Transcription
Hello class. I'm here to talk with you today about an important distinction in how we understand ethical theories. So, ethics, as you recall, is all about answering this question: What should I do? Or, how should I live? And that question is fundamentally a question about action. It's about what actions we should take, what we should do. We talk about ethical dilemmas, we're talking about, should I do this action or that action? That issue of how should we act is at the heart of ethics. And to understand ethical theories that are going to give us different accounts of how we ought to act, we need to understand this basic distinction. The distinction between deontological forms of ethical theory and consequentialist forms of ethical theory.
The way to understand that distinction is by this very simple schema behind me here. We have actions. Actions cause consequences, the effects of actions. We're going to call consequences the outcomes. The standard language in ethical theory is consequences. Consequences. And actions themselves are caused by, uh, the contents of our mind, our, our, our mental drives that compel us to act. And those we call motives. Sometimes people might call those desires or something like that, but the standard is to say motives. Motives cause action. Actions cause consequences. That basic schema is important because to evaluate an action, we can't just look at the action itself, right? The an action of killing a person is very different depending on the context that it's in, right? If you take an action of, uh, say, shooting someone, was it done as part of a just execution, a proper penalty? Was it done in self-defense? Was it done purely maliciously? All of those are questions about motives. What was kind of the mental content that went into that action? If you shot someone, did it bring about the consequences that were good that you wanted to bring about? You shot someone, did it deter other criminals from taking the action as you hoped that it would? Did it really save your life or save others and thus produce a greater good? Those are the consequences produced by the action. There's simply no good way to evaluate actions on their own merits without thinking about them in this broader context, context of what causes them and the context of what they cause. So, motives cause actions, cause consequences.
That distinction that I alluded to already, the distinction between consequentialism and deontology, you can probably start to feel how that's going to work. The consequentialist is going to say, in order to evaluate actions, what we should do is look at the consequences that those actions generate. The consequences determine whether an action is good or bad, right or wrong. The deontologist is going to disagree. Deontologist thinks that it's the motives that matter. It's our state of mind that causes us or leads us to act, that's what brings about good action or bad action.
Uh, to understand this distinction, let me just talk through a historical example, kind of a, um, loose historical example of that. I got to play up certain parts that may be slightly exaggerated, but you'll get the idea. So, Alfred Nobel is a famous figure from history. He's the namesake of the Nobel Prizes. He's a wealthy, uh, inventor, engineer, industrialist type of person. Made a lot of money in his lifetime. And when he died, he donated his estate to endow the Nobel Prizes, most famously the Nobel Peace Prize, right? Someone wins every year, and many great people throughout history have won that prize ever since Alfred Nobel endowed it. What most people don't know is how Alfred Nobel made his money. Well, Alfred Nobel, uh, was an inventor and had a number of patents, but his kind of family business was the weapons business. He was in the, uh, explosives manufacturing industry. He started out in a family company that made nitroglycerin, also known as blasting oil. Nitroglycerin is highly volatile. Nitroglycerin, if you shake it too hard in the jar, it will just explode in your hand. That's how volatile it is. Uh, people used to use that to, you know, blow holes in the earth. They would drill holes and then slide down little jars of nitroglycerin and then drop, uh, iron bars down that would ignite them, and off they would blow. So, this was a very, very dangerous business, as you can imagine, to use nitroglycerin in mining. And as dangerous, dangerous as it was to use it in mining, it was even more dangerous to manufacture it. And so, when Alfred Nobel was a fairly young man, there was a major accident at his family's nitroglycerin factory, an explosion that killed many, many people. And Alfred Nobel got this idea. He kind of committed himself, I'm going to invent a safer explosive so that we can save hundreds and hundreds of people's lives, both in the mining industry and in manufacturing this stuff. There's just too many people dying because it's too dangerous. And along the way, after a lot of trial and error and coming up with different things, he ends up inventing dynamite. Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. And dynamite's an amazing substance. It's much safer to manufacture. It's much safer to transport. You know, you can't really ignite it until you put that, uh, blasting cap in there and the fuse, and you ignite it in the proper way. If you can carry a bunch of sticks of dynamite around in a backpack and you can fall down the hill, and it won't blow up on you, you'll be fine. Nitroglycerin on the other hand, that would never have happened. And so, Alfred Nobel invents this stuff. He was clearly motivated. What he was trying to do was to save lives. He was motivated by this drive to help others. That's what caused him to do this action, to invent dynamite. But unbeknownst to him, one of the great consequences of that action was he ended up inventing one of the most powerful weapons of the modern era. There simply couldn't have been the sorts of warfare that we had in the American Civil War and World War I, for example, if it weren't for the invention of dynamite. You simply couldn't grab a jar full of nitroglycerin and throw it at your enemy, because as you did, it would explode in your hand. And so, whenever he invented dynamite, you could do that with it. It ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people more that he never intended, because they were using it as a weapon. It was now safe enough that they could carry it across a battlefield, and they could run across and throw it in a trench and kill a bunch of your enemies. The consequences of his action then were quite negative. In fact, maybe not, maybe all, not all things considered, you know, it might be that a greater good came out of this and whatnot, but just stick with that idea for a second, that many, many people died that he never intended to. The consequences of that invention were much more negative than he had ever thought. And just assume, for the sake of argument, that on the whole, they were quite negative. That leaves us with this problem: How do we evaluate Alfred Nobel's invention? Did he do a good thing when he invented it, or did he do something bad? Was he a great philanthropist helping mankind, or was he somewhat of an evil genius that created a great terrible weapon that has caused mankind to fight and destroy itself? Well, answering that question forces us to choose. Is it the consequences that matter more, because they were negative, or the motives that matter more, because they were positive? If you're a deontologist, you think it's the motives that matter for evaluating action, then you're going to say Alfred Nobel's invention was a good thing. His action was good in inventing that dynamite. If you're a consequentialist, you're going to go, no, the consequences were bad. It was a bad action. And that's why this distinction is so important. For almost any ethically interesting action, the motives and the consequences pull apart. When the motives are good and the consequences are good, it's pretty easy to go, yeah, that's a good action. And when the motives are bad and the consequences are bad, yeah, sure, bad action. But all the ethically interesting cases, all the cases in which we need moral theory to help us out, those are cases in which the goodness or badness of the motive is contrary to the goodness or badness of the consequences. And so, I point this out to dispel the first objection I always get when presenting this. Everyone wants to say, well, why can't we just use the motives and the consequences? Why think we have to, you know, value one more than the other? And the answer to that objection is, we just have to, because things aren't all roses and rainbows. It sometimes good motives lead to bad consequences, and sometimes bad motives lead to good consequences. Those are the interesting cases. Those are the cases where we really need our reason to help us reflect and figure out if that action was good or bad. And that's why we have to place an emphasis on one over the other. So, the consequentialist says, to evaluate an action, look at its consequences. Consequences determine the goodness or badness of action. Deontologist say, look at the motives. Motives determine the rightness or wrongness of action, and the consequences don't matter. And that distinction is going to carry us on through the rest of the course. We're going to see different consequentialist accounts. We're going to see different deontological accounts, different ways of understanding which consequences are the good consequences and which consequences we ought to bring about, and different ways of understanding which motives are the good motives and which ones are the bad ones. As we do that, we'll have to wrestle with this broad issue: Is it the consequences or the motives that matter more?
And as we close out this discussion, let me just give you a little bit of reason for thinking, uh, that each of those sides has something going for it. So, the basic deontology argument, the basic argument for deontology goes something like this: In order for us to have a moral obligation, we have to be in control of that thing we're obligated to do. You know, so we often times call this the "ought implies can" principle. Anything that you ought to do, you have to first be able to do it. If it's impossible for you, you can't have any moral obligations towards it. So, ought implies can principle. You can only have moral obligations towards things that you can do. That's the first key premise of the deontologist argument. Ought implies can. The next key claim is that we cannot control the consequences of our actions. Think about that for a moment. Often times people think, sure, I can control the consequences of my action. I know if I, you know, if I shoot that person, it's going to kill them. And to some extent, we can have fairly accurate predictions of the consequences of our actions. But what we also see is that many, many times the consequences of our actions are very far outside our ability to control. We'll take an action intending something, and almost exactly the opposite will happen. And that's a real limitation in our ability to know what's going on in the future. But what the deontologist is talking about isn't our ability to predict or our ability to know the future. The deontologist thinks there's a fundamental, in-principle problem, a reason why I can't control the consequences of any of my ethically significant actions. And that principled problem is that all of my ethically significant actions involve interacting with another free rational agent like me. Ethics is about interpersonal relations with humans, and those interpersonal relations mean that I might do something, and you might react any way you would like to. That's what's great about you being free and me being free. You can't predict what I'm going to do, you can't control what I'm going to do. I'm free to do whatever I want. I can go along, I can resist, it doesn't matter. And so, the deontologist is going to say, for example, in the Alfred Nobel case, yeah, you might have had a reasonable prediction that if you created a more stable explosive, people would use it as a weapon. But that's not Alfred Nobel's responsibility, because he is not in control of the free choices of those other rational agents who decided to use that dynamite as a weapon. And so, in principle, he can't control the consequences of his actions. He can't control whether someone uses it as a weapon, because he can't control anyone else's actions but his own. And if you can't control it, you can't have a moral obligation towards it. So, since we can't control the consequences of our actions, the deontologist thinks, and ought implies can, it can't be the case that consequentialism is true. It can't be the case that what we ought to do is bring about the best consequences. So, that's the, that's the argument for deontology. That's the best case they can give you. I don't want to talk about whether that's a good argument or a bad argument right now, because I want you to reflect on that and think about it a little bit. It is a compelling case. It's hard to find the holes in, if there are any. But that's, that's the deontologist argument against consequentialism. Ought implies can, we can't control the consequences of our actions, therefore consequentialism has to be false. It can't be the case that we should bring about the best consequences. That's the case for deontology.
Now let's think a little bit about the case for consequentialism. The case for consequentialism basically goes like this: The good things in the world are stuff that our actions are supposed to try and bring about, right? What we care about are just consequences. Whatever it is, whether we think the good is happiness or pleasure or any other account of what the good is, our actions are going to be made good just in case they bring that about, in case they don't. And if they don't, they'll be bad actions as a result. The only sensible way to evaluate actions is based on whether or not the actions result in the good. That's it. So, the consequentialist case, quite simply, is that what we really care about, what really matters, are these goods. These goods aren't actions themselves. The goods are always ends of actions. They're always results or effects. And so, the only way to determine whether an action connects to the good is by whether or not it brings it about as an effect. So, in the consequentialist case, they're going to say, yeah, Alfred Nobel, he may have been trying to do something good, but look, he did something actually that was bad. Maybe we don't blame him personally for that, but ethics isn't about blaming people. It's not about praise and blame. For the consequentialist, ethics is about producing the good, making the world better. And if what we care about is making the world better, then our actions need to do that. And that is fundamentally about consequences of our actions. And so, you have it, a great divide in how people think about right and wrong, good and bad. Actions are right either because of what causes them or because of what they cause. The consequentialist thinks we should look at the consequences to determine act the goodness or badness of actions. And the deontologist thinks that we should look at the motives to determine the rightness or wrongness of actions. And tied up in that is a difference in perspective about the very nature of ethics itself. The deontologist thinks ethics is about identifying persons with free will and their responsibilities and their duties, and it's about figuring out which people are meeting their duties and which aren't, the good people from the bad people. But the consequentialist thinks that ethics is about making the world better, producing the good, not separating right from wrong, but producing the good. And as we go forward and look at more specific accounts of that in the ethical theories we're going to consider, we'll need to think about which of those perspectives is the best perspective to take, the deontological one or the consequentialist. But for now, just see that distinction and how important it is for thinking about the world around us. We'll build on it as we go forward.