Topics Ethics

Question How do consequentialists justify what the consequence of an action is? If you save a man from drowning who goes on to become a serial killer, I don't think it's right to say that your action had this consequence. Where do you draw the line between action-consequence pairs? Don't consequences of actions lead to actions themselves?

Accepted:
December 6, 2005

Comments

I think that you have put your finger on a big problem with consequentialism: There is no way to draw a line between consequences that "count" that those that don't; and there's no way to draw a line between consequences that it was reasonable to expect, and those that no one could have foreseen. What matters are actual consequences. Period.

Consequentialists may respond that they are giving us an analysis of right action in terms of goodness of consequences, and you can't expect an analysis to give you real-life advice.

You're right, I think, that consequences of actions can lead to further actions. 'Lead to' is a pretty vague term, and we'd need to decide exactly how we mean it here. But if we use 'lead to' so that A's action x leads to B's action y if A's action x gives B a reason to do y, then it seems to me that definitely actions have further actions as consequences. The further actions would be consequences of the first action, and they in turn would have consequences. This suggests another implication of consequentialism: If consequentialism is correct, then we are *never* in a position to give a final evaluation of an action.