I'm really not sure which of those best describes me.
In principle, I feel that the moral value of an action should be independent of its actual consequences, but have everything to do with its reasonably foreseeable probable consequences. So, in particular, two drunk drivers running exactly the same level of risk are morally in the wrong to exactly the same degree, even if one happens to get lucky and not have an accident while the other one kills an innocent person.
In practice, of course, we punish based on actual consequences; and I think we are right to do so, in spite of the principle I state above. The reason being, only an omniscient observer could know enough about the driver's state of mind and speed of reactions to judge the actual level of risk they were running; we poor mortals, in possession of much more limited information, can only infer via Bayes' Theorem what sort of level of risk they were likely to have been running – and naturally, one of the most significant factors we can feed into Bayes when making that judgment is the knowledge of what the outcome actually was. And if a more dangerous driver is more likely to have an accident, then clearly the fact that someone did have an accident makes it more likely they were driving particularly dangerously. It's not morally perfect, but it's the best we can do with our limited information.
So, does that make me a consequentialist? I honestly don't know.
There's also a whole bunch of special cases about whose fault the consequence really was in cases where there are multiple actors. If someone holds a child at gunpoint and makes some demand of me, and I decline to do whatever it was he was asking, and he shoots the child, then clearly the shooting of the child was a reasonably foreseeable bad consequence of my choice, and yet I would say that morally the killing falls on his shoulders and not mine. Does that disqualify me from consequentialism? Again, I don't know.
Here's another thing that convinces me I'm not a pure consequentialist. Consider the old chestnut where I come across a railway track with two people tied to it, and I've only got time to save one before the train arrives. Of course there's no really good way to choose which person to save; but some cases seem more morally questionable to me than others. For instance, if one person is a stranger and the other is my (hypothetical) wife, it seems to me that I couldn't be blamed for choosing to save my wife because I love her. But if one is a stranger and the other cheated me at cards last week, then I would feel distinctly iffy about the idea of choosing to save the stranger because I disliked the other guy – whereas if in exactly the same situation I saved the same stranger because he was closer, that would seem OK to me. So the motivation behind the decision definitely matters to me in addition to the consequences.
So I think that for all these reasons I probably fall a little way outside pure consequentialism. However, I really have no idea at all which of the other two I should be mixing in with it.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2008-07-18 01:43 pm (UTC)In principle, I feel that the moral value of an action should be independent of its actual consequences, but have everything to do with its reasonably foreseeable probable consequences. So, in particular, two drunk drivers running exactly the same level of risk are morally in the wrong to exactly the same degree, even if one happens to get lucky and not have an accident while the other one kills an innocent person.
In practice, of course, we punish based on actual consequences; and I think we are right to do so, in spite of the principle I state above. The reason being, only an omniscient observer could know enough about the driver's state of mind and speed of reactions to judge the actual level of risk they were running; we poor mortals, in possession of much more limited information, can only infer via Bayes' Theorem what sort of level of risk they were likely to have been running – and naturally, one of the most significant factors we can feed into Bayes when making that judgment is the knowledge of what the outcome actually was. And if a more dangerous driver is more likely to have an accident, then clearly the fact that someone did have an accident makes it more likely they were driving particularly dangerously. It's not morally perfect, but it's the best we can do with our limited information.
So, does that make me a consequentialist? I honestly don't know.
There's also a whole bunch of special cases about whose fault the consequence really was in cases where there are multiple actors. If someone holds a child at gunpoint and makes some demand of me, and I decline to do whatever it was he was asking, and he shoots the child, then clearly the shooting of the child was a reasonably foreseeable bad consequence of my choice, and yet I would say that morally the killing falls on his shoulders and not mine. Does that disqualify me from consequentialism? Again, I don't know.
Here's another thing that convinces me I'm not a pure consequentialist. Consider the old chestnut where I come across a railway track with two people tied to it, and I've only got time to save one before the train arrives. Of course there's no really good way to choose which person to save; but some cases seem more morally questionable to me than others. For instance, if one person is a stranger and the other is my (hypothetical) wife, it seems to me that I couldn't be blamed for choosing to save my wife because I love her. But if one is a stranger and the other cheated me at cards last week, then I would feel distinctly iffy about the idea of choosing to save the stranger because I disliked the other guy – whereas if in exactly the same situation I saved the same stranger because he was closer, that would seem OK to me. So the motivation behind the decision definitely matters to me in addition to the consequences.
So I think that for all these reasons I probably fall a little way outside pure consequentialism. However, I really have no idea at all which of the other two I should be mixing in with it.