Anti-Climacus

WELL: Interesting to see this post on Evangelical Outpost (Joe turned over his blog-space to someone else) on how consequentialist ethics aren't really that bad. As a deontologist, and particularly a Christian deontologist, I was a bit dismayed to read it because Kevin T. Keith glides past two of the biggest areas for deontologist objection:

1. Right and Good:

"But once a definition of moral right or moral good (we will also skip distinctions between “right” and “good,” though they are important) is in hand, the thing to do, of course, is to seek it and promote it as we live our lives." (bolding mine)

Darn tootin'. One of the key beliefs deontologists have is that the right and the good are at least sometimes (perhaps frequently) separable entities, and, what's more, the right takes precedence over the good*. Thus it's unacceptable to look only at outcomes in judging the relative merits of potential actions (it's not a logical impossibility than an action be wrong but good (for just you, for example), after all). This is actually what I think Kant was getting at when he said you can't treat people as means, only as ends: treating people as means to an end can allow you to justify any number of morally repellant things if the end result is supposed to be good enough**. And, of course, one could go one step further and point out, along with that famous religious conservative Michael Sandel (in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice), that the disagreements people have on issues of, say, distriubtional justice, are not just disagreements about how to apply certain moral principles to social or governmental action, but are also arguments over what are the appropriate criteria to use to try and decide what the relevant rules for deciding what distributions should look like (e.g., Rawls and Nozick).

In sum, then, deontological theory is better because it has a little more give in it (by recognizing and trying to deal with instances where the right and the good are separate), and also because it's more morally inclusive, especially in the context of a pluralist society, because unlike consequentialism, which tries (under its various auspices as act utilitarianism or what-have-you) to apply one single standard to the answering of all questions, deontology is open to the possibility of plurality in conceptions of the right, and has at least some rudimentary ways of trying to deal with that.

2. Grounding of Beliefs:

"Every such theory grounds its moral principles on such absolute truths, and every theory holds up its own rationalization of what constitutes such truths and how we know which ones they are. (We won’t get deeply into that here.)"

and:

"(I have seen arguments from Christians to the effect that only revealed religious precepts can be “absolutely true,” because only they come from God, or some transcendent realm, while all other claims are grounded on contingent reality on earth. This is far off base. Whether something is universally true has nothing to do with how one knows it is true, and at any rate the meaning of “absolute” has nothing to do with being “trascendent” or “from God.”)"

Well, to begin with, let me sound a bit like Richard Rorty: if you believe in something like free will, you're faced with at least the prima facie problem of deep contingency in the world. Keith wisely tries, on this basis, to punt the discussion over the relative (heh) merits of ethical principles from epistemology to ontology, but this won't really work for him. Here's why: a deontologist (such as myself) can claim that the moral principles from which my ethics are drawn come from a transcendent source (God)--but I can also claim that this last little bit is unneccessary, because my version of deontological ethics is right no matter whether I can justify it as such (because if right is right, it will be so whether or not I, or anyone else, chooses to believe that). And I can claim this, moreover, because I'm claiming an idea of right which I want to be in effect everywhere. Keith wants to do something similar for utilitarianism/consequentialism. But if consequentialism is the best moral theory because it's grounded in some non-relativistic sense of being true, then one has to assert the rightness of this ethical theory above all others. But utilitarianism is not, as such, a theory about the right. So I can suppose that there might be such a thing as utilitarianism*, which produces all the same results utilitarianism does, except one better result somewhere. Keith can do one of two things at this point:

1. Reject utilitarianism* as not being grounded as strongly as utilitarianism (remember, Keith wants to minimize the difference between consequentialism and deontology, and a deontologist would make a claim something like this in rejecting another conception of the right), in which case he sacrifices the purpose of utilitarianism (maximizing of good, whatever that is) to affirm it's ontological status, or

2. Replace utilitarianism with utilitarianism*, and admit the deep contingency (in terms of grounding) of consequentialist theory.



*for what I'll claim are somewhat intuitive reasons: goods are the sort of things one can have in greater or lesser quantities; rights are things which come in just two flavors: right and wrong. Assuming you care at all about right, it has to come first whenever the two conflict--you can always find good soemwhere else later.

**the mild example here being the implications of Rousseau's "forced to be free" line in the Social Contract, the more extreme ones being something like the liquidation of the Kulaks.