A theory that tells you to bring about the best outcome will sometimes tell you to kill someone, and it will always tell you that you have not yet done enough.
Those are the two great objections, and they are structurally different. The first says the theory permits too much: there are acts nobody may perform whatever the arithmetic. The second says it demands too much: a life lived by the theory would have no room in it for the person living it. The previous two lessons built consequentialism at full strength and left it needing a filling for "good" that nothing quite supplies. This lesson attacks the structure rather than the filling, and then examines the two standard repairs.
The transplant surgeon
Five patients in a hospital will die today without transplants: one needs a heart, two need kidneys, one a liver, one a lung. A healthy man comes in for a check-up. He is a tissue match for all five. The surgeon can kill him quietly, distribute the organs, and save five lives at the cost of one. Nobody will find out, so no wider effects on trust follow.
Every stipulation is there for a reason: the case is built to strip away every consequence a consequentialist might appeal to, so that only the arithmetic remains. Five is greater than one, so the theory says the surgeon should do it. Almost nobody believes that, including almost all consequentialists.
The case pairs with a second, from Philippa Foot's 1967 paper, in which a runaway trolley will kill five unless a driver steers it onto a track where it will kill one. There, most people think steering is permissible or required. Same numbers, opposite verdicts. Since a pure consequentialist theory sees only the numbers, it cannot make the pair come out differently, and any theory that gets both right must be sensitive to something other than outcomes.
What that something is has a name: a constraint, sometimes called an agent-relative restriction. It is a prohibition on the agent's doing something, which holds even when the agent's violating it would prevent more violations of the same kind. Constraints are strange when you look at them directly. If killing is bad, why may I not kill one to prevent five killings? The consequentialist finds this paradoxical, and is entitled to press it. The reply, developed in the lesson on duties, is that a moral requirement addresses the agent about what to do rather than instructing them to minimise an outcome, and that the wrong of killing is something you do to a person rather than a quantity in the world.
Example. A consequentialist replies that the surgeon case is unrealistic: in the real world secrets leak, trust in hospitals collapses, and fewer people attend check-ups, so the arithmetic actually forbids the killing. Is that a good reply?
It is true and it does not answer the objection. The case is stipulated to exclude those effects, and a theory that gets the right answer only because the stipulation is unrealistic is getting it for the wrong reason. Test the reply by strengthening the stipulation: suppose the surgeon will die tomorrow of an unrelated illness, so no discovery is possible. If the verdict now flips to permitting the killing, the reply was never doing philosophical work, it was doing empirical work that happened to point the same way. There is a further problem: someone who refrains from killing the man only because they calculate the wider effects has, on most people's view, the wrong relationship to the act altogether, which is the integrity objection below in miniature.
Now you. Is there a version of the transplant case where you would accept the killing? What does your answer commit you to?
Answer
Most people find that raising the numbers eventually moves them: one death to save five is unthinkable, one to save the population of a city is at least arguable. If your answer is yes at some number, you hold a threshold view: constraints are real but not absolute, and can be overridden when enough is at stake. That is a coherent and popular position, and it owes an account of where the threshold sits and why it sits there, which nobody has given convincingly. If your answer is no at any number, you hold an absolutist view, and you owe an answer to the case where the alternative is the end of everything. Notice that "I do not know" is not available as a resting place, because the two answers commit you to different things elsewhere: the threshold view has to explain why the boundary is not arbitrary, and the absolutist has to accept the catastrophe.
Demandingness
The second objection needs no exotic case. Consequentialism is maximising, and there is always more good available, so on the theory almost every choice you make is wrong.
The money you spent on this year's holiday would have bought bed nets. So would the money you spent on a better flat, on your children's music lessons, on the coffee this morning. Since the theory is agent-neutral, the fact that it is your money and your children carries no weight of its own. The correct level of personal spending is whatever keeps you productive enough to give more, and everything above that is a wrong act.
Two consequences follow, and the second is less noticed. The first is that the demand is crushing: a life lived by the theory is one of permanent unrelieved obligation. The second is that the category of the supererogatory disappears. Ordinary moral thought has a large space for acts that are admirable but not required, and a maximising theory has none: the heroic donation is not generous, it is the minimum, and anything less is a wrong. A theory that cannot say a single true thing about generosity has lost something.
The standard reply is Samuel Scheffler's, in The Rejection of Consequentialism in 1982. He proposes an agent-centred prerogative: agents are permitted to give their own projects and attachments weight out of proportion to their impersonal value, up to some limit. The prerogative is a permission, not a constraint, so it blocks the demandingness objection without blocking the arithmetic where nothing personal is at stake. Scheffler himself notes the asymmetry it leaves: it is much easier to justify a prerogative, which relaxes a demand, than a constraint, which forbids an act that would make things better, and he declined to defend constraints on the same basis.
Williams on integrity
Bernard Williams, in his half of Utilitarianism: For and Against in 1973, aimed at something deeper than the demand, and his two cases are the most quoted in the literature.
George is a chemist, unemployed, with a family suffering for it. A job is available in a laboratory doing research on chemical and biological weapons. George opposes such weapons. If he refuses, the post will go to a colleague who is enthusiastic about the work and will pursue it more vigorously. On the arithmetic, George should take the job: fewer weapons will be developed and his family will be fed.
Jim, a botanist, stumbles into a South American village where a captain has twenty Indians tied up, about to be shot as a warning to protesters. As an honoured guest, Jim is offered a privilege: if he shoots one himself, the other nineteen go free. If he refuses, the soldiers do what they were going to do and all twenty die. On the arithmetic, Jim should shoot.
Williams's point is not that these answers are obviously wrong. He grants that in Jim's case the right answer is probably to shoot. It is that utilitarianism reaches them too easily, and in doing so misdescribes what is happening. The theory holds each of us responsible not only for what we do but equally for what we fail to prevent, which Williams calls negative responsibility, and the effect is that another person's projects, including the captain's, flow through you and determine what you must do. Your own commitments become one more input to a calculation performed from nowhere. But those commitments are what you are: a person with deep projects who is required to set them aside whenever the sums say so has been alienated, in a quite literal sense, from their own agency. That, and not the body count, is the integrity objection.
The best consequentialist replies do not deny the phenomenon but relocate it. Peter Railton's sophisticated consequentialism, in a 1984 paper called "Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality", argues that a person with genuine loves and commitments produces better outcomes than a calculating one, so the theory itself recommends being the sort of person Williams describes, and endorses that from the outside without requiring it as a motive. Whether that is a real answer or an elegant way of conceding the point is still argued.
Example. Distinguish what the transplant case and the George case each show, and say why a repair to one need not repair the other.
The transplant case is about permission: it says the theory allows an act that is forbidden, so it needs a constraint. The George case is about the structure of practical reasoning: it says the theory reaches its verdict by treating George's own convictions as one more variable, so it needs some account of why an agent's commitments have standing. These are separate defects. A theory could add constraints against killing and still require George to take the job, and a theory could grant an agent-centred prerogative and still permit the surgeon to kill. Scheffler's position is exactly the second combination, deliberately: he accepts the prerogative and rejects constraints, on the ground that a permission to attend to one's own life is easy to motivate while a prohibition on minimising harm is not.
Now you. A consequentialist says that Williams's objection is self-indulgent, since Jim's discomfort at killing one man is a poor reason to let nineteen die. What has been missed?
Answer
The objection is not about Jim's discomfort, and Williams says explicitly that Jim should probably shoot. It is about the description of the situation the theory forces. On the theory, the twenty deaths are simply a bad outcome to be minimised, and the fact that the captain is doing the killing while Jim would be refraining is morally invisible; the captain's murderousness enters Jim's deliberation as neutral data, exactly like a landslide. Williams's claim is that this is a false picture of moral life, in which what other people freely choose to do is not equivalent to what you choose to do, and that a theory that cannot register the difference has lost something even when it reaches the right verdict. The self-indulgence charge answers a psychological objection that was never made, which is worth watching for generally: the strongest version of an opponent's argument is rarely the one about how they feel.
Rule consequentialism, and whether it collapses
The obvious repair is to evaluate rules rather than acts. An act is right if it conforms to a code of rules whose general acceptance would produce the best outcomes.
Brad Hooker's Ideal Code, Real World in 2000 is the developed version: the right code is the one whose internalisation by the overwhelming majority of everyone, in each new generation, has the highest expected value, counting the costs of teaching it. That formulation does real work. A code containing "surgeons may kill patients to redistribute organs" would be catastrophic if internalised, so the surgeon is forbidden. A code requiring maximal donation would be too costly to instil, so the demand is moderated. Constraints and prerogatives both fall out of the theory rather than being bolted on.
The classic objection, from David Lyons in 1965, is that the theory collapses into act consequentialism. Whenever a rule produces a worse outcome in some circumstance, a better rule is available: the original rule plus an exception for that circumstance. Iterate, and the ideal code becomes "do whatever produces the best outcome", at which point rule consequentialism is act consequentialism with extra steps.
Hooker's reply is that the collapse depends on a rule being allowed unlimited complexity, and that his formulation blocks it, because a code has to be internalised by ordinary people at a cost, and a code of a million exceptions cannot be taught. Complexity is therefore penalised by the theory's own standard, and the ideal code stabilises well short of the act-consequentialist limit.
That answer works, and it exposes the position's real difficulty, which is different. If the code is fixed by what it would be best for everyone to accept, then in a world where most people do not accept it, following it can knowingly produce a worse outcome than breaking it. Hooker accepts this: he holds that you should follow the ideal code even where deviating would do more good. But that is to abandon the thought that made consequentialism attractive in the first place, and the rule consequentialist is now open to the charge of rule worship, of preferring a code to the good the code exists to serve.
Two levels
Richard Hare's Moral Thinking, in 1981, proposes that the theory has been asked the wrong question. Moral thinking happens at two levels.
At the intuitive level, where nearly all of life is lived, we operate with firm dispositions and simple principles: keep your promises, do not kill, look after your children. These are held with feeling and resist calculation, which is what makes them reliable under pressure and in the face of self-serving reasoning. At the critical level, used in reflection and when intuitive principles conflict, we reason as act utilitarians about which set of intuitive principles to have, and about genuinely novel cases.
The archangel, Hare's idealised reasoner with perfect information and no partiality, would use critical thinking directly. The prole, with human limitations, does best on intuitions alone. Real people are in between, and the theory recommends critical thinking sparingly, because human beings who begin calculating in the moment mostly discover that the sums favour them.
The view absorbs a great deal: it explains why the surgeon should not calculate, why the intuitions Williams defends are worth having, and why a good person feels the force of a promise rather than weighing it. Its problem is what happens at the boundary. If critical thinking always overrides intuition when the two conflict, the intuitive level is only a heuristic and the theory has all the implications of act consequentialism for anyone reflective enough to reach the critical level. And if intuition sometimes overrides critical thinking, the theory owes a criterion for when, which it does not supply.
Example. A rule consequentialist and a two-level utilitarian both say the surgeon must not kill. Are they saying the same thing?
No, and the difference shows up under reflection. The rule consequentialist says the act is wrong, full stop, because it violates the ideal code, and would still be wrong if the surgeon reasoned about it perfectly and knew for certain that the killing would go undetected. The two-level utilitarian says that the surgeon should not kill because a disposition against it produces better outcomes overall, and that at the critical level, with full information and no risk of self-deception, the killing would be correct. The first gives a verdict on the act; the second gives a verdict on the disposition and leaves the act's status to the arithmetic. Someone who finds the second answer unsatisfying is registering that they wanted a constraint, not a well-chosen habit, which is what pushes readers towards the next lesson.
Now you. Does the demandingness objection apply to rule consequentialism?
Answer
Much less, and the mechanism is worth understanding. The ideal code is assessed by the expected value of its general internalisation, including the cost of teaching it, and a code demanding that everyone give away everything above subsistence would be enormously costly to instil and widely rejected, so a code with a moderate requirement of beneficence scores better. Hooker's own estimate is that the ideal code requires giving something in the region of a tenth of one's income, which is a demand people can meet and therefore will. That is a genuine advantage over act consequentialism. The corresponding cost is that the level of demand now depends on facts about how hard it is to teach people things, which is a strange determinant of what you owe a dying child, and an act consequentialist will say the theory has confused what is achievable with what is right.
Scoring the round
The theory is not dead, and the summary should be honest about what each objection establishes.
The demandingness objection is answerable, at the cost of adding a prerogative that does not come from the theory. The integrity objection is partly answerable, at the cost of a two-level structure that most people find alienating in a different way. The constraint objection is the one that has not been answered: no consequentialist theory has produced a principled prohibition on killing one to save five that survives the case being stipulated cleanly, and the honest consequentialist position is to accept the verdict and argue that the intuition is unreliable.
That is a real position and it has serious holders. What it means is that the disagreement has been located exactly, which is what the lesson on method promised. Either there are acts one may not perform whatever the outcome, or there are not. If there are, moral theory needs a source for them other than the good they produce.
The next lesson is the most thorough attempt anyone has made to supply one, and it starts from a surprising place: not from any claim about what is valuable, but from the bare requirement that your reasons be consistent.