April 8, 2021

The Consequentialism Conundrum

A Tale of Two Tracks

Perhaps the most famous moral dilemma in the history of ethics is the trolley problem. The parameters of the situation are as follows:

A trolley speeds down the tracks. Ahead of the trolley, five people are tied down on the tracks. However, there is a fork in the tracks in between the trolley and the five people, but down the alternate set of tracks there is one person. You stand next to a lever which can divert the trolley from the track with five people to the track with one person. What is the most moral choice: Allow five to die by inaction, or kill one by deliberate action?

This dilemma demonstrates the difference between consequentialism and deontology, which have different answers to this question as a result of differences in their conception of ethics. Consequentialist reasoning argues that the consequences of pulling the lever (one dead person) are preferable to the consequences of doing nothing (five dead people), and therefore pulling the lever is the right thing to do. On the other hand, deontology argues that pulling the lever constitutes murder and is thereby a violation of moral law.

Often, the consequential argument is compelling given the original trolley problem. Varying the specific circumstances of this dilemma produce wildly different responses, however, despite posing the exact same problem. As an alternative example, imagine that you are a physician with six patients: Five need organ donations by the end of the day or they'll die, but there are no available donors. Your sixth patient is healthy, admitted for a minor injury, and has all the organs necessary to save the other five. Should you allow five of your patients to die by doing nothing, or murder your healthy patient to harvest their organs and save the other five? Suddenly, far fewer of us are comfortable with the act of killing an innocent human, but fundamentally there is no difference between this situation and the original trolley problem: Allow five to die by inaction, or kill one by deliberate action?

The Rules of Reality

This creates another problem in and of itself: Why is one method of ethical reasoning valid for trolley routing, but not for medicine? There have been attempts to reconcile consequentialism with deontology, and they should not be discounted. In the scope of this essay, however, the consideration of consequentialism and its chief opponent will suffice. After all, the existence of some set of transcendant rules or duties either exists, or it does not. It is evident to the author that such rules do exist, and further that their existence is both intuitive and provable by contradiction.

The intuitive argument is simply a consideration of the nature of the conscience. Naturally, all ethical reasoning depends heavily on the ability of the thinker to appeal to his conscience, yet it seems that relatively little consideration is given to its nature. Certainly the moral validity of the conscience is a necessary attribute, but is it not odd that most moral assessments are agreed upon? Throughout history, various systems of law have been remarkably similar. It seems strange that if every man had a conscience entirely independent of all other's conscience, they would still arrive at the same conclusions so reliably. It is for this reason that it's most intuitive to consider the nature of conscience as transcendant, such that it is not a faculty possessed by each individual, but rather each individual possesses a window into the same transcendant above us all. The proof by contradiction is much more complex, and requires an assessment of the consequences of consequentialism itself.

The Utopia Vulnerability

Consequential reasoning has a very literally fatal flaw in its capacity to be seduced by outcomes. It permits murder, as the trolley problem illustrates, so long as something sufficiently attractive can be achieved by it. Something ultimately attractive, then, is capable of justifying ultimate moral crimes. This constitutes not just a circumstantial problem, but a systemic problem with consequential reasoning altogether, even by its own standard. Indeed, if it can be demonstrated that the application of consequential reasoning is consequentially inferior to deontological reasoning at scale, it can be dismissed altogether.

Theoretically, hacking consequentialism is simple: Achievement of utopia is the ultimate moral good, and it is therefore worth any moral price. The only conceivable defense consequentialism may have against this vulnerability is that it's not practically applicable to the human condition, and is therefore irrelevant. This defense is weak. History has many stories of atrocity, and each antagonist is fueled by the common goal of utopia (or pseudo-utopia). The atrocity is permissible, so those responsible tell themselves, because it will allow us to create a world worth committing the atrocity for. The Nazi and Soviet regimes, as different as their idealisms were, both shared this philosophy of consequential justification.

Consequentialism has a historical and theoretical tendency to be leveraged to justify humanitarian crises. Consequential reasoning on a national scale, then, is consequentially inferior to alternative ethical reasoning on the same scale. Therefore, consequential reasoning concludes that the application of consequential reasoning is immoral. Q.E.D.

This Is An Oversimplification

I am aware that this argument deserves a much more lengthy explanation. This subject is compelling enough, however, that I may well author it.