2.3 Critiques and Limitations of Consequentialist Ethics

Consequentialism, a key ethical theory, faces several critiques. Critics argue it's too demanding, requiring constant sacrifice for the greater good. It also clashes with common moral intuitions, potentially justifying rights violations for better outcomes.

Consequentialists respond by defending their theory's logic and proposing modifications. Rule consequentialism and two-level approaches aim to address concerns while maintaining a focus on outcomes. These debates highlight the complexities of balancing individual rights with overall welfare in ethical decision-making.

Objections to Consequentialism

Demandingness and Impracticality

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• Consequentialist theories are often criticized for being too demanding, requiring individuals to always act to maximize overall well-being even at great personal sacrifice
• Consequentialist reasoning seems to require unrealistic and undesirable levels of impartiality, with agents giving no special priority to their own interests, relationships, or personal projects
• Trying to actually implement thoroughgoing consequentialism might be self-defeating, as constantly calculating consequences could lead to paralyzing indecision, alienation from personal connections, and overall worse results
• Applying consequentialist theories in practice requires predicting and quantifying all the effects of our actions, which may be impossible in many situations given the limits of human knowledge

Counterintuitive Implications

• Critics argue consequentialism could justify violating individual rights if doing so would lead to better overall consequences, making the theory seem to permit or even require intuitively unethical actions
• Thought experiments like pushing an innocent person in front of a runaway trolley to save five others illustrate how consequentialism can conflict with common moral intuitions about rights and using people merely as means
• Consequentialists may have to endorse highly unequal distributions of well-being, including imposing great suffering on an individual for the greater good, which seems to violate principles of justice and fairness
• Some consequences of our actions, like effects on future generations or unforeseeable long-term impacts, seem especially difficult to assess and weigh against more immediate concerns

Consequentialist Responses

• Consequentialists may respond by arguing the demandingness of a moral theory does not make it false, and that respecting rights and justice tends to promote the best consequences in most real-world situations
• Rule consequentialists attempt to avoid conflicts with rights by evaluating moral rules rather than individual acts based on their consequences, arguing that a rule requiring respect for rights will tend to promote the best outcomes
• Some consequentialists "bite the bullet" and maintain that violating individual rights can be morally justified if the overall consequences are good enough (preventing catastrophic outcomes)
• Two-level consequentialist views hold that individuals should mostly follow commonsense moral norms, but that these norms themselves should be selected based on their overall consequences

Consequentialism vs Rights

Violating Rights for the Greater Good

• Consequentialist theories seem to imply that violating an individual's rights could be morally required if doing so would produce sufficiently good consequences overall
• Thought experiments like pushing an innocent person in front of a runaway trolley to save five others illustrate how consequentialism can conflict with common moral intuitions about rights and using people merely as means
• Consequentialists may have to endorse highly unequal distributions of well-being, including imposing great suffering on an individual for the greater good, which seems to violate principles of justice and fairness

Separateness of Persons

• Some argue consequentialism fails to respect the separateness of persons by aggregating utility across individuals and ignoring the distribution of well-being
• Even if the consequences could be known, critics argue that there is no truly impartial way to make interpersonal comparisons of well-being or aggregate utility across separate individuals
• Consequentialist reasoning requires giving equal weight to the interests of all affected individuals, which can lead to counterintuitive conclusions that fail to prioritize special obligations (family, promises)

Rule Consequentialism and Individual Acts

• Rule consequentialists attempt to avoid conflicts with rights by evaluating moral rules rather than individual acts based on their consequences, arguing that a rule requiring respect for rights will tend to promote the best outcomes
• This allows the rule consequentialist to generally prohibit actions like lying or violating rights, since a world where everyone followed such a rule would have better consequences than a world with rampant dishonesty and rights violations
• However, the rule consequentialist still seems committed to violating the rule in extreme thought experiments where doing so would prevent a catastrophe, leading some to object that it collapses into act consequentialism

Feasibility of Consequentialism

Difficulties of Prediction and Quantification

• Applying consequentialist theories in practice requires predicting and quantifying all the effects of our actions, which may be impossible in many situations given the limits of human knowledge
• Some consequences of our actions, like effects on future generations or unforeseeable long-term impacts, seem especially difficult to assess and weigh against more immediate concerns
• Even if the consequences could be known, critics argue that there is no truly impartial way to make interpersonal comparisons of well-being or aggregate utility across separate individuals

Psychological Feasibility

• Consequentialist reasoning seems to require unrealistic and undesirable levels of impartiality, with agents giving no special priority to their own interests, relationships, or personal projects
• Trying to actually implement thoroughgoing consequentialism might be self-defeating, as constantly calculating consequences could lead to paralyzing indecision, alienation from personal connections, and overall worse results
• Humans may simply be psychologically incapable of the kind of impartial, detached reasoning that consequentialism requires, instead relying on moral heuristics (rules of thumb)

Scalar Consequentialism

• Given the difficulties of reliably maximizing utility, some consequentialists argue we should adopt a "scalar" conception that simply tries to produce better outcomes rather than the best possible outcome
• Satisficing consequentialism requires agents to produce good enough outcomes rather than the very best consequences, reducing demandingness while preserving the core consequentialist focus on results
• This makes consequentialism more feasible to implement, but may still be objectionably demanding and fails to escape the problem of quantifying and comparing consequences

Consequentialism in Ethical Frameworks

Alternatives to Pure Consequentialism

• Ethical egoism takes the goodness of consequences for the individual agent as the sole standard of morality, avoiding the demandingness objection to impartial consequentialist views
• Deontological theories that recognize prima facie duties, like Ross's moral pluralism, can give some weight to producing good consequences while still respecting constraints like individual rights
• Virtue ethics focuses on character traits rather than right actions, but consequentialist considerations can still play a role in assessing what the virtues are and how they should be cultivated and applied

Consequentialist Elements in Other Theories

• While consequentialism as a complete theory may be objectionable, many find it hard to deny that consequences are morally relevant and play some role in our ethical thinking
• Deontological theories can incorporate consequentialist considerations as a prima facie duty to be weighed against other duties (fairness, honesty), or by arguing that individual rights are justified by their positive consequences
• Virtue ethicists can hold that virtuous character traits (compassion, courage) are justified by their tendency to promote good consequences, even if right action doesn't simply reduce to producing the best outcomes
• Two-level consequentialist views separate the criterion of rightness (producing the best consequences) from decision procedures, allowing individuals to mostly rely on commonsense moral norms