How to Justify Consequentialism Without Pointing at the Consequences?

What makes an action good or bad? People adhering to deontological ethics judge the morality of their actions based on whether their actions follow certain rules. ‘You should not kill’, ‘You should not steal’ and ‘You should not lie’ are examples of such rules. On the other end there are people who say that ‘ the ends justify the means’, and that the rightness or wrongness of an action is ultimately based on the outcomes of the action. ‘You may lie if the damage caused to the person you lie to is negligible in comparison to the utility you gain/the dis-utility you prevent from happening’ could be an example. The latter position is an instance of a the broader position of consequentialism

So: what position to choose? Should you base your conduct on absolute rules, or should you weigh the expected outcomes of actions in order to decide what action is the right one to take? One could say that it is reasonable to judge each case on its own merits. That it does not make sense to hold on to the rule ‘You should not lie’, because in some cases lying might be ‘better’ – in whatever sense defined – for both you and the person you lie too. For example: suppose your father is lying on his deathbed. You have just heard that your sister – the apple of your dad’s eye – got cancer. Given that you know that your dad cares an awful lot about your sister, and that telling about your sister’s situation is likely to worsen his health, it might in fact be bad – in terms outcomes – to tell him about your sister’s situation. Furthermore, given your own happiness, it might be better not to say anything (saving you the painful outcome of seeing your dad suffer from the news). Hence one could reasonably say that there are instances, such as this example, that falsify an absolute rule of conduct – ‘You should not lie,’ in this case. That implies that deontological ethics is not necessarily – or not always – the best stance to adopt.

That brings us to consequentialism: might this be a more reasonable position to adopt? In order to reasonably claim so, one should at least come up with a reasonable answer to the following question: how can you base your conduct on the outcomes of your actions if you don’t know what the consequences of your actions will be? We can – after all – not look into the future, hence we cannot know what the consequences of our actions will be. You could – for example – think that your girlfriend would not mind it if you’d post a photo of you and another girl on your social media (‘because she is so reasonable’), but it might turn out that, contrary to your expectation, she does. You can of course have expectations, but are expectations sufficient to ground moral conduct? After all, each case is unique – each case has innumerable factors that influence the outcome of one’s action. Hence even coming up with a reasonable expectation might – a priori – be impossible.

A more fundamental problem with consequentialism might be the premise on which the doctrine is based: something along the lines of ‘An action is good if its outcomes are good’. It seems that this rule – which forms the foundation of the consequentialist position – is, by definition, deontological in nature. But what then justifies this rule? If the reason would be that adopting this rule is good because it leads to the best outcomes, then we are justifying consequentialism with consequentialism, which seems intolerable. On the other hand, if we take this rule to be applied without looking at its expected outcomes, then we are deriving consequentialism – at least in part – from deontological ethics, which could cast doubt on whether one is actually applying consequentialism instead of deontological ethics.

I find this a difficult issue. What do you think?

P.S. For the sake of the length of this article, I left out pragmatic ethics. This seems to be a middle ground between deontological ethics and consequentialism that could be reasonable.

To Kill or Not to Kill, That’s the Question

Imagine the following situation: you are walking your morning walk along the primary school in your neighborhood. You walk past the playground, where children are playing until the bell rings and school starts. And then suddenly, out of the blue, a man enters the playground: he is wearing a machine gun. A loaded machine gun, to be exact. He aims his gun at one the children and yells: ‘The children of today will be the corpses of tomorrow. This is God’s revenge for the tormenting betrayal of the West.’ And while he is pointing his gun at a little girl, you recognize that he has dropped his handgun. You pick up the handgun, and see that it is loaded. In the corner of your eye, you see a child peeing its paints, while sounds of crying and terror fill your ears. You aim the gun at the man and think to yourself: Shall I kill him? Or not?

Because what should you do? There are two competing philosophical positions that might assist you in making this decision. But before knowing which position to choose, you should answer to following question: should you strive to maximize the overall level of ‘happiness’, irrespective of the act you have to undertake (killing someone in this case), or should you stick to absolute moral values, regardless of what the immediate consequences of doing so might be? This is the decision between utilitarianism and absolute ethics.

Utilitarianism claims that all actions that increase the overall level of good in the world, the level of good caused by an action minus the level of suffering caused by this is action, is a good action. You can see what, according to this view, you should do in the example: kill that guy. After all, the suffering he will cause the children is (presumably) much more than the suffering he will incur by being killed. It’s a tradeoff: one human life versus many more. Nothing more, and nothing less.

However, is this how we usually perform moral actions? By just checking whether our actions will maximize the overall level of good? That’s not what we usually associate with acting morally, right? You help your friend because you feel like you want to help him, not because it increases the overall level of utility, do you? Or are we indeed nothing more than walking and talking calculators; adding and subtracting gains and losses in a split second? And if so, how can we be sure about the number we include in our calculation? Imagine that the guy in our example isn’t intending to kill any child. We might assume that he is going to kill children, but are sure about that? He might have just been drunk and confused, but not planning to do any physical harm. So in this case we wouldn’t increase the of overall level of utility by killing him, right? My point is: you don’t know what the consequences of someone’s actions will be, until you have have witnessed them. So how are you going to take this into account?

The competing view is derived from Kant’s moral philosophy, in which the notion of the Categorical Imperative plays a crucial role. According to this Categorical Imperative, you should “act only according to that maxim whereby you can and, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law”. This law has nothing to do with increasing the overall level of good in the world; you should ask yourself what the world would look like if everyone would perform the action that you were considering to do (like killing someone), and you would have to check whether this is a world you could live and whether this is a world you want to live in. If your action doesn’t meet these requirements, it’s an immoral action and you shouldn’t perform it.

So, what if we would apply the Categorical Imperative to our case of the (potential) child murderer? What if everyone of us would kill someone who they expect is going to kill people? Would that be a world we could and want to live in? Well, it might not be a world we want to live in. After all, as we’ve just seen, we don’t know for sure whether the man will indeed kill the children; and if would be a little harsh to kill someone because of our inadequate projections, would it? But, more importantly, acting according to the aforementioned maxim (“kill someone who you expect is going to kill people”) doesn’t seem to b a world we could live in. After all, if you are planning on killing someone, the man with the gun in this example, you should be killed also, right? But who’s going to do that? And shouldn’t that person be killed either? An infinite regress will result. So you see: it is impossible to make this law into a universal law; a law that everyone of us should (always) stick to.

Ethics is not so easy. So, what do you think?

Are the Exact Sciences being Taught Poorly?

I was relieved when I heard that I passed my final examination for mathematics on high school. Finally…no more need to memorize those nonsensical rules. No more need to study this weird language that, just like French and German, just seemed to make no sense at all. No more frustration. What a relief. That was how I have felt about mathematics, and about the exact sciences in  general, for my entire high school period. But in the last couple of years, I slowly became aware of the beauty of each of these “nonsensical” disciplines. I have read about Einstein’s theory of general relativity and other world-changing ideas that have catapulted our society into the 21st century. And this made me think: are the exact sciences being taught in the wrong manner? Is that maybe why I – and possible many others – couldn’t appreciate their beauty?

The (Dutch) labor market is short of beta-educated people. Why is that? Well, maybe it is because of the manner in which mathematics and physics are being taught at high school. Maybe children are being scared to death in the few years they are at attending high school, so that they promise themselves never ever to study mathematics or physics later on in their lives. That could be an explanation for the fact that the majority of children finishing their high school education start studying law or business, two subjects that aren’t being taught at high school and – therefore – could not have scared away any child (yet).

But there might be many opportunities for making the exact sciences more attractive to children. There are websites like BetterExplained, Khan Academy, Ted-Ed and MinutePhysics that are capable of teaching seemingly dry and formal concepts in a playful and interesting manner. These people have taught me the ideas behind mathematical formulas and the laws of physics governing our everyday reality. I believe that it is a lack of idea-oriented teaching, as being applied by the aforementioned websites, and an overdose of rule-based teaching, as currently being applied at high school, that is what is discouraging many youngsters from choosing to continue their education in the exact sciences.

Another reason why teaching according to the idea-oriented approach might better suit the needs of children, and thus of society, is that the parts of children’s brains required for being able to process abstract information are frequently not fully developed yet in the period they are attending high school. Therefore, even if they wanted to, they might simply be unable to understand what is being taught to them. Concepts like atoms or differentiation are not similar to any everyday experience a child knows of. These abstract concepts might ask a little too much of children’s underdeveloped little brains. And it is this “asking a little too much” that might result in children not understanding the topics and, what seems to be an even bigger problem, not enjoying to learn about them.

But it is not only at high school that rule-based teaching seems to dominate idea-oriented teaching; many university courses also seem to stick to the procedure of “just follow the steps” in teaching students about – for example – mathematics. But what if you go wrong by following these steps? What if you ask your teacher for advice and he says, “Of course you went wrong, you skipped step 6”. How would that contribute to your understanding of mathematics? Not much, right? Is that truly how we want to teach mathematics to students? Given that there seems to be no creativity required for performing these types of calculations, can’t we just let computers do it for us? Then we will at least be sure that no steps will be forgotten, right?

My question to you is: do you also think that the manner in which the exact sciences are being taught today might prevent children from studying them later on in their lives? And do you believe that the manner in which the exact sciences are being taught, whether it is in high school or at university, is wrong from a didactic point of view? I am curious to know what you believe.