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Ethics:Â Consequentialism
Video transcript
(intro music) Hi! My name's Julia Driver,
and I teach in the philosophy department at
Washington University in St. Louis. Today, I'm going to introduce you
to the theory of consequentialism. Consequentialism is a type of
normative ethical theory. Such theories provide criteria
for moral evaluation, and may also recommend rules
or decision procedures for people to follow in acting morally. Consequentialism, in its most general
form, holds that the moral quality of an action is completely determined
by its consequences. There are variations on this theme. For example, we might be evaluating
character traits instead of actions, or we might be evaluating actions
in terms of the consequences of adopting a set of rules that
prescribe those actions. The common thread, however, is that moral quality is a function of
consequences and nothing else. Traditionally, consequentialist theories
of moral evaluation have two parts. One part is an account of what is good, and the other part, an account of how to
approach the good, which underlies the attribution of deontic properties to the
action, such as the property of being right. For example, the most well-known
version of consequentialism is hedonistic act utilitarianism, which holds
that the right action is the action that maximizes pleasure, the action that has
the best overall consequences in terms of the production of pleasure. Here, the theory of the good is hedonism,
which is the view that pleasure is the one intrinsic good, and the approach to
pleasure is to maximize it, or to produce as much of it as possible. Suppose a doctor, Martha, has a dose of
medicine that is just enough to save the life of one person, Steve. To save Steve, she would need to
use the entire dose of medicine. However, there are five other people
who need much smaller doses in order to be saved. She could instead divide the
medicine into five smaller doses and save them instead of Steve. The utilitarian would view the
right action as the action with the best consequences, and so Martha
should use the medicine to save five rather than just one. The guiding idea is that
the point of morality is to make the world a better place. Consequentialism is contrasted with
theories of moral evaluation that either hold that consequences
are not relevant in determining the moral quality of one's actions;
or that consequences are only partly relevant, and that other considerations
matter in determinations of moral quality. Very few believe that consequences
are not at all relevant. However, there are very many moral
theorists who believe consequentialism is incorrect because it reduces
the moral quality of an action to the goodness of its consequences. For example, I have moral reason to keep
a promise, even if the promise does not promote the good. The reason is simply that
I made the promise. If I break a promise, I have
done something wrong, even if the consequences of breaking
the promise are slightly better than the consequences
of keeping the promise. Maximizing forms of consequentialism
are thought to be overly demanding. If the right action for me to perform is the one among the options open to me that
produces the most good, and if failure to produce the
most good is therefore wrong, then many of our ordinary
actions are wrong. For example, if I buy a bagel every
morning for breakfast, rather than make my own toast at home, then I
am spending money on a bagel that I could be spending to do something else
that, morally speaking, is better. I could save my bagel money
and send it to Oxfam, and use the money to save people's lives. And this is true for very
many of the purchases that people in affluent countries make. Thus, maximizing forms
of consequentialism, such as utilitarianism, seem to
be morally very demanding. To avoid this problem, some
consequentialists hold that the right action need not
maximize the good. Instead, the right action is the action
that produces enough good. This is called "satisficing
consequentialism." However, this approach seems odd, since
maximizing seems to be rationally required by the observation that more good
is surely better than less good. Subtitles by the Amara.org community