpful.
It also seems that your statement that good intentions don’t justify the means is false. Consider this counterexample:
I have 2 choices A and B. Option A produces 2 utilons with 50% probability and −1 utilon the rest of the time. Choice B is just 0 utilons with 100% probability.
My expected utility for option A is +0.5 utilons which is greater than the 0 utilons for option B so I choose option A.
Let’s say I happen to get the −1 utilon in the coin flip.
At this point, it seems the following three things are true:
I had good intentions
I had a bad actual outcome, compared to what would have happened if I had chosen option (or “means”) B
I made the right choice, given the information I had at the time
Therefore, from this example it certainly seems like good intentions do justify the means. But perhaps you meant something else by “good intentions”?
that if you mean well and can convince yourself that the consequences of an action will be good, then that action is right for you and nobody has any business criticizing you for taking it.
Certainly it is bad to delude yourself, but it seems like that is just a case of having the wrong intentions… that is, you should have intended to prevent yourself from becoming deluded in the first place, proceeding carefully and realizing that as a human you are likely to make errors in judgement.
Plus people often are unaware of moral injunctions, or even consequentialist heuristics, and tend to think of highly disruptive ruthlessly optimizing Grindelwald style consequentialism, or else of a variety of failure modes that seem consequentialistic but not actually good such as wireheading, euthanasia, schemes involving extreme inequality or something, etc.
Ambiguity on “ends” probably does some damage here: it originally referred to results but also came to have the sense of purposes, goals, or aims, in other words, intentions.
It doesn’t help that consequentialist care about expected utility, which can be a lot closer to intentions than results.
Worse, the idea of consequentialism (or “utilitarianism”) is often taken by people with a little philosophy awareness to mean the view that “the ends justify the means” without regard for actual outcomes — that if you mean well and can convince yourself that the consequences of an action will be good, then that action is right for you and nobody has any business criticizing you for taking it.
What this really amounts to is not “the ends justify the means”, of course, but the horrible view that “good intentions justify actions that turn out to be harmful.”
Ambiguity on “ends” probably does some damage here: it originally referred to results but also came to have the sense of purposes, goals, or aims, in other words, intentions.
Thanks for making this obvious. Yes, this is the typical consequentialism strawman, but I did not notice how exactly are the meanings of the words redefined.
I’m confused. Consequentialists do not have access to the actual outcomes when they are making their decisions, so using that as a guideline for making moral decisions is completely unhelpful.
It also seems that your statement that good intentions don’t justify the means is false. Consider this counterexample:
I have 2 choices A and B. Option A produces 2 utilons with 50% probability and −1 utilon the rest of the time. Choice B is just 0 utilons with 100% probability.
My expected utility for option A is +0.5 utilons which is greater than the 0 utilons for option B so I choose option A.
Let’s say I happen to get the −1 utilon in the coin flip.
At this point, it seems the following three things are true:
I had good intentions
I had a bad actual outcome, compared to what would have happened if I had chosen option (or “means”) B
I made the right choice, given the information I had at the time
Therefore, from this example it certainly seems like good intentions do justify the means. But perhaps you meant something else by “good intentions”?
Certainly it is bad to delude yourself, but it seems like that is just a case of having the wrong intentions… that is, you should have intended to prevent yourself from becoming deluded in the first place, proceeding carefully and realizing that as a human you are likely to make errors in judgement.
Plus people often are unaware of moral injunctions, or even consequentialist heuristics, and tend to think of highly disruptive ruthlessly optimizing Grindelwald style consequentialism, or else of a variety of failure modes that seem consequentialistic but not actually good such as wireheading, euthanasia, schemes involving extreme inequality or something, etc.
It doesn’t help that consequentialist care about expected utility, which can be a lot closer to intentions than results.