By nature I’m basically a consequentialist.
I’ve never been too committed to any particular view about just which kinds of
things should be maximised, but until recently I’d never seriously doubted that
the right ethical theory involved maximising something or other interesting.
Now, I’m not so sure.

Here
is one quite general way to respond to all sorts of ‘counterexamples’ to
consequentialism. The form of these should be familiar: we find an action a such that doing a would maximise the amount of happiness in the world, or the
number of satisfied preferences, or whatever, but despite this we still think
that a is intuitively the wrong thing
to do. Now we could follow Jack Smart in deprecating the importance of these
kinds of intuition, and I think it’s important to work out just how far this
kind of move can be taken. But we don’t have to do this to save
consequentialism in its most general form. Because we can just say that our
ethical theory is to produce the best kind of society we can, and if we think a makes society worse, then a does not have the best consequences,
so there is no ethical obligation to perform a. This is rather rough as it stands, but in most cases it seems to
me that it lets us save consequentialism from familiar objections to specific
kinds of utilitarianism without making the Smart move.

Anyway,
it now seems to me that this won’t work in general. The problem cases arise in
a very narrow range of cases, certainly not the kinds of cases we expect to
find in worlds anything like this one. In fact, we have to be living in a
community of moral saints, or near enough to it, for the cases to arise. Assume
we are in such a community. It seems to me that we’d be missing something –
moral diversity. It’s kind of fun to have a few mostly harmless wrongdoers
around, and it would be sad if they weren’t there. Just which kinds of
wrongdoers is a bit of an open question. I use pie-throwers as the main example
of fun wrongdoers, but really there’s all sorts of cases. Here’s the troubling
set of propositions that seem true about the pie-thrower in the world of moral
saints

(a) The existence of the
pie-thrower makes the world a better place, in the sense that from behind the
veil of ignorance we’d prefer to be in a world with a pie-thrower or two than
one consisting entirely of moral saints;

(b) Throwing pies at
people for amusement, which I assume is pretty much what the pie-thrower does,
is morally wrong; and

(c) The reason that
throwing such pies has good consequences is because
it is morally wrong.

(c) is important here. If we only had (a)
and, allegedly, (b) then we could follow Jack and simply deny (b). It turns out
that harming other people for one’s own amusement is morally justified, and
indeed morally obligatory, in a saintly world! But I think (c) undercuts this
defence. It seems to me that the benefits of pie-throwing, such as the
amusement it generates among others, and the moral discourse it might prompt,
arise in part because of the moral wrongness of the act.

This
all needs considerably more elaboration, probably more than a non-ethicist like
me can provide. So I’m co-writing a paper on all this, although since my
co-author (Andy Egan from MIT) is also a
non-ethicist there’s a serious possibility that our treatment will be, er,
shallow. (Some may say ‘infantile’, but they are basically evil people and you,
dear reader, should ignore them.) When the paper is ready, I’ll post a draft
here.

The
title is because there’s several more of these ‘I was wrong’s to follow in
upcoming days, when the horrendous heat here slows down enough to allow me to
write about them.