Always make the world a better place
(1) It can never be right to make the world worse than it could be (and it must always be right to make the world as good as it can be).
(2) Consequentialism says that the only reasons people have, and all the reasons people have, are reasons to maximise the good (==bring about the best state of affairs possible).
Therefore:
(3) Consequentialism is true.
I tend to think that the driving force behind consequentialism is something along the lines of (1). How can one be obliged to bring about worse, rather than better, states of affairs?
(2) is just pure definition; this is what people tend to mean by consequentialism.
Yet it's interesting to note that the conclusion (3) really doesn't follow from these two premises. Why not? It doesn't follow because (1) only says that one's strongest reason is always to maximise the good. It's perfectly compatible with the claim that one sometimes has other (weaker) reasons to do other things. But the definition of (2) explicitly rules out this possibility, and so (1) can't imply (3).
That is, the following position seems coherent, is compatible with the truth of (1), and is not consequentialism. I don't endorse it, but it is interesting.
Quasi-consequentialism: One has reasons to do many things: keep promises, not to kill people, to respect rights, to give people their just deserts, and so on, and of course, to maximise the good. But the strength of the last of these is always so great as to obviously outweigh any reason that one has to do anything else.
But this doesn't make such reasons redundant! When one is unsure which action maximises the good (or is sure that there is a tie between more than one action), then these reasons come into play. If, for example, you are faced with the choice of whether or not to keep a promise, and you have no idea which choice maximises the good, you should keep it, because you have unconditional reason to keep promises.
(Objection: "In those cases where one is unsure what to do, these non-consequentialist reasons do not correlate with what is right. Whether one keeps the promise for its own sake or not, one's action will be right or wrong for reasons independent of this. Therefore the reason to keep the promise is irrelevant to moral decision making." It is true that such non-consequentialist reasons will not correlate with what is actually right. But we are interested not only in acting rightly, but also in acting least wrongly (and most rightly). That means that such reasons are relevant to what one ought to do from a subjective point of view.)
But this doesn't make such
But this doesn't make such reasons redundant! When one is unsure which action maximises the good (or is sure that there is a tie between more than one action), then these reasons come into play.
Even under conditions of perfect knowledge such reasons would not always be redundant. Unlike consequentialism, quasi-consequentialism might require you to perform some act even when there is at least one other act that would have produced as much good. Nonconsequentialist reasons could thus be relevant as tiebrakers on a quasi-consequentialist theory.
(Rawls thought that consequentialists give insufficient weight to distribution because they only appeal to equality to break ties. But he was clearly wrong. Consequentialists don't give insufficient weight to distribution; they don't give it any weight at all. His remarks could, however, be true of some forms of quasi-consequentialism.)
Blame my habit of skipping
Blame my habit of skipping over remarks in parenthesis. I just realized that the parenthetical clause included in the very sentence I quoted anticipated the point I made in the comment above.
As you say, I make the same
As you say, I make the same point more briefly (and perhaps less clearly) in the parentheses.
The Rawlsian example is an interesting one though. The reason Rawls says this is, if I recall correctly, because Sidgwick claims that utilitarians should use equality to break ties (In Methods..., though it would take me some time to find the page). I've always been a little unclear as to why Sidgwick says this.
Al
What Sidgwick says is
What Sidgwick says is actually quite interesting, and covers some of the points you made in your original post:
"[T]he very indefiniteness of all hedonistic calculations, which was sufficiently shown in Book ii., renders it by no means unlikely that there may be no cognisable difference between the quantities of happiness involved in two sets of consequences respectively; the more rough our estimates necessarily are, the less likely we shall be to come to any clear decision between two apparently balanced alternatives. In all such cases, therefore, it becomes practically important to ask whether any mode of distributing a given quantum of happiness is better than any other. Now the Utilitarian formula seems to supply no answer to this question: at least we have to supplement the principle of seeking the greatest happiness on the whole by some principle of Just or Right distribution of this happiness. The principle which most Utilitarians have either tacitly or expressly adopted is that of pure equality--as given in Bentham's formula, "everybody to count for one, and nobody for more than one." And this principle seems the only one which does not need a special justification; for, as we saw, it must be reasonable to treat any one man in the same way as any other, if there be no reason apparent for treating him differently." (The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., London, 1907, pp. 416-417)
It seems to me that, contrary to Rawls's interpretation, Sidgwick is not claiming here that utilitarianism requires one to choose the more equal distribution of good when the total aggregate of good is maximal, but instead that, as a matter of contingent fact, those philosophers who have been utilitarians have also embraced a distributive principle which assigns (subordinate) moral significance to equality.
The view that consequentialism (and hence utilitarianism) assigns no intrinsic moral significance to equality, even as a tiebraker, has also been defended by other prominent consequentialists, such as G. E. Moore. Thus Moore writes that
"I have always held that there are sometimes open to an agent at a given time two or more acts, any one of which would produce as much intrinsic good as the other or others; so that in such cases there would be no act which was the act which would produce as much as any other open to him. I have held that, in such cases, any one of these acts which produce as much as any act open to him, would be an act which it was right for him to perform, and that therefore there would, in such cases, be no act which was the right act for him to perform and no act which he ought to perform; since to say of an act that it is the right thing for him to do or that he ought to do it implies that no other act would be right for him." (‘Reply to My Critics’, in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, Chicago, 1942, p. 561)
Hi again Pablo, Many thanks
Hi again Pablo,
Many thanks for the informative reply. I starting writing a reply, but it grew until I decided I might as well make it into a new post. (I'll probably post that tommorrow.)
Alex