Our first lens focuses on consequences, capturing a set of theories that are classed as types of consequentialism. As we shall see, consequentialists can have very different views of what counts as good or bad consequences. Also, they may think about consequences in quite different ways, with some focusing on individuals and others more interested in groups. Consequentialists also differ in how they factor moral status into decision-making; that is, figuring out who counts. Some consider humans alone while others extend their ethical gaze to include nonhuman animals.

3.1 Mohism

Written consequentialist theories go back to the work of Mozi (mentioned above in section 2.4) and those who followed his work, the Mohists. This philosophical approach saw its zenith during the Warring States era in China (479–221 BCE), a time of political chaos that brought considerable misery and hardship to ordinary people.^[1] The right thing to do, according to Mohism, is simply to try to alleviate harms done to people and promote what is beneficial to them. Mozi wrote:

Now at the present time, what brings the greatest harm to the world? Great states attacking small ones, great families overthrowing small ones, the strong oppressing the weak, the many harrying the few, the cunning deceiving the stupid, the eminent lording it over the humble—these are harmful to the world.^[2]

Mozi thought that the underlying cause of this misery is that people are partial, meaning that they don’t love everyone equally but instead put the interests of particular people—typically, themselves and their loved ones—before everyone else. In a competing approach to ethics in China at the time, love of one’s family, especially one’s parents (sometimes called filial piety) played a central role. Mozi argued that if one really wants to benefit and protect the interests of one’s parents, the best way to achieve this is to make sure that everyone else wants it too. The question is how to secure this goal. He explains, “Obviously, I must make it a point to love and benefit other [people’s] parents, so that they in return will love and benefit my parents. So, if all of us are to be filial [children], can we set about it any other way than by first making a point of loving and benefiting other [people’s] parents?”^[3]

Mozi’s point is that everyone will be better off if we all follow a practice of universal, impartial love. It’s worth noting that Mozi is not saying that universal love is intrinsically good. It is, instead, a means for bringing about the good. This is what makes it consequentialist. As he explains:

Now if we seek to benefit the world by taking universality as our standard, those with sharp ears and clear eyes will see and hear for others, those with sturdy limbs will work for others….Those who are old and without [family] will find means of support and be able to live out their days; the young and orphaned who have no parents will find someone to care for them and look after their needs.^[4]

This passage suggests the benefits that Mohists sought to advance—namely, life, wealth, and social order—and the harms they wished to avoid—namely, death, poverty, and disorder or conflict.^[5] Although we might disagree about the goals that Mohists value, the important point here is that in order to assess what we should do they direct us to look at the consequences for society as a whole. If the members of our society work to maximize the right social goods then the benefits will flow to them individually.

3.2 Utilitarianism

In the eighteenth century an English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, developed a similar idea, which he dubbed utilitarianism . Bentham was scientifically minded, which one can see in the way he approached ethics. He posited that we all pursue pleasure and avoid pain. This provided him with what he called a principle of utility, which is, in effect, a theory of the good. In brief, Bentham thought it is good to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.^[6]

He suggested we should do a kind of calculus when we are trying to figure out what will maximize utility. We should identify the likely outcomes of different possible courses of action, consider who is affected, and estimate the intensity, duration, and immediacy of the pleasures and pains that would be produced for each individual under each scenario, as well as our degree of certainty in these outcomes.^[7] As with Mohism, everyone counts equally. We are not allowed to weigh our own pleasures and pains more heavily in this calculation.

While this view is often identified with the slogan “the greatest good for the greatest number,” this isn’t quite right. It is possible that one could achieve “the greatest good for the greatest number” by inflicting so much misery on a small group of people that the total utility is less than an alternative that brings less good to fewer people but suffering to none. The utilitarian calculus requires us to account for the total sum of positive utility (for Bentham, pleasure) and negative utility (for Bentham, pain) for each possible course of action and weigh these sums against each other.

Later thinkers have modified utilitarianism in various ways. Some have argued that the principle of utility needs revision, suggesting that happiness and suffering are much richer and more morally nuanced ideas than mere pleasure and pain. This was the view of John Stewart Mill, another English thinker, who developed and refined Bentham’s theory. Mill thought that many of the experiences that individuals value the most aren’t those that simply bring them pleasure. Moreover, he thought that we might want to differentially rank pleasures. He famously wrote, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.”^[8] Bentham likely would not have agreed. He remarked, “the question is not, Can they reason? or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”^[9] So, while both thinkers took the well-being of sentient nonhumans into account, they would have weighed them differently.

Some utilitarians have suggested that we need to consider something more easily countable than pleasures, pains, happiness, and suffering. Others have noted that we sometimes desire things that don’t seem to involve any of these. They suggest that the principle of utility should focus on preference satisfaction. However, due to the tendency for humans to have wholly irrational preferences—for instance, frequently choosing to do things that harm them—other thinkers have suggested that we define utility in terms of the preferences that humans would have if we were perfectly (or sufficiently) rational beings. One can often see something like this approach in economics and rational decision theory.

3.2.1 Act Utilitarianism

While all utilitarians value consequences, they may differ in how they do this. One option is to employ a utilitarian calculus for each action. This approach, act utilitarianism, provides us with the following principle (quoting Boetzkes and Waluchow):

An act is right if and only if there is no other action I could have done instead which either (a) would have produced a greater balance of utility over disutility; or (b) would have produced a smaller balance of disutility over utility.^[10]

Notice that even though action C makes two of three people worse off than any other possible action it is still the right thing to do because it has the greatest net utility. This could even be true if there were another possible action that had positive utility for everyone. (Suppose there were a fourth possible action, D, that had a value of +1 for each person. This would still only add up to +3 and thus provide less total utility than action C in this scenario.)

We can make this a little more tangible. Imagine you’re Yassar and you own an apartment that you are currently renting to Xena. Xena lost her job a few months ago and, even with government assistance, she is now two months behind on rent. She is looking for a job but you don’t expect she will be able to find one. Zhu is looking for an apartment and would like to rent the apartment that Xena currently occupies. Legally, you can evict Xena, but, as a committed act utilitarian, it’s important to you that you do the morally right thing. You judge that you have three options: (A) you could evict Xena immediately and immediately rent the apartment to Zhu; (B) you could give Xena until the end of the month to find the money to pay her back rent and then evict her and rent it to Zhu if she fails (as you expect she will); or (C) you can just tell Xena that you are confident she will be able to pay her back rent eventually and tell Zhu that they will have to find another apartment.

Notice that even though it’s the worst option for you (Yassar), action C is still the right thing to do. Even if Zhu was your best friend and Xena was the biggest jerk you’d ever met, if the calculus above is correct, option C is the right thing to do. Again, for utilitarians, all individuals count equally and all that matters is the net utility produced, whether we judge that in terms of pleasures (and pains), happiness (and suffering), or preferences. Also, notice how sensitive the consequences are to the situation of the individuals involved. It is easy to imagine all kinds of different circumstances that would influence the utility of each action for each individual, from whether Xena has other realistic living options, to Yassar’s wealth, to Zhu’s psychological capacity to deal with uncertainty, and so on.

There are several objections that people have raised to act utilitarianism. First, many people think that there are particular types of action or special relationships that matter, which are irrelevant from a utilitarian perspective. (We’ll consider these ethical lenses in Chapter 4 and section 1 of Chapter 6, respectively.) For instance, suppose you have already promised the apartment to Zhu when you’re trying to decide what to do. An act utilitarian will only value keeping this promise insofar as it affects the utility of the possible actions. To be sure, often breaking promises can cause the promise-breaker shame, anguish, and anxiety (disutility, on pretty much any principle of utility) and have real negative consequences for the person to whom the promise was made. However, if you have no scruples about breaking promises, Zhu’s disutility isn’t increased by the additional harm of having a promise broken, and there are no other adverse serial consequences, then breaking the promise is the best thing to do, according to an act utilitarian. Aside from possible consequences, the fact that you promised is ethically irrelevant. If we think that promises matter morally, then this appears to be a serious problem for this theory. Similarly, we may think that we have particular obligations to family and friends to watch out for their interests and that these cannot fully be captured simply by thinking about consequences in a totally impartial way.

A second objection concerns matters of equality. Action C in the table above significantly benefits one person, while the other two are significantly harmed. It has seemed to many that this sort of inequality counts against the rightness of the action that produces it. Maybe action B, which distributes utility more evenly than the other options, is better. It’s not difficult to imagine cases in which considerations of equality run against other values. For instance, many people identify the vast inequalities of wealth, both within many nations and between nations, as fundamentally wrong, even if they maximize utility over all (though there is little reason to think they do). However, unless inequality itself has bad consequences for the individuals affected, a classical act utilitarian wouldn’t consider it morally relevant. Indeed, it is not at all clear how the utilitarian method of assessing consequences—looking at the expected utility for each individual and then adding it all together—could address relational properties like equality, which depend on comparisons between the individuals affected. Notice that this is not a problem for the consequentialist lens as such, but a limitation of the aggregative approach of classical act utilitarianism. After all, a more Mohist approach, which focuses on benefitting society as a whole, could easily prioritize equality as a goal.

Another type of objection concerns matters of justice. Imagine the following scenario. Suppose you are a police superintendent in a town where a terrible violent crime has been committed and the perpetrator is still at large. The general populace of the community is not only terrified, but they are also very angry at what they consider to be the failure of the police and there are nightly protests that are getting increasingly violent. Although you have no leads, you do a utilitarian calculus where you consider framing one person for the crime. You reason as follows. If no arrest is made, thousands of people will suffer in the following ways: many people will continue to live in terror; the riots will continue and many people will be hurt, some even killed; many people’s property will be damaged and some of their livelihoods ruined. If you frame a person who has no alibi, then these terrible consequences will be avoided. To be sure, one person will suffer terribly, but this is outweighed by the thousands of people who will be spared any disutility. If the numbers work out, this means that the right thing to do is to frame the innocent person. Also, notice that if you want to harm as few people as possible then you will target someone who is socially isolated and marginalized in the community, someone who likely already experiences significant forms of social injustice. Most people think this is clearly wrong. It is simply unjust to frame an innocent person and even worse if you choose them because they are oppressed. If you are not so sure, imagine that you are the innocent person who is framed—after all, utilitarianism is impartial.

Act utilitarianism faces another kind of challenge when we consider the problem of free riders. Imagine there is a water shortage in your town. The town council asks everyone to avoid watering their lawns (if they have them) and to take short showers only a few times a week. If most people do this, a catastrophic drought where there is not enough water to drink will be avoided. So, although everyone will experience some unpleasantness if they follow the council’s recommendation, it is considerably less unpleasant than what would happen under drought conditions. Suppose you know that your neighbours are very civic-minded and are likely to comply with the order, which means there will be more than enough water saved to avoid the catastrophic drought. Then it doesn’t really matter what you do, as the drought will be avoided. Indeed, because you will diminish your own utility by forgoing your two daily 20-minute showers (you don’t have a lawn) and because the right thing to do is to maximize utility, it seems you are morally obliged to keep up your high consumption of water, according to act utilitarianism. The cost in utility to other in the community would be zero, or negligibly small.^[11] If people were to find out that you’re a free rider this might make them angry (an unpleasant emotion that diminishes their happiness), or they might start acting the way you do, risking a drought. So to maximize the overall utility you should cover up and lie about your own water consumption. It seems, once again, that an act utilitarian approach is requiring one to behave in ways that are fundamentally unfair and immoral.

3.2.2 Rule Utilitarianism

Prompted by such concerns, some have proposed a rule-based approach to utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism. The basic idea is that we need to identify those rules that, if everybody followed them, would maximize utility. Thus, we get a principle like the following (quoting  Boetzkes and Waluchow):

An act is morally right if and only if it conforms with a set of rules whose general observance would maximize utility.^[12]

3.3 Final Considerations about Approaches that Focus on Consequences

While there are significant similarities between Mozi’s consequentialism and utilitarianism there are also some differences. Perhaps the most significant similarity, beyond consequentialism itself, is that they both emphasize impartiality—that one shouldn’t value one’s own well-being (or that of those close to us) more than anybody else’s. This means that Mohism and utilitarianism suggest that everyone who counts enjoys equal moral status. The key difference is in what these theories value and how they think of the collective. Utilitarians think of the collective simply as the sum of individuals; you determine utility for relevant individual and then add it all up. Mozi values wealth, social order, and community growth as properties of the collective. Consider social order. This is not the property of an individual and so it is not a possible principle of utility. Mozi can directly value social order in his system because the consequences he wants to bring about are the good of society as a whole, not the good of society understood as a collection of individuals.

Importantly for applied ethics, harm/benefit analyses invariably take up a kind of consequentialist lens. After all, harms are typically nothing other than bad consequences and benefits are typically good consequences. The challenge with harm/benefit analyses, just as with consequentialism more generally, is figuring out what counts—pleasure, happiness, preferences, social order, life, wealth—who counts—only humans or some nonhuman animals (and, perhaps, other nonhuman entities) too—and how to weigh what are often very different kinds of consequences against each other.

Further Reading

In addition to the sources in the footnotes, the following may be helpful:

Consequentialism

Shaw, William. “The Consequentialist Perspective.” In Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, edited by James Drier, 5-20. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

Mohism

Lyceum of Philosophy. “MOZI: World’s 1st Utilitarian & OG Minimalist Philosopher: An Introduction.” YouTube. May 24, 2020. Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp9ovoxeUsg

Van Norden, Bryan W. Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. See Part 3: “Mozi and Early Mohism.”

Wong, David. “Chinese Ethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), edited by Edward N. Zalta, last modified September 14, 2018, §3. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/ethics-chinese.

Utilitarianism

Driver, Julia. Consequentialism. London: Routledge, 2012.

Mason, Elinor. “Consequentialism, Blame, and Moral Responsibility.” In The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism, edited by Douglas W. Portmore, 162-78. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190905323.001.0001.

Smart, J.J.C. “Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism.” Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1956): 344-54.

Warburton, Nigel and Philip Schofield. “Philip Schofield on Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism.” Produced by the Institute of Philosophy. Philosophy Bites. February 11, 2012. Podcast. https://philosophybites.com/2012/02/philip-schofield-on-jeremy-benthams-utilitarianism.html