Are Consequences All That Matter in Ethics?

How the notion of utilitarianism affects our ethical inquiries

A key component of understanding purpose is understanding ethics. Ethics is, at its simplest, the study of what we should do. Purpose, naturally, is the same sort of thing.

When dealing with ethical dilemmas, many people tend to believe that the difficulties of deciding the right path can be resolved fairly easily simply by appealing to one rule: Always act to bring about the best consequences. It’s an intuitive way of looking at these problems—but is it really the answer?

The Philosophy of Utilitarianism

An ethical term you might be familiar with is “utilitarianism.” It’s a philosophy first developed in the 19^th century that proposes that all ethical deliberation is simply about deciding how to bring about the best consequences. Specifically, proponents of utilitarianism argue that in our actions, we are obligated to minimize pain and maximize pleasure—alternatively, some might use the terms unhappiness and happiness.

Therefore, to judge any action, all we have to do is ask what it’s most likely to bring about. If we look at an example like theft, a utilitarian will see that generally, it will bring about a great amount of pain for the person robbed while bringing about a likely smaller amount of pleasure for the person robbing—therefore, theft is a bad action. Similar analyses can be done for everything from lying to murder.

Most often, these calculations agree with our moral intuitions. Utilitarianism agrees with our natural disdain for things like killing or theft. However, it often goes against typical moral laws, arguing that something like lying might be the moral choice in many situations. In pure utilitarianism, nothing is necessarily off-limits. There are no bad actions, only bad consequences.

The notion of calculation is very important for utilitarianism. Many of its early believers tried to explain it in mathematical terms. Ethics could be expressed in a purely rational and objective way.

Motivations for Utilitarianism

Since this philosophy is generally intuitive and, importantly, rational and empirical, many people have taken utilitarianism as the default approach to ethics. Even in normal day-to-day affairs, many people use this sort of approach to consider the ethical implications of their actions. An “all’s well that ends well” approach is exceedingly common.

Perhaps most significantly, utilitarianism is an easy way to deal with ethics at a large scale. Something like a massive multinational corporation with thousands of employees will likely find it easiest to look at ethical problems through this objective and calculating lens. All these issues can be reduced to simply determining what outcome leads to the most favorable outcome.

The benefits are clear. This is a simple and objective way of looking at ethics that very often leads to simple, intuitive solutions. So, should we all simply be utilitarians?

The Problems of Utilitarianism

Before committing to anything, it’s important to talk about some issues with this philosophy. Perhaps we’ll see that there are some key mistakes made in the utilitarian approach.

The clearest problem with utilitarianism is that in some cases, it seems that some terribly immoral actions must be taken to reach the best possible outcome. The most obvious examples of this are life-or-death scenarios: The classic example is the trolley problem, where you can divert a trolley from killing five people to a track where it will instead kill five. Other examples might include the need to let people die in times of famine, or the need to accept civilian casualties in war—for the utilitarian, although these are bad, they are justified as long as they lead to the best possible outcome.

But this “best possible outcome” mentality can have a terrible effect on our idea of what morality is. By reducing ethics to simply a matter of outcomes, we’re taught to view the world in a very particular way. Human happiness and ethical behavior become a numbers game: Your only goal is to “maximize” pleasure or happiness for everyone, however you choose to quantify it.

Beyond that, it also introduces the frightening concept that everything might be permissible so long as it has good consequences. Something like torture might be justifiable for a military if it’s going to speed up a conflict. In a survival situation, something like cannibalism might be justifiable if it keeps people alive.

At a practical level

And, in more down-to-earth contexts, we see issues along these same lines begin to creep up. Is it fine to lie to a spouse to keep them from finding out about an uncomfortable truth? Is it fine to enter a contract that you’re not sure if you can fulfill without telling your business partners about your issues? Is it fine to steal something small if you know that somebody will never notice it’s missing?

There are so many small places where it’s clear that the outcome that maximizes “happiness” (in the shallow sense of the word) is in some way unethical. But in a simply utilitarian framework, there’s no way to say that lying is wrong regardless of its results or that theft is never the “best” solution.

Often, this is precisely what allows for immoral action at these massive scales. When there are no inherently wrong actions, there are always justifications for things. Maybe underpaying workers is necessary to keep the business profitable for shareholders, or maybe an industry can justify environmental recklessness if it means keeping prices down for its customers. There are many different ways to justify behavior that clearly seems wrong.

Above all, it seems that this sort of logic removes humanity from the ethical equation. Utilitarian ethics is not really concerned with human dignity. Instead, it’s just a pragmatic solution to make sure the average person leads a more pleasurable life. If we want something that really offers a meaningful and dignified view of the human person, utilitarianism is not the solution and likely never can be.

Should we simply ignore all consequences when deciding on ethical questions? No, of course not. But we can never make our sole focus “the best possible outcome” while ignoring the means. There are terrible and dehumanizing ways to reach desirable outcomes. It does not seem that the ends can ever justify these means.

The Utilitarian Reduction

There is another problem we see here that we see earlier with a strictly scientific approach to happiness. In that approach, we saw that looking at humans as things that can be explained in the same terms as any scientific theorem, people were necessarily reduced to basic material things.

Here, we see the same problem: In trying to approach happiness and ethics as a mathematical problem, we are reducing them to something much less dignified than what they really are. We assume that they can be expressed in these terms, and so we reduce them to be like any other theorem.

It seems clear that math cannot explain ethics. Perhaps it can be a useful tool to understand ethics, but something will always be missing. We need a vision of ethics that is as nuanced and complex as the human person—anything less would be degrading.