Consequences

The most natural answer to what you should do is that you should do whatever makes things go best, and almost everyone reaches for it before they reach for anything else.

Ask a stranger why lying is wrong and you will hear that it hurts people. Ask why a law is bad and you will hear what it will cause. This is consequentialism operating as the default background theory of public argument, usually unexamined. The previous lesson supplied the method for examining it: state it in premises, find its moral premise, and test it against cases. This lesson states it at full strength and makes the case for it. The two after that take it apart.

The idea, and what makes it attractive

Consequentialism holds that the moral quality of an act is entirely a matter of its outcomes. Nothing else counts: not who performs it, not what rule it falls under, not the agent's history or intentions except insofar as those affect what happens.

Two features give it its pull. The first is that it explains rather than stipulates. Rival theories tend to arrive with a list of things that are forbidden; consequentialism says why anything is forbidden at all, namely that it makes things worse, and then derives the list. A theory that generates its prohibitions from one principle is doing more work than one that reports them.

The second is impartiality. Jeremy Bentham's formula, as Mill reports it, is that each is to count for one and nobody for more than one. Your suffering counts exactly as much as mine, and a stranger's exactly as much as your friend's, and the theory has no way of writing your own interests in larger letters. Every historical extension of moral concern, to the enslaved, to women, to foreigners, to animals, is an application of exactly that step, and consequentialists were unusually often ahead of the curve on each of them.

There is a third, less advertised, which is that the theory answers rather than shrugging. Given the facts, it always returns a verdict. Whether that verdict is right is the argument of the following lessons, but a theory that goes silent on hard cases is not obviously better.

Bentham's calculus

Bentham's Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, printed in 1780 and published in 1789, tries to make the theory operational, and the attempt is more interesting than its failure.

The good, for Bentham, is pleasure and the absence of pain, and nothing else. Since these are the only things that matter, the value of any act is fixed by the quantity of pleasure and pain it produces, and quantity has dimensions. He lists seven: the intensity of a pleasure, its duration, its certainty, its propinquity or nearness in time, its fecundity or tendency to be followed by more of the same, its purity or freedom from following pain, and finally its extent, meaning the number of people affected.

The first six describe a pleasure; the seventh is where the aggregation happens, and it is the radical one. Extent turns a private hedonism into a moral theory, because it says that the arithmetic runs across persons and every person is a term in the sum.

Bentham is candid that nobody can literally run the calculation, and says only that it should be kept in view as the standard the practice approximates. That concession is more important than it looks, and it reappears below as the distinction between a criterion and a procedure.

Example. A city council can spend a fixed budget on one of two health programmes. Programme A averts a year of healthy life lost for every 50 pounds spent; programme B does so for every 500 pounds. The budget is one million pounds. What does the calculus say, and what does the comparison actually show?

Divide: one million at 50 pounds each averts {1}{\{}{,}{\}}{000}{\{}{,}{\}}{000}{/}{50}{=}{20}{\{}{,}{\}}{000} years, and at 500 pounds each averts {1}{\{}{,}{\}}{000}{\{}{,}{\}}{000}{/}{500}{=}{2}{\{}{,}{\}}{000} years, a factor of ten. On the theory the council should spend the whole budget on A and nothing on B, since splitting it produces strictly less good. The comparison matters because such ratios are not hypothetical: cost-effectiveness estimates across health interventions in the Disease Control Priorities literature span roughly three orders of magnitude, so the gap between a good and a poor allocation is far larger than the gap between spending and not spending. What the calculation does not settle is whether averted years of healthy life are the right measure, whether whose years they are should matter, or whether a council owes anything to the specific patients in front of it, and each of those objections belongs to a later lesson.

Now you. Programme B serves a remote community that programme A cannot reach. Does that change the consequentialist verdict?

Mill's repair

Bentham's hedonism has an immediate embarrassment: if pleasure is pleasure, then a life of trivial amusement, sufficiently prolonged, beats a short and difficult life of achievement, and pushpin is as good as poetry.

John Stuart Mill, in Utilitarianism in 1863, seventy-four years after Bentham's book, tries to keep hedonism while denying the conclusion. Pleasures differ in kind as well as amount, he says, and some are higher. The test he offers is a competent judge: of two pleasures, if all or almost all who have experienced both give a decided preference to one, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, then that one is higher, and its superiority may be so great that no quantity of the other will outweigh it. Hence the famous line that it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

The move is popular and unstable. If the higher pleasure is preferred because it is more pleasant, the appeal to kinds is unnecessary and quantity was doing the work all along. If it is preferred for some other reason, then something other than pleasure is being valued and pure hedonism has been abandoned. Mill's own qualification that no quantity of the lower outweighs the higher makes this worse, since it treats one kind of value as lexically prior to another, which is not a hedonic calculation at all.

The lasting significance of the repair is that it is the first crack in the identification of the good with pleasure. The next lesson widens it.

Act consequentialism, stated

Here is the theory in the form later lessons will attack. An act is right if and only if its outcome is at least as good as the outcome of every alternative available to the agent.

Four features of that sentence are doing work. It is maximising: doing a great deal of good is not enough if more was available, which is why the theory has no category of the supererogatory, the praiseworthy but optional. It is agent-neutral: the value of an outcome does not depend on who brings it about, so your killing one person and someone else killing one person are equally bad states of affairs, and this is the feature that generates the objections of the next-but-one lesson. It is welfarist in its standard form, meaning that what makes an outcome good is how well things go for those in it. And it is complete: every act is right or wrong, with no gaps.

Two variants matter. Actual-outcome versions say the right act is the one that in fact turns out best, which makes rightness depend on luck and often unknowable at the time. Expected-value versions say it is the one with the highest expected value given the evidence available, which is what any real decision has to use. Most contemporary consequentialists distinguish the two: the actual-outcome version fixes what would have been best, and the expected-value version fixes what it was reasonable to do, and blame attaches to the second.

Example. A doctor prescribes a drug with a 1 in 1,000 chance of a fatal reaction and a large expected benefit. The patient is the unlucky one and dies. Did the doctor act wrongly?

On the actual-outcome version, yes: the alternative would have gone better, so the act was wrong, though the doctor is blameless because she could not have known. On the expected-value version, no: given the evidence, prescribing had the higher expected value and was therefore right, and the death is a bad outcome of a right act. Most people find the second closer to how they use the word, and the split is worth keeping because it dissolves a common confusion in which a bad result is treated as proof of a bad decision. Notice that the two versions never disagree about what to do, since only one of them is usable in advance; they disagree about what to say afterwards.

Now you. A campaign vaccinates one million people against a disease. The vaccine kills 1 in 100,000 recipients and the disease would have killed 1 in 500. Work the numbers and say what the theory concludes.

Criterion or procedure

A persistent misreading treats consequentialism as instructing you to calculate before every act, which would be absurd and would itself have terrible consequences.

The standard reply, present in Bentham and made explicit by Henry Sidgwick in The Methods of Ethics in 1874, distinguishes the criterion of rightness from the decision procedure. The criterion says what makes an act right. The procedure is whatever method of deciding actually produces the most right acts, and by the theory's own lights that will usually be habits, rules of thumb and firm dispositions rather than case-by-case calculation, because people calculating under pressure make self-serving errors, take too long, and become unreliable to others.

So a consequentialist can consistently recommend that you keep your promises without weighing, that surgeons follow protocols, and that you cultivate a settled aversion to violence, on the grounds that agents with those dispositions produce better outcomes than agents who deliberate afresh. This absorbs a great deal of the intuitive appeal of rival theories.

Example. You have promised to help a friend move house on Saturday. On Friday you are offered a shift of paid work whose earnings, donated well, would do more good than your friend's afternoon is worth. What does the theory say?

At the level of the criterion, it says to take the shift, since the outcome is better, and any consequentialist who denies this has not understood their own theory. At the level of the procedure, it says something more interesting. An agent who reasons this way about promises will break them often, will be known for it, and will find that nobody relies on them, which destroys the very good that made their promises useful in the first place. The theory therefore recommends being the sort of person who keeps promises without weighing, and such a person will keep this one. The two answers do not contradict each other, because they answer different questions: whether the act was optimal, and what disposition produces the most optimal acts over a life. Notice how much of ordinary morality this recovers, and notice the residue, which is that the theory still calls the promise-keeping a mistake in this instance and calls the disposition that produced it correct.

Now you. Is a consequentialist who feels guilty about breaking a promise, in a case where breaking it produced the best outcome, making an error?

The structure also creates a problem that Sidgwick faced squarely and called the esoteric part of the doctrine. If the best outcomes come from most people believing something other than consequentialism, the theory recommends that they be brought to believe it, and that the truth be kept among those who can handle it. Bernard Williams later called this Government House utilitarianism, and it is not an attractive feature: a moral theory that recommends its own concealment has an awkward relationship with the idea that moral reasons are the kind of thing one can state publicly.

The record

Theories are usually judged on their counterexamples, and the next lessons supply plenty. It is worth first noting what this one got right, because a theory with a good predictive record deserves more patience than one without.

Bentham argued for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in an essay written around 1785 and left unpublished in his lifetime, at a time when the offence was capital in England. He argued against slavery and for the legal equality of women. He put the question about animals in a footnote that is still the standard citation in the field: the question is not whether they can reason, nor whether they can talk, but whether they can suffer. He was a systematic prison reformer. Mill wrote The Subjection of Women in 1869 and was the first member of Parliament to move for female suffrage.

None of that is an argument for the theory, and one can reach the same conclusions from other premises. What it establishes is that the theory's central move, insisting that a being's interests count regardless of which being it is, has repeatedly produced conclusions that were regarded as absurd when drawn and obvious a century later. Any objection to consequentialism has to reckon with the possibility that today's counterexample is tomorrow's obvious truth, and that a strong intuition against a theory's verdict is exactly what the slave owner had.

That is the strongest thing that can be said in its favour, and it should be held in mind through the two lessons that follow. The immediate task is narrower. The theory says to maximise the good, and so far the good has been left as pleasure, which Mill already found untenable. Before the theory can be assessed, it needs a filling, and every candidate filling turns out to have a problem of its own.