Daily Dialectic

It is very widely accepted that an act’s consequences have a role to play when we’re assessing whether the act was good or bad. And it is hotly debated how great that role is. But perhaps more attention should first be given to how, and to what extent, an act can cause a consequence, and how we can predict that the consequence will occur.

I want to examine three potential tensions in consequentialism:

Whether we should assess the actual or the predictable consequences when judging an action: One of these seems worthless to decision making; the other seems to incentivise ignorance, as a means to remaining innocence.

Whether an act is best seen as a necessary condition of a future event or a only contributing cause of it: in the former case, we live in a hopelessly complex web of causes, in which every act is one necessary cause (among many other necessary causes) of every future event. On the latter, the causal role of an act rapidly diminishes, so that we can say it had only a minor causal role in an event that it was actually a necessary precondition of.

How to weight the competing demands of short-term goals and ultra-long-term goals: The former are often easily attained and the causal pathway to them is often very straightforward. If the latter are feasible, they seem to offer both very important goals but few guides to immediate action.