Every position in this course is a set of answers to a small number of questions, and once you can see the questions the map is small enough to locate yourself on.
That is the claim this last lesson makes good. It is not a summary; the earlier lessons contain the material. It is a method for holding a view: stating it so that an opponent knows what to attack, answering the strongest objection rather than the most convenient one, arguing usefully with someone whose foundations differ from yours, and deciding what to do while remaining unsure which theory is true, which is the situation everyone is actually in.
Six questions
Here is the whole subject as a questionnaire. Every named theory answers all six, and disagreements that look enormous usually turn out to be disagreements about one or two.
What makes an outcome good? Pleasure, preference satisfaction, a list of objective goods, or a hybrid. Answer this and you have fixed what a consequentialist is maximising and what anyone else is weighing when they weigh consequences at all.
Do only outcomes matter? If there are acts you may not perform even when performing them would make things go better, you have constraints, and you owe an account of where they come from and whether they hold absolutely.
How much may you favour yourself and your own? From full impartiality, through an agent-centred prerogative, to strong special obligations grounded in relationships.
Whose interests count, and how much? All humans and no animals, all sentient beings equally, a graded scale, or something relational. This is the question with the largest consequences and the one people argue about least carefully.
How do burdens on different people combine? Fully aggregative, so enough small harms outweigh a large one; individualist, so they never do; or something in between with a threshold.
What is the primary object of assessment? The act, the rule, or the agent. This determines the shape of the theory rather than its verdicts, and it is the difference between "was that the right thing to do" and "what sort of person does that".
| Position | Good | Constraints | Partiality | Aggregation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Act utilitarianism | Welfare, summed | None | None | Full |
| Rule consequentialism | Welfare, summed | Derived from the code | Permitted by the code | Full, at the level of rules |
| Kantian deontology | Not primary | Absolute | Permitted | Rejected |
| Rossian pluralism | Several | Pro tanto | Built into the duties | By judgement |
| Scanlonian contractualism | Not primary | Yes, via rejection | Permitted | Individualist |
| Virtue ethics | Flourishing | Via the virtues | Central | Not the question |
The table is a starting grid, not a taxonomy to be memorised, and its real use is diagnostic: when you disagree with someone, find the row they are in and the column you differ on.
Example. Two people disagree about whether a government should divert flood defence funding from a wealthy town to a poorer one where more lives are at risk. Locate the disagreement on the six questions.
Almost certainly on aggregation and partiality, and not on the good. Both parties value lives and property, so the first question is not in dispute. If one says the greater number of lives settles it and the other says the wealthy town's residents have paid for their defences and have a claim, the disagreement is partly about entitlement, which is Nozick's historical question, and partly about whether the state may weigh its citizens against each other at all, which is the aggregation question. Notice what is not in dispute: neither is arguing about consequences versus duties in the abstract, and a conversation conducted at that altitude would never reach the point where they differ. Locating it takes two minutes and makes the rest of the argument possible.
Now you. Someone says they are a consequentialist but that torture is always wrong. Is that a contradiction?
Answer
Not necessarily, and there are three consistent readings. They may be a rule consequentialist, holding that a code containing an exceptionless prohibition on torture has the best expected consequences when generally internalised, which is defensible given how badly the exceptions have gone in practice. They may be a two-level act consequentialist, holding that a firm disposition against torture produces better outcomes than a policy of weighing, while conceding that at the critical level, with perfect information, torture could in principle be justified. Or they may be inconsistent, holding a genuine constraint while calling themselves a consequentialist. The three are distinguished by one question: is the prohibition defeasible by a sufficiently large benefit that you know about with certainty? A yes puts them in the second camp, a no in the first or the third, and asking it is more useful than telling them they contradict themselves.
Stating a view so it can be attacked
A view that cannot be attacked has not been stated. Four elements make the difference.
Name the criterion. Not "I think consequences matter" but "an act is right if and only if its expected welfare is at least as great as that of any alternative". Vagueness at this stage is what lets a position slide out from under every counterexample.
Name the scope. Whose welfare, over what time, with what discount, and which beings are included. A great many disputes that look like disagreements about the criterion are disagreements about scope.
Name the priority ordering. If you have several considerations, say what happens when they conflict: lexical priority, weighing by judgement, or a threshold. A list of considerations with no ordering is not yet a view.
Name the refuter. Say what case, if you accepted its description and still found the verdict intolerable, would make you abandon the position. If nothing would, you have an allegiance rather than a view, and the rest of the discussion is theatre.
That last requirement is uncomfortable and it is the one worth insisting on, of yourself first. It is also the direct descendant of the standard the free will course ended with, and for the same reason: a position held with no conditions attached to it cannot be argued about, only announced.
Answering the best objection
When a counterexample lands, there are exactly three moves, and knowing which one you are making is most of the skill.
Deny the case. Argue that the description is incoherent, or that the stipulations smuggle in the conclusion, or that the case as described could not occur. This is legitimate and is overused: the fact that a case is unrealistic is not by itself an objection, since the point of stipulating is to isolate a variable.
Distinguish. Accept the case and show that your principle, correctly stated, does not apply to it. This is the most productive move, because it forces you to state the principle more precisely, and the more precise version is a better theory whether or not it survives the next case.
Bite the bullet. Accept both the case and the verdict, and argue that the intuition against it is unreliable. This is respectable and it has a price: you must supply the debunking story, explaining why we would have that intuition whether or not it were correct, and you must accept the verdict consistently in every relevantly similar case rather than only in the seminar.
What is not available is silence, or the reply that the objector is being unreasonable, or the observation that the other theory has problems too. That last is the commonest evasion in the subject. Every theory has problems; the question is which set you can live with, and that comparison requires stating your own problems as clearly as your opponent's.
Example. You hold that an act is right if it maximises expected welfare. Someone puts the transplant surgeon to you. Work all three moves and say which is strongest.
Denying the case means arguing that the secrecy stipulation is incoherent, since nothing stays secret and the surgeon cannot know that it will, and therefore that the expected welfare of killing is negative. This is weak, because the case can be restated to close the gap, as the earlier lesson showed. Distinguishing means adopting a rule or two-level version: the criterion applies to codes or dispositions rather than to individual acts, so the surgeon's act is wrong because the disposition to perform it is disastrous. This is strong, and its cost is that you have changed your theory, and inherited the collapse objection or the boundary problem that comes with it. Biting the bullet means accepting that the surgeon should kill, and supplying a debunking account of the contrary intuition, most plausibly that we have a well-founded and generally useful horror of doctors who kill, which misfires in a case stipulated never to occur. This is respectable and requires you to say the same thing about every structurally identical case, including ones where the victim is you. The strongest is the second, and noticing that it is a change of theory rather than a defence of the original is the honest part.
Now you. You hold that there is an absolute constraint against intentionally killing the innocent. Someone puts a case in which one such killing prevents the deaths of a million. Work the three moves.
Answer
Denying the case is weak here, since cases of roughly this shape have occurred and the stipulation is not exotic. Distinguishing is where the work is: you can adopt a threshold, so that the constraint holds absolutely below some enormous level of harm and is overridden above it, which saves the intuition at the cost of the discontinuity problem and of admitting that the constraint was not absolute after all. Or you can distinguish intending from foreseeing and check whether the killing is genuinely intended, which sometimes dissolves the case and sometimes does not. Biting the bullet is the position of a genuine absolutist, and it requires saying that the million must die, which Kant and Anscombe both accepted in the relevant forms, and supplying an account of why the intuition against it is unreliable, usually that our sense of responsibility for what we allow is inflated by the vividness of the numbers. All three are live. What is not live is holding the constraint absolutely, refusing the threshold, and also refusing to say that the million die.
Arguing with someone whose foundations differ
Most real disagreements are not between a consequentialist and a Kantian. They are between two people who have never stated a criterion, and the useful techniques do not require either of them to.
Internal critique is the most powerful and the least used. Instead of arguing from your premises, argue from theirs: find a commitment they hold and show what it entails about the case in dispute. This is what the earlier lessons did throughout, and its advantage is that it requires no shared foundation at all, only that your interlocutor prefers consistency to inconsistency.
Locating the disagreement comes next. Run the six questions until you find the one you differ on. Very often the answer surprises both of you: two people arguing about immigration may agree completely about consequences and differ about whether a state may weight its own citizens, which is the partiality question, and a whole evening spent on economic forecasts was wasted.
Separating the empirical from the normative is the third, and it is worth doing early. Ask what fact, if established, would change their view. If one exists, the argument is partly empirical and you can look it up. If none does, you have found the moral premise, which is where the argument actually is.
Argument runs out somewhere, and it is worth knowing where. Against someone who accepts a monstrous conclusion consistently, has no inconsistency to exploit, and shares no premise with you, there is nothing further to say, and the rational response is not a better argument but resistance. That is a real limit on the reach of moral reasoning and it does not undermine anything above it, since the same is true of any subject: someone who consistently rejects the evidence of their senses cannot be argued into physics either.
What to do while uncertain
There remains the practical problem: you have read all this, you find each family partly convincing, and you have to act.
The bad answers are to pick a team and follow it off a cliff, and to conclude that since the theories disagree, nothing is settled. The second is plainly false: the theories agree about the overwhelming majority of cases, and their agreement is more informative than their disagreement. Where all live theories give the same verdict, the verdict is as well supported as anything in the subject.
For the residue, three approaches are used. My favourite theory says act on the theory you find most plausible, which is simple and throws away the information contained in your uncertainty. Maximising expected choiceworthiness, developed by William MacAskill and Toby Ord, treats moral uncertainty like empirical uncertainty: weight each option by your credence in each theory and by how good the option is on that theory. Its difficulty is intertheoretic comparison, since there is no common scale on which a utilitarian's welfare units and a Kantian's violation of dignity can be measured, and a theory that assigns infinite disvalue to some acts swamps the calculation. Avoiding the worst is the practical residue that survives both: prefer options that are acceptable on every theory you take seriously, and treat an option that is catastrophic on any live theory as one requiring a very strong case.
Three rules of thumb follow from this and are worth more than they look. Where theories converge, act with confidence. Where they diverge, prefer the reversible option, because the value of information is high and your credences will change. And be suspicious of any argument whose conclusion is that you may do something you already wanted to do, since that is precisely the pattern the debunking test in the lesson on method was designed to catch.
Example. You are a doctor and a patient with a poor prognosis asks for help to die. The law permits it. Your credence is roughly even between a view on which autonomy settles the matter and one on which there is a constraint against killing. What does each approach recommend?
My favourite theory picks the more plausible of the two and acts on it, which given roughly even credences is close to arbitrary. Expected choiceworthiness asks how much is at stake on each view: on the autonomy view, refusing imposes a serious and irreversible burden on the patient, and on the constraint view, complying is a grave wrong, and the calculation cannot be completed without a common scale, which is the objection. Avoiding the worst gives usable guidance and it is worth stating: refer the patient to a colleague who has no such reservation. That option is acceptable on the autonomy view, since the patient's request is met, and much less bad on the constraint view, since you have not killed anyone, so it dominates both of the pure options. Conscientious objection with a duty to refer, which is what most jurisdictions with assisted dying laws have adopted, is exactly this structure, and it is a good illustration that institutional compromises are often solutions to moral uncertainty rather than failures of nerve.
Now you. Apply the same reasoning to a decision about whether to eat meat, given uncertainty about animal moral status.
Answer
The asymmetry is stark and the case is a good test of whether the method has been understood. If animals have no moral status, eating them is permissible and abstaining costs you some pleasure and some convenience. If animals have significant moral status, eating factory-farmed meat is participation in something very serious. So the downside of abstaining is small on every theory, and the downside of not abstaining is severe on some, which is exactly the structure "avoid the worst" is built for. This does not prove that eating meat is wrong; it shows that a person genuinely uncertain about the question has a reason to act as though it were, and that the burden of the uncertainty falls on the eater rather than on the animal. A reader who wants to resist should attack the premise that the cost of abstaining is small, which is a real argument in some contexts, or defend the confident claim that animals lack status, which the lesson on who counts showed to be much harder than it looks. What is not available is to plead uncertainty and continue, since uncertainty is what generated the argument.
What this course has shown
It has not shown which theory is true, and no honest course could.
What it has shown is that the disagreements are structured. Every position is a set of answers to six questions. Every argument has a moral premise, and finding it is a technique rather than a talent. Every universal principle can be tested by one case, and every response to a counterexample is one of three moves. The empirical questions inside moral disputes are separable and often already answered. And the strongest arguments in the subject, on both sides of every live dispute, have the same form: they take a premise their opponent already holds and follow it somewhere the opponent did not want to go.
The free will course ended by asking readers to locate themselves on a map of positions about responsibility and say what would change their mind. This one ends with the same demand about conduct, and the two questions are less separable than they look: what you think a person deserves depends on what you think they should have done, and what you think they should have done is settled by nothing except argument of the kind this course has been conducting.
The last thing to say is the one Aristotle said first. Knowing all this is not the same as being good, and a course cannot make anyone good. What it can do is remove the excuses: after this, "who is to say" is not available, and neither is the claim that the question is too hard to think about. It is hard, it is thinkable, and the tools are now in your hands.