Are We All Consequentialists Now?

[cross-posted at Austro-Athenian Empire]

The current (June 2004) issue of Reason magazine carries the following letter to the editor. (I've restored my original formatting, plus a section -- marked in brackets -- that Reason deleted for space.)

To the Editor:

In"Coercion vs. Consent" (March), Randy Barnett writes that"there are very few libertarians today for whom consequences are not ultimately the reason why they believe in liberty," while Richard Epstein cheerfully agrees that libertarians are"all consequentialists now."

Fortunately, it is not true that we libertarians are all consequentialists now. I say"fortunately," because consequentialism is philosophically indefensible as a normative theory.

The basic problem with consequentialism is that it recognizes no limit in principle on what can be done to people in order to promote good consequences.

Now consequentialists insist that in the vast majority of cases, killing, torturing, or enslaving innocent people is not the best way to get good results. And of course they are right about that. But by the logic of their position the consistent consequentialist (happily a rara avis) must always be open to the possibility that killing, torturing, or enslaving the innocent might be called for under special circumstances, and this recognition necessarily taints the character of even one's ordinary relations to other people.

[If the only reason I do not steal is that I'm afraid of being caught, then how am I morally superior to the thief? Likewise, if the only reason I don't slaughter my neighbors is that doing so happens not to maximize social utility at the moment, then how am I morally superior to a mass murderer?]

As Immanuel Kant pointed out more than two centuries ago, to subordinate -- or even to be prepared to subordinate -- one's fellow human beings to some end they do not share is to treat them as slaves, thereby denying both their inherent dignity and one's own.

Many consequentialists will say that they too can accommodate ironclad prohibitions on certain actions, on the grounds that utility will be maximized in the long run if people internalize such prohibitions. This is true, but it misses the point. Once one has internalized an ironclad prohibition, one is by definition no longer a consequentialist. One cannot treat certain values as absolute in practice and still meaningfully deny their absoluteness in theory; a belief that is not allowed to influence one's actions is no real belief. Most consequentialists are morally superior to their theory and, thankfully, pay it only lip service.

David Friedman is quite right to point out, in the same issue, that" concepts such as rights, property, and coercion" are complicated and not always susceptible to clear and easy rules. But this is not an argument for making consequences the sole test of right action. What it does mean is that non-consequentialist moral considerations establish only certain broad parameters, leaving it to consequences, custom, and context to make them more specific.

The parameters are not infinitely broad, however; and I do not see how they could be broad enough to license one group of people, called the government, to reassign title to the fruits of another group's labor at the first group's sole discretion. Hence even if taxation and eminent domain had good results -- which in the long term they rarely do -- they would stand condemned on non-consequentialist grounds as slavery and plunder.

Roderick T. Long
Department of Philosophy
Auburn University
Auburn AL

One clarification: while I agree with Kant’s indictment of the consequentialist conception of morality as an instrumental strategy for promoting human welfare, I disagree with his remedy. For Kant, the solution is to sever the connection between morality and human welfare entirely; I instead follow the classical Greek tradition in tying the two together more closely, making morality an essential component of human welfare rather than a mere external means to it. For details see my book Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand; my articles Egoism and Anarchy and Why Does Justice Have Good Consequences?; and my review of Leland Yeager's Ethics As Social Science.