Abstract
Consequentialism is an issue for bioethics because bioethics is concerned with justification, with giving reasons; and consequentialism provides an understanding of what we shall be led to if we take seriously that commitment to reason-giving. In this essay I consider how, within the context of modern moral philosophy, we see and how we do not see consequentialism. My discussion is meant to cast light on the questions, underlying many disagreements within bioethics, about what we are led to by taking reason-giving seriously.
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Notes
Originally in Philosophy 33 (1958) 1–19; reprinted in Anscombe, Ethics, Religion and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 26–42. The explanation of ‘consequentialism’ is on pp. 33–36.
For the view of Mill see, e.g., Anne Maclean, The Elimination of Morality (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 81; her detailed account of Mill earlier in the book is meant to support the idea of his moral theory as a good example of consequentialism, an example by reference to which the term may be explained. For the identification of deontological views with rejection of consequentialism, see Michael Slote, ‘Consequentialism’, in L. Becker, ed., Encyclopedia of Ethics (New York: Garland, 1992); also Nancy Davis, ‘Contemporary Deontology’, in Peter Singer, ed, A Companion to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); also Jonathan Dancy, ‘An Ethic of Prima Facie Duties’, in Singer, Companion to Ethics. Dancy takes Ross to be a paradigmatic opponent of consequentialism.
Gottlob Frege, ‘Foundations of Geometry’, I, Collected Papers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 283.
See W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 41: ‘It is obvious that any of the acts that we do has countless effects, directly or indirectly, on countless people, and the probability is that any act, however right it be, will have adverse effects (though these may be very trivial) on some innocent people. Similarly, any wrong act will probably have beneficial effects on some deserving people. Every act therefore, viewed in some aspects, will be prima facie right, and viewed in others, prima facie wrong, and right acts can be distinguished from wrong acts only as being those which, of all those possible for the agent in the circumstances, have the greatest balance of prima facie rightness, in those respects in which they are prima facie right, over their prima facie wrongness, in those respects in which they are prima facie wrong — prima facie rightness and wrongness being understood in the sense previously explained. For the estimation of the comparative stringency of these prima facie obligations no general rules can, so far as I can see, be laid down.’ In the light of that quotation it is quite remarkable that Ross is so frequently taken to be an anti-consequentialist Although he does attack the role given to consequences in theories like utilitarianism and that of Moore, the differences are (as Anscombe implies) less significant than the resemblances. See also Ross, Foundations of Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 165 and 190.
‘Rights and Agency’, in Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982) 3–39; reprinted in Samuel Scheffler, Consequentialism and Its Critics (Oxford: OUP, 1988), pp. 187–223.
But cf. Bernard Williams’s discussion of the contrast between a consequentialist and a non-consequentialist treatment of the rightness of keeping promises, in ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (henceforward referred to as ‘CU’), in J. J. C Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: CUP, 1973), pp. 88–89. Williams’s argument leaves open the possibility of treating philosophers like Ross as consequentialists.
There is, for example, this: ‘The morality of an action depends on its foreseeable consequences’, from the essay ‘Bentham’, in Dissertations and Discussions (New York: Henry Holt, 1874) I, p. 412.
Goodbye to All That (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), pp. 197–198.
If Graves had said ‘Yet I knew I would be unable to sign’ and not ‘Yet I could not sign’, he would have been making a prediction, and would have been distancing himself from the recognition that this was not something he could do. He would then have had a dilemma of a different sort from the one he did have, in which he takes signing to be ruled out See Bernard Williams, ‘Moral Incapacity’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1993) 59–70.
My imagined consequentialist argument is meant to reflect such typical consequentialist lines of thought as that in S. Scheffler, Introduction to Consequentiatism and its Critics, pp. 4–10. Cf. also Jonathan Glover, ‘It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do If’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 49 (1975) 171–190.
On John Skorupski’s reading, Mill’s account of liberty of expression gives weight to the nature of the causal linkage through which what someone says plays a role in what happens; Skorupski does not, though, see this as a case of an application by Mill of a kind of distinction that plays a more general role in his moral theory. See his John Stuart Mill (London: Routledge, 1989), §9 of chapter 10.
J. O. Urmson, ‘The Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy of J. S. Mill’, Philosophical Quarterly 3 (1953) 33–39. Urmson argues that, although drinking alcohol may tend to produce exhilaration, my drinking a particular glass either does or does not produce it But Mill’s idea is roughly that, if drinking alcohol tends to produce exhilaration, and if your drinking a particular glass does not produce it, then the failure to produce exhilaration is the result of the counteracting, by the tendency of some other cause operative in the circumstances, of the tendency of the action to produce exhilaration Far from its being impossible to speak of tendencies of individual actions, such tendencies are essential in explaining how the outcome in a particular situation is brought about by interacting causes.
David Lyons, Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 28.
It is perhaps worth noting that Mill’s use of the expression ‘the effects of’ is not the same as Lyons’s. When Mill speaks of the effects of something he frequently means only those effects which it tends to produce, as contrasted with those things to which it leads ‘accidentally’, through the complex causal network within which it is placed, including the tendencies of other causes operative in the circumstances. Mill has many discussions in System of Logic of the tendencies through which some effect was produced; see, e.g., Book III, especially chapters 10 and 11. Mill’s brief methodological remarks, in his bracketed comments on Herbert Spencer in the second footnote to Ch. V of Utilitarianism, should be read with the discussions of method in System of Logic. See also the fine brief summary of Mill’s view in the Autobiography (Oxford: OUP, 1924), pp 135–136. Mill there uses the principle of the Composition of Forces in dynamics to illustrate the derivation of the effect of several conjoined causes from their individual tendencies.
See Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1972), pp. 99–102. J. D. Mabbott raises the objection as an objection to Urmson’s reading of Mill as a rule-utilitarian; see ‘Interpretations of Mill’s “Utilitarianism”’, Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1956), 115–20. See also J. J. C. Smart, ‘Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism’, Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1956), pp. 344–354.
My wording of this point is derived from Jonathan Glover, Responsibility (London: Routledge, 1970), p 193.
McDowell’s reading is developed in various essays; my exposition draws especially from ‘Eudaimonism and Realism in Aristotle’s Ethics’, in R. Heinaman (ed.), Aristotle and Moral Realism (London: UCL Press, 1995), pp. 201–18.
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© 1997 David S. Oderberg and Jacqueline A. Laing
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Diamond, C. (1997). Consequentialism in Modern Moral Philosophy and in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. In: Oderberg, D.S., Laing, J.A. (eds) Human Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25098-1_2
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