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Subjective Consequentialism and the Unforeseeable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2019

Christopher Jay Open the ORCID record for Christopher Jay [Opens in a new window]
Christopher Jay*
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University of York
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Abstract

As is already well known, subjective consequentialists face a challenge which arises from the fact that many (perhaps even most) of the consequences of an action are unforeseeable: this fact makes trouble for the assignment of expected values. Recently there has been some discussion of the role of ‘indifference’ principles in addressing this challenge. In this article, I argue that adopting a principle of indifference to unforeseeable consequences will not work – not because of familiar worries about the rationality of such indifference principles, but because subjective consequentialist theories which adopt such principles end up entailing either deontic indeterminacy or arbitrary deontic variance. This is because of another well-known fact: that possibilities do not ‘agglomerate’.

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Article
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Utilitas , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 33 - 49
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

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References

1 Quoted in Furbank, P. N., E. M. Forster: A Life, vol. 2 (London, 1977), p. 2Google Scholar. I came across the comment as the epigram of Stephen Neale, Facing Facts (Oxford, 2001).

2 For different forms of ‘indirect’ consequentialism which explain the difference between a moral theory's principles and the principles which ought, according to that moral theory, to be appealed to by agents deliberating about what to do see, e.g., Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Railton, Peter, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 13 (1984), pp. 134–71Google Scholar.

3 In this article, an action's ‘deontic status’ is always its moral permissibility, or its being morally forbidden or required. For the characterization of consequentialism in terms of ‘promoting’ value, see Pettit, Philip, ‘The Consequentialist Perspective’, in Baron, Marcia, Pettit, Philip and Slote, Michael, Three Methods of Ethics: A Debate (Oxford, 1997), pp. 92–174Google Scholar. In the remainder of this section, I present a very sketchy summary of the varieties of consequentialism which is not supposed to be comprehensive but picks out some salient points for what follows.

4 See, e.g., Parfit, Derek, On What Matters, vol. 3 (Oxford, 2017), §57CrossRefGoogle Scholar on ‘act-including act consequentialism’ for a discussion of types of consequentialism which take account of the intrinsic value of actions, as well as their consequences.

5 This is true of both traditional ‘single dimension’ consequentialism, such as utilitarianism, and (with some complications which aren't relevant for this article) more sophisticated ‘multi dimension’ consequentialism, such as the view developed in Peterson, Martin, The Dimensions of Consequentialism: Ethics, Equality and Risk (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this article I am only concerned with act consequentialism. Rule consequentialism (see, e.g., Hooker, Brad, Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-Consequentialist Theory of Morality (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar) is a very different type of theory, but it is probable, I think, that arguments similar to the ones I present here apply to the appropriate forms of rule consequentialism too.

6 Jackson, Frank, ‘Decision Theoretic Consequentialism and the Nearest and Dearest Objection’, Ethics 101 (1991), pp. 461–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Howard-Snyder, Frances, ‘The Rejection of Objective Consequentialism’, Utilitas 9 (1997), pp. 241–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lenman, James, ‘Consequentialism and Cluelessness’, Philosophy & Public Affairs 29 (2000), pp. 342–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Hilary Greaves and others point out, epistemic concerns such as these assail all sorts of moral theories – including non-consequentialist ones – according to which it matters what the consequences of our actions are; which, according to some, means that such concerns assail all plausible moral theories. (Greaves, , ‘Cluelessness’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (2016), pp. 311–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 312.) We shouldn't overestimate the extent to which the cluelessness objection presents a problem for all plausible non-consequentialist theories, though. According to some such theories, what matters for determining the deontic status of an action is not actually its consequences, but the agent's expectation about the consequences, or their intentions with respect to the consequences, and in neither case is there a particular epistemic worry of the type described here. It is true that according to some such theories the actual consequences of an action contribute to how good that action is; but their account of the deontic status of actions (their permissibility, being forbidden or required) is not tied, in the way characteristic of consequentialism, purely to facts about their evaluative properties (such as being (one of) the best actions). And while it might be plausible that a natural constraint on moral theories is that their accounts of what is permissible, required and forbidden should be apt to play an action guiding role in the deliberation of agents, it is not nearly so plausible that their accounts of what is good or bad (or how good or bad things are) should respect that constraint, unless those evaluative facts are supposed to determine the deontic ones: it might be implausible that we act wrongly in doing what we could not know is forbidden; but as far as I can see there is nothing at all implausible in the suggestion that we are often ignorant of how good something we have done or propose to do really is.

7 Jackson, ‘Decision Theoretic Consequentialism’. As Christian Piller reminded me, not all subjective consequentialists are motivated in this way.

8 Greaves, ‘Cluelessness’.

9 For a precise statement of the Principle of Indifference, see Greaves, ‘Cluelessness’, p. 318. Greaves explains nicely what motivates EVF in ‘Cluelessness’, §2; and she discusses and defends the Principle of Indifference in ‘Cluelessness’, §§3–4.

10 See Greaves ‘Cluelessness’, §§5–6.

11 A’s embarking on some other endeavour (aside from investigating p or q) which similarly takes the necessary time and effort away from investigating p or q would also, of course, settle which of p or q (or, in this case, both) is doomed to ultimate unforeseeability by A. (That is why I said, above, that at least one of p or q is ultimately unforeseeable.) But I leave aside that unproblematic complication here and in what follows.

12 Couldn't what someone spends time thinking about make a difference to how much happiness there is in the world, for example, so that some (utilitarian) consequentialists would be happy to say that deontic variance on the basis of such facts isn't arbitrary? It could. But notice that in such cases, the morally significant difference is made not by the fact that someone spends their time thinking about some particular things per se, but by the happiness which results from that: it is the happiness, not the fact that someone has directed their attention in a particular way, which is morally salient. What I am suggesting is that it would be bizarre to think that in cases where the facts about how attention and effort are directed have no further morally significant consequences (such as increasing well-being or happiness), they could in themselves determine variations in deontic status in a non-arbitrary way.

13 Thanks to two anonymous referees who each pressed me to address this idea.

14 The argument I have given here might ground a complaint about an infinite regress against subjective consequentialism. But I am more interested, here, to point out the way in which the incompossibility problem recurs at each stage, such that it causes trouble even if the chain of stages is finite.

15 Thanks to Dylan Balfour, who started me thinking seriously about indifference principles, and to two referees and the editor of this journal, an audience at the University of York, particularly Christian Piller, and Rob Trueman for comments on a draft of this article.