Objections to Consequentialism
Demandingness and Impracticality
One of the most common critiques of consequentialism is that it asks too much of people. If you're always supposed to maximize overall well-being, that seems to leave no room for personal goals, relationships, or even basic self-interest. You'd have to treat a stranger's needs as equally important as your own family's, which strikes most people as unreasonable.
There's also a practical problem: consequentialism seems to require you to predict and quantify all the effects of your actions before you act. Given the limits of human knowledge, that's often impossible. How do you weigh the long-term effects on future generations against immediate concerns? And even setting prediction aside, constantly calculating consequences could lead to paralyzing indecision and alienation from the people closest to you. Ironically, trying to implement thoroughgoing consequentialism might actually produce worse results, making the approach self-defeating.
Counterintuitive Implications
Critics point out that consequentialism can justify actions most people consider clearly wrong. The classic example: a runaway trolley is heading toward five people, and you could save them by pushing an innocent bystander onto the tracks. Consequentialist logic says you should push, since five lives outweigh one. But this conflicts with deep moral intuitions about individual rights and the wrongness of using people merely as means to an end.
The problem extends beyond trolley cases. Consequentialism could, in principle, endorse highly unequal distributions of well-being, including imposing severe suffering on one person for the benefit of many. That seems to violate basic principles of justice and fairness. And some consequences, like unforeseeable long-term impacts, are nearly impossible to assess, making it hard to know whether the "greater good" was actually achieved.
Consequentialist Responses
Consequentialists have several lines of defense:
- The demandingness reply: The fact that a moral theory is demanding doesn't make it false. Morality should push us to do more for others.
- Rule consequentialism: Instead of evaluating individual acts, evaluate moral rules by their consequences. A rule like "respect individual rights" tends to produce the best outcomes overall, so the rule consequentialist can generally prohibit rights violations.
- Two-level approaches: R.M. Hare's two-level view says individuals should mostly follow commonsense moral norms in everyday life, but those norms themselves should be selected based on which set of norms produces the best overall consequences.
- Biting the bullet: Some consequentialists simply accept that violating individual rights can be morally justified when the stakes are high enough, such as preventing a catastrophe.
Consequentialism vs. Rights
Violating Rights for the Greater Good
The tension between consequentialism and individual rights is one of the theory's deepest problems. If pushing one person in front of a trolley saves five, consequentialism seems to say you must push. More broadly, the theory implies that any rights violation could be morally required if the consequences are good enough.
This isn't just about trolley cases. Consequentialism could justify punishing an innocent person to prevent a riot, or breaking a promise whenever doing so produces a slightly better outcome. These implications trouble critics because they seem to treat individuals as mere instruments for producing good results rather than as people with inherent moral standing.
Separateness of Persons
A deeper philosophical objection, associated with John Rawls, is that consequentialism fails to respect the separateness of persons. When you aggregate utility across individuals, you're essentially treating society like a single person whose total happiness should be maximized. But people are separate beings with distinct lives. Imposing suffering on one person to increase another's happiness isn't like moving pain from your left hand to your right.
This objection also raises questions about interpersonal comparisons of well-being. Even if you could know all the consequences, is there a truly impartial way to compare how much one person's suffering "costs" versus how much another person's happiness "gains"? Critics say no. And the consequentialist requirement to give equal weight to everyone's interests can override special obligations to family, friends, or people you've made promises to.
Rule Consequentialism and Individual Acts
Rule consequentialism tries to solve the rights problem by shifting the focus from individual actions to moral rules. The idea: a world where everyone follows a rule like "don't violate individual rights" will have better consequences than a world of case-by-case calculation.
This approach handles most everyday cases well. It can prohibit lying, promise-breaking, and rights violations because rules against these things generally produce better outcomes. But a stubborn problem remains: in extreme scenarios where breaking the rule would prevent a catastrophe, the rule consequentialist seems committed to breaking it. Critics argue this means rule consequentialism ultimately collapses back into act consequentialism, since the rule is only as strong as its consequences.
Feasibility of Consequentialism
Difficulties of Prediction and Quantification
Even if you accept consequentialism in theory, applying it in practice is enormously difficult. You'd need to:
- Identify all the people affected by your action
- Predict the consequences for each of them, including long-term and indirect effects
- Quantify those consequences in some common unit of well-being
- Compare and aggregate well-being across different individuals
Each step presents serious challenges. Long-term effects are often unforeseeable. Effects on future generations are nearly impossible to calculate. And the problem of interpersonal comparison, measuring whether your gain outweighs someone else's loss, may have no objective solution.
Psychological Feasibility
Beyond the intellectual challenges, there's a question of whether humans can actually be consequentialists. The theory demands a level of impartiality that may be psychologically impossible. People naturally prioritize their own interests, their families, and their communities. That's not a flaw to be corrected; it may be a basic feature of human psychology.
In practice, most people rely on moral heuristics (rules of thumb like "keep your promises" and "don't harm innocents") rather than calculating consequences from scratch each time. Some consequentialists see this as compatible with their theory: the heuristics are justified because they tend to produce good outcomes. But critics argue this concession undermines the theory's distinctive claim that consequences are all that matter.
Scalar and Satisficing Consequentialism
To address feasibility concerns, some consequentialists have proposed modified versions of the theory:
- Scalar consequentialism drops the idea of a sharp line between right and wrong actions. Instead, actions are simply better or worse based on their consequences. You don't need to find the single best option; you just try to produce better outcomes rather than worse ones.
- Satisficing consequentialism says you need to produce "good enough" outcomes rather than the very best possible consequences. This reduces the demandingness of the theory significantly.
Both modifications make consequentialism more livable. But critics note they still require you to quantify and compare consequences, and satisficing consequentialism still faces the question of where to draw the "good enough" line.
Consequentialism in Ethical Frameworks
Alternatives to Pure Consequentialism
Several ethical theories offer alternatives that avoid some of consequentialism's problems while still taking consequences seriously:
- Ethical egoism says you should maximize good consequences for yourself. This sidesteps the demandingness objection entirely, but raises its own problems (it seems to permit exploiting others).
- W.D. Ross's moral pluralism recognizes multiple prima facie duties, including a duty to promote good consequences, but also duties of fidelity, justice, and non-harm. When duties conflict, you use judgment to determine which takes priority in a given situation.
- Virtue ethics focuses on cultivating good character traits (compassion, courage, honesty) rather than calculating right actions. Consequences can still inform what counts as a virtue, but right action doesn't reduce to producing the best outcomes.
Consequentialist Elements in Other Theories
Even if pure consequentialism has serious problems, almost every ethical theory acknowledges that consequences matter to some degree. The real debate is about how much weight they should carry.
- Deontologists can treat promoting good consequences as one duty among many, to be weighed against duties like fairness and honesty.
- Virtue ethicists can argue that virtues like compassion are partly justified by their tendency to produce good outcomes, even though virtue ethics isn't reducible to consequentialism.
- Two-level consequentialists separate the criterion of rightness (producing the best consequences) from the decision procedure (following commonsense moral norms day to day). This lets the theory acknowledge that rigid consequentialist calculation is impractical while maintaining that consequences are the ultimate standard.
The upshot: consequences clearly matter in ethics. The question is whether they're the only thing that matters, and the critiques covered here give strong reasons to think the answer is no.