I can confirm that philosophers are familiar with the concept of expected value. One famous paper that deals with it is Frank Jackson’s “Decision-theoretic consequentialism and the nearest-and-dearest objection.” (Haven’t read it myself, though I skimmed it to make sure it says what I thought it said.) ETA: nowadays, as far as I can tell, the standard statement of consequentialism is as maximizing expected value.
There’s also a huge literature (which I’m not very familiar with) on the question of how to reconcile deontology and consequentialism. Search “consequentializing” if you’re interested—the big question is whether all deontological theories can be restated in purely consequentialist terms.
I think a far more plausible hypothesis is that we vastly oversimplify this stuff for our undergrads (in part because we hew to the history on these things, and some of these confusions were present in the historical statements of these views). The slides you cite are presumably from intro courses. And many medical students likely never get beyond a single medical ethics course, which probably performs all these oversimplifications in spades. (I am currently TAing for an engineering ethics course. We are covering utilitarianism this week, and we didn’t talk about expected value—though I don’t know off the top of my head if we cover it later.)
Thanks for your insight. Yes, the “we simplify this for undergrads” thing seems most plausible to me. I guess my concern is that in this particular case, the simplification from “expected consequences matter” to “consequences matter” might be doing more harm than good.
This could well be true. It’s highly possible that we ought to be teaching this distinction, and teaching the expected-value version when we teach utilitarianism (and maybe some philosophy professors do, I don’t know).
I can confirm that philosophers are familiar with the concept of expected value. One famous paper that deals with it is Frank Jackson’s “Decision-theoretic consequentialism and the nearest-and-dearest objection.” (Haven’t read it myself, though I skimmed it to make sure it says what I thought it said.) ETA: nowadays, as far as I can tell, the standard statement of consequentialism is as maximizing expected value.
There’s also a huge literature (which I’m not very familiar with) on the question of how to reconcile deontology and consequentialism. Search “consequentializing” if you’re interested—the big question is whether all deontological theories can be restated in purely consequentialist terms.
I think a far more plausible hypothesis is that we vastly oversimplify this stuff for our undergrads (in part because we hew to the history on these things, and some of these confusions were present in the historical statements of these views). The slides you cite are presumably from intro courses. And many medical students likely never get beyond a single medical ethics course, which probably performs all these oversimplifications in spades. (I am currently TAing for an engineering ethics course. We are covering utilitarianism this week, and we didn’t talk about expected value—though I don’t know off the top of my head if we cover it later.)
Source: PhD student in ethics.
Thanks for your insight. Yes, the “we simplify this for undergrads” thing seems most plausible to me. I guess my concern is that in this particular case, the simplification from “expected consequences matter” to “consequences matter” might be doing more harm than good.
This could well be true. It’s highly possible that we ought to be teaching this distinction, and teaching the expected-value version when we teach utilitarianism (and maybe some philosophy professors do, I don’t know).
Also, here’s a bit in the SEP on actual vs expected consequentialism: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/#WhiConActVsExpCon