Topics Ethics

Question I recently read a philosophy book and it got me thinking about morality. Is not morality a tool of society to make it run smoother? If an action effects the world in a positive way than the action is good. If it effects in a negative way than it is bad. Now each human beings deepest desire is happiness and thats what each human strives for so I can only assume that society, as a group of humans, must strive for happiness as a whole as well. If this is true than the way society would decide if an action is good or bad would be the overall effect on happiness. So if we take all of this as true than it would seem that the morality of a decision can be measured and morality itself even made into a science. Is this not so?

Accepted:
January 2, 2014

Comments

I agree with you that the consequences of an action matter to its moral status. But unfortunately it's hard to specify exactly how the consequences matter. You wrote, "If this is true [then] the way society would decide if an action is good or bad would be the overall effect on happiness." On the most straightforward reading of your claim, there seem to be clear counterexamples to it. To use a fanciful example, suppose that we can spare each of 1 billion people the discomfort of a mild headache only by secretly subjecting you to excruciating torture for 24 hours, and suppose that the pain of your torture would be less than the aggregate pain of those 1 billion headaches. Nevertheless, it would be wrong (I take it) to torture you for that purpose, even though arguably we'd increase net happiness by doing so. So the impact of consequences on the moral status of an action can't be quite so straightforward. Therefore, even if we could "measure happiness" much more reliably than in fact we now can, it's unclear how we ought to apply the results of our measurements. For much more on the role of consequences in morality, I recommend starting with this SEP article.