Abstract
Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that we can and should “consequentialize” non-consequentialist moral theories, putting them into a consequentialist framework. I argue that these philosophers, usually treated as a group, in fact offer three separate arguments, two of which are incompatible. I show that none represent significant threats to a committed non-consequentialist, and that the literature has suffered due to a failure to distinguish these arguments. I conclude by showing that the failure of the consequentializers’ arguments has implications for disciplines, such as economics, logic, decision theory, and linguistics, which sometimes use a consequentialist structure to represent non-consequentialist ethical theories.
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Notes
For a number of reasons, I think it would be better to refer to these theories as teleological, rather than consequentialist. Nevertheless, the term ‘consequentialist’ is firmly established in the literature, so I will use it here. I will also largely set aside the distinction between maximizing and satisficing versions of consequentialism, as well as the more complex forms of consequentialism offered by Portmore (2011) and Peterson (2013). I don’t think that discussions of such variants would significantly alter the main points I’ll make, though they would make the article much longer.
For this reason, the material in this section is largely a review of points that have already been well-addressed in the literature. I include it for completeness’s sake, and to make clear the contrast with the other arguments I’ll discuss later.
Portmore originally agreed that this was the compelling idea behind consequentialism, but has since adopted a different view about what makes consequentialism attractive (2011). This new view is more sophisticated in a number of ways, but it remains essentially a version of the intuitive argument (Hurley 2014), and as such is subject to the same sort of analysis I give here. For reasons of space and simplicity, then, I won’t discuss Portmore’s new position in the main text, though I will return to it in several footnotes.
Portmore now believes that the attractiveness of consequentialism is grounded in its acceptance of a particular conception of reasons, which he calls the Teleological Conception of Reasons (TCR). According to the TCR, we have more reason to perform one action over another, if, only if, and in virtue of the fact that, we have more reason to desire the outcome associated with the former (2011, p. 58). But many philosophers have argued that the TCR isn’t, after all, very compelling, which would of course defeat Portmore’s argument (Hurley 2014, cf. Tenenbaum 2014). Portmore has offered responses to some of these arguments (Portmore 2011, ch. 3, 2014), but in the end many of his responses boil down to differences in intuition. (See e.g. his response to Hurley at (2014, pp. 248–9).) None of this is to say that those who reject the TCR are correct and that Portmore’s defense of the TCR fails. It is just to note that, as Portmore acknowledges, his argument relies on intuitions that are evidently controversial, and accordingly that it may not be appealing to those with different intuitions from Portmore.
Kamm (1996, ch. 10, 2000), for example, argues that constraints are grounded in the moral inviolability of persons. But inviolability—having the status of a creature that may not be permissibly violated—is not something that we can affect with our actions. (We can cause someone to be violated or not violated, but we can’t affect whether she is inviolable.) Consequentializing Kamm’s theory would involve assigning disvalue to violations, which is not the same thing as valuing inviolability. Thus, Kamm calls inviolability a “non-consequential value”: it can’t be consequentialized.
Portmore acknowledges a similar objection to his newer account, noting that the plausibility of his theory will depend on the plausibility of its account of what we have most reason to prefer and to desire (2011, pp. 10–11). The possibility of an objection to his theory on this point is evident in his discussion of the “Coherentist Procedure” (2011, pp. 113–7, cf. 2014, pp. 251–4), according to which we rank outcomes in terms both of our direct intuitions about their rankings, and also in terms of the intuitive plausibility of their implied judgments of permissibility and impermissibility in a consequentialist framework. Portmore argues that there is reason to think we can reach a stable and satisfying reflective equilibrium. But a philosopher who is unable to reach such a satisfying reflective equilibrium, perhaps because she has firm convictions about both the ranking of outcomes and the permissibility of actions which are incompatible in a consequentialist framework, has a third lever to pull: she could reject the consequentialist framework by rejecting the Teleological Conception of Reasons. Though Portmore gives an extended argument for the TCR, he acknowledges that it is not decisive and is largely based on intuition.
Though Peterson here hints at what I call the assimilation argument, elsewhere he suggests he may hold what I will call the pragmatic argument. In the end, I am not sure which argument Peterson means to be offering.
There is at least one possible loophole. Suppose there were a theory according to which there is no property which can be equated with choice-worthiness. Such a theory could not be consequentialized, and assimilation would fail. (Brown (2011) argues that this is the case.) This possibility is ruled out, however, by our earlier assumption that all theories can be consequentialized—i.e., put in a form, such that they direct agents to maximize the good.
For a more serious and nuanced proposal that has the same broad structure, see Dworkin (1978), e.g. at pp. 90–94. I discuss Nozick in the text because his simple presentation makes the objection to Dreier easy to see.
Most deontologists acknowledge that even if in general there is a constraint against killing, it can be permissible to kill to avert a catastrophe. So doesn’t a plausible theory need to assign strengths to constraints—making them scalar—to determine when one should give way to considerations of overall good? That is one model of how constraints “give way”, but it is not the only one. Kamm (1996, ch. 10), for example, suggests that the limits to a constraint be built into the content of the constraint. If the deontologist thinks that one may kill only to save at least 50 lives, Kamm interprets that as an absolute constraint not to kill to save less than 50. Or, put in terms of rights, she would say we have a right not to be killed unless 50 lives are at stake. In this way, the deontologist can preserve the idea that constraints are fully inviolable (and therefore binary), while acknowledging that actions like killing can sometimes be justified. Whether or not Kamm is correct, so long as her view is a candidate view, it suffices as an objection to Dreier.
Dreier’s text suggests that he views a successful response as one that identifies a pre-theoretic concept of goodness that is “thicker” than choice-worthiness. The response I’ve given doesn’t take this route, but instead distinguishes goodness from choice-worthiness by leaving it “thin”, but making it only one component of choice-worthiness. Further, it does not hinge on a pre-theoretic idea, but instead is induced by the structure of the deontological theory in question: that theory (the argument goes) is naturally interpreted as positing the existence of two separate normative entities, only one of which has the internal structure characteristic of goodness.
I wonder if Dreier might offer such an argument based on a kind of broad metaethical skepticism (or at least agnosticism) which surfaces towards the end of his chapter. If Dreier could argue that there is no meaningful sense in which we can distinguish different types of ethical properties—that ethics in a fundamental sense is just about deontic verdicts, and that there isn’t any further “real” structure—that might support the assimilation argument. This, though, would be a very strong and (to many philosophers) counterintuitive conclusion, and so would require extensive argument, which Dreier unfortunately does not provide. Peterson may cautiously entertain a similar idea (2013, pp. 42–3), but he neither endorses nor defends it.
To be fair, in two footnotes Hurley observes that Dreier seems to be an outlier (2013, p. 125n, 136n). But he makes no mention of this in the main text and doesn’t discuss its importance. He also doesn’t note that other consequentializers, including Louise and perhaps Peterson, appear to hold views similar to Dreier’s.
Perhaps for that reason, he tries to shoehorn Dreier and Louise into the intuitive framework, saying, “Several authors have even held that [consequentialism] is such a compelling moral theory that charity requires the hypothesis that everyone believes it” (2007, p. 266). This isn’t, though, a very charitable interpretation of Dreier or Louise. As we saw above, there is no way of understanding the intuitive argument that makes it anywhere near irresistible, so when Dreier and Louise assert that we are all consequentialists, they can’t be doing so on the strength of the intuitive argument. Dreier later explicitly rejected Schroeder’s characterization of his argument (2011, p. 98n).
I in fact suspect that something like this may be the case. Intuitionists like Portmore (2011) have produced significantly different accounts of the Compelling Idea and the nature of goodness, in an attempt to meet Schroeder’s challenge. In doing so, I think it is fair to wonder whether they have strayed too far from their consequentialist roots. Dreier, on the other hand, may be in a position to propose a revised account of goodness, according to which it simply is agent-relative, or relative-to-role (as he does e.g. at 2011, pp. 101–104). If this new account is counterintuitive in certain ways, or does not meet our semantic expectations in certain cases (as Schroeder argues), so much the worse for our intuitions and expectations. Philosophers offer such revisionary analyses of concepts all the time.
Dreier (2011), p. 115. Dreier is in particular need of a second argument to support his assimilating argument. Since he acknowledges that theories can be deontologized as well as consequentialized, he needs some reason to prefer the consequentialized form. He uses the pragmatic argument to provide this. This, incidentally, is how Dreier would (or at least should) respond to the end of Schroeder’s (2007) article. There, Schroeder wonders what the attraction of consequentializing is supposed to be, if consequentialized theories can’t capture the Compelling Idea. Dreier’s claim is that there are instrumental benefits.
Of course, for someone like Dreier who holds the Extensionality Thesis, this may not matter.
See e.g. Nagel (1986).
After this article was accepted for publication, I learned of a work-in-progress by Seth Lazar, “Deontological Decision Theory and Agent-Centred Options”. Lazar deploys the pragmatic argument in what I take to be a more promising way. Rather than proposing consequentializing as an all-purpose tool, Lazar proposes consequentializing for a limited purpose: to extend certain deontological theories, to help them better handle actions whose consequences are uncertain. Lazar then works out the details in ways which—especially in the case of agent-centered options—are more sensitive to core deontological commitments. Although I still have concerns about Lazar’s proposal, it strikes me as a much more promising justification for pragmatic consequentializing.
It can be helpful to focus on a salient subcategory of such actions, those which are morally forbidden despite having a morally better outcome than all permissible alternatives. The examples that follow may be of this type.
See e.g. Nagel (1986, pp. 175–185).
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Acknowledgments
For valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I would like to thank Paul Hurley, Seth Lazar, Adrienne Martin, Alex Rajczi, and the participants at the Bechtel Workshop in Moral and Political Philosophy, held at the University of Pittsburgh. For earlier conversations on related issues, I thank Jamie Dreier and Paul McNamara.
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Schroeder, S.A. Consequentializing and its consequences. Philos Stud 174, 1475–1497 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0768-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0768-2