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journal of philosophical researchvolume xviii

1993

editor Robert AudiUnivers i ty of Nebraska

associate editor Charles Sayward

editorial board Robert Audi

Univers i ty of Nebraska

Univers i ty of Nebra ska

William P. AlstonSyracuse Univers i tyFounding Edi tor

Richard H. LinebackBowl ing Gree n State Universi tyPhilosophy Documentation Center Representative

Frank DilleyUnivers i ty of DelawareAm erican P hilosop hical Associat ion Representative

Kai NielsenUnivers i ty of CalgaryCan adian Philosophical Associat ion Representative

Robert G. Turnbul lOhio State Un ivers i tyImmediate Past Editor

editorial secretary Cindy RichardsBowling Green State UniversityPhilosophy Documentation Center Representative

Unive rsity of Nebraska, Lincolneditorial assistants Priscella Guerra and D ouglas M. Weber

Published with the sponsors hip of the Philosophy Documentation Center, he American Philosoph-

icalAssociation, the C anad ian Philosophical Association, and the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Produced w ith the financ ial aid and material assistance of the Philosophy D ocumentation Center

an d the Univers i ty of Nebraska, Lincoln.



W e a r e p l ea sed to an n o u n ce th a t b eg in n in g withthe 1994 Vo lu me, Pan ayo t B u tch v a r o v su ccee d sRobert Audi as Edi to r .

OPhilosophy Documentation Center 1993 All rights reserved

ISSN 0153-8364



JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCHVOLUME XVIII, 1993

A CONSEQ UENTIALIST CASE FOR

REJECTING THE RIGHT

F R A N C E S H O W A R D -S N Y D ER AND ALASTAIR NORCROSS

PURDU E UNIVERSITY AND SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY

ABSTRACT Satisficing and maximizing versions of con-

sequentialism have both assumed that rightness is an all-or-nothing property. We argue that this is inimical to the spirit of

consequentialism, and that, from the point of view of the con-sequentialist, actions should be evaluated purely i n terms thatadmit of degree. We first consider the suggestion that rightnessand wrongness are a matter of degree. If so, this raises thequestion of whether the claim that something is wrong saysany more than that it is bad. We consider the possibility that a

consequentialist should simply equa te wrongness with bad-ness. We reject thi s on the grounds that there is not a satsifac-tory way for a consequentialist to account for the badness of

actions, as opposed to states of affairs. We explore two con-cepts of wrongness: to do something wrong is to be blamewor-thy; and the fact that something is wrong creates a reason no t

to do it. We argue that the first of these is not available to the

consequentialist because of her views on blame, and that thesecond is just a s much a feature of badness a s of wrongness.We conclude that the consequentialist can make no sense ofthe concept of wrongness.

1. Introduction

onsequent ial ism has t radi t ional ly been viewed a s a theory of rightaction. Consequentialists hav e employed theories of value, theories that tellus what th ings are good and bad, in functions that tell us what actions ar eright a n d wrong. The most comm on function from the good to the right canbe expressed a s fol lows: an act is r ight if and on ly if it produces a t least asmuch go od a s any alternative available to the agent, otherwise it i s wrong.According to this maximizing function, r ightness and wrongness are notm at te r s of degree . Consequentialists are not a lone on this score. Deontolo-



110 HOWARD-SNYDER AND N O R C R O S S

gists concur that rightness and wrongness are not matters of degree. Thereis an important difference, though. In typical deontological theories, prop-erties that make an action right and wrong-e.g., being a keep ing of abinding promise, a killing of an innocent person, or a telling of a lie-arenot naturally thought of as matters of degree. So one wouldn't expect therightness or wrongness of an act to be a matter of degree for deontology.But this is not the case with consequentialism. Goodn ess and badness areclearly matters of degree. So the property of an act that makes it right orwrong-how much good it produces relative to available alternatives-isnaturally thought of as a matter of degree. Why, then, is rightness andwrongness not a matter of degree?

We will argue that, from the point of view of a consequentialist, actio nsshould be evaluated purely in terms that admit of degrees. D oes that m ean

that right ness and wrongness should be treated as matters of degree? If so,this raises the question of whether the claim that something is wrong saysany mo re than that it is bad. We explore two concepts of wrongness: the factthat an act was wrong makes the agent blameworthy; and the fact that theact would b e wrong is a reason not to do it. We argue that the first of theseis not available to the consequentialist because of her views on blame, andthat the second i s just as muc h a feature of badness as of wro ngness. Weconclude that the consequentialist can make no sense of the concept ofwrongness. Our argument is directed towards those who are already at-tracted to consequen tialism. We are not undertaking to argue fo r con-sequentialism against any rival moral theory. Perhaps, though, some whohave rejected consequentialism because of its views on wrongness may b emo re attracted to a theory constructed along the lines that we sugg est.

We shall conduct o ur discussion in terms of utilitarianism, since this is

the mo st popular form of consequentialism. None of our points, however,will rely on the utilitarian value theory.

2. The Supererogation Objection

We can approach our topic by focussing first on an objection which is

comm only raised f or consequentialist theories such a s utili tarianism: thatthey leav e no room for supererogation. Such theories a re said to classify aswrong all acts that fail to maximize. A supererogatory act, however, isgenerally ch aracterized as an act which is not requited , but which is in som eway better than the alternatives. E.g. a doctor, who hears of an epidemic inanother town may choose to go to the assistance of the people who aresufferin g there, although in doing so he will be pu tting himself at great risk. '

Such an action is not morally required of the doctor, but it produces moreutility than the morally permissible alternative of remaining in his hometown.

Utilitarianism is said to require the doctor to go and help th e victims of

the epid emic. There seem to be two connected motivations for rejec ting this.



REJECTING THE RIGHT 111

First, peop le som etimes go beyond the call of duty. Max imizing utilitarian-ism would no t allow that. To do your duty is to do the best thing you canpossibly do. And se cond, people wh o fail to mak e certain extreme sacrificesfor the greater good are usually not wrong. I t seems harsh to demand orexpect that th e docto r sacrifice his life for the villagers.

The utilitarian can avoid these conse quence s by retreating to a form ofsatisficing utilitarianism.* For example, one can allow that the boundarybetween right and wrong can in some cases be located on the scale at som epoint short of the best. This would allow that an agent can do her dutywithout performing the best action available to her, and it would make itpossible fo r her to go beyond the call of duty. The position of the boundarybetween right and wrong may be affected by such factors as how muchself-sacrifice is required of the agent by th e various options, and how m uchutility or disutility they will produce. For example, it may be perfectly

permissible for the doctor to stay at home, even though the best optionwould have been to go and help with the epidem ic. On the other hand, if allthe doctor could d o and needed to do to sav e the villagers were to send abo x of tablets or a textbook on d iseases, then he w ould be required to do allhe could to save them.

3. Wrongness: All-or-Nothing or Scalar

Satisficing ve rsions of utilitarianism, n o less than the traditional o nes,assume that the rightness of an action is an all-or-nothing property. If anaction does not produce at least the required amount of good, then it iswrong; othe rwise it is right. On a maximizin g theory th e required amo untis the most g ood avai lable. On a non-maximizing theory what is requiredmay b e less than the bes t . Both forms of utilitarianism s hare the view that amoral mis s is as good as a mile. If you don’t produce a s much good as i srequired, then you d o something wrong, and that’s all there is to it.

We see nothing to recomm end this claim. It is abundantly clear that thedifference betwe en two wrong actions-one slightly wrong and the otherser ious ly wrong-can be at least as great as the dif ference between a

slightly wrong action and a minimally right one.

Here’s an argum ent for the view that r ightness and wrongness isn’t anall-or-nothing affair. Sup pos e that we have so me obligations of benefi-cence, e.g. the wealthy are required to g ive up a minim al proportion of theirincomes for the support of the poor and hungry. (Most people, includingdeontologists such a s Kant and Ross, would accept this .) Suppo se Jones i sobligated to give 10% of his income to charity. The difference betweengiving 8% and 9% is the same, in some obvious physical sense, as the

difference betwe en giving 9 % and lo%,or between giving 11% and 12%.Such similarities should be reflected in moral sim ilarities. A moral theorywhich says that there is a really significant moral difference betwe en giving9% an d lo%, but not between giving 11%an d 12%, looks misguided. At



112 HOWARD-SNYDER AN D NORCROSS

least, no utilitarian should accept this. She will be equally concerned aboutthe difference between giving 11% an d 12% as the difference betweengiving 9% and 10%. To see this , suppose that Jones were tom betweengiving 11%and 12%and that Smith were torn between giving 9% and 10%.

The utilitarian will tell you to spend the same amount of time persuadingeach to give th e larger sum, assuming that other things are equal. Th is is

because sh e is concerned with certain sorts of consequences, in this case,with getting mone y to people who need it. An extra $5,000 f rom Jones (whohas already given 11%)would satisfy this goal as well as an extra $5,000

from Smith (who has given 9%). It does not matter whether the $5,000

com es from one who has already given 11% or from one who h as given a

mere 9%.An all-or-nothing theory of right and wrong w ould have to say that there

was a threshold, e.g., at l o % , such that if one chose to give 9% one wouldbe wrong, whereas if one chose to give 10% one would be right. If th isdistinction is to be interesting, i t must say that there is a big difference

between right and wrong, between giving 9 % and giving IO%, and a smalldifference between pairs of right actions, or pairs of wrong actions. Thedifference between giving 9% an d 8% is just the difference between awrong action and a slightly worse one; and the difference between giving11% and 12% is just the difference between one supererogatory act and aslightly better one. Given the argument of the last paragraph, the utilitarian

cannot a ccept this.3A related reason to reject an all-or-nothing line between right and w rong

is that the choice of any point on the scale of possible op tions as a thresholdfor rightness will be arbitrary. Even maximization is subject to this criti-

cism. O ne might think that the difference between the best and the next bestoption constitu tes a really significant moral difference, quite apart fro m thedifference in goodness between the options. We do, after all, attach greatsignificance to the difference between winning a race and com ing secon d,even if the two runners are separated by only a fraction of a second. Wecertainly don’t attach anything like the sa me significance to the differencebetw een finishing, say, seventh and eighth, even when a much larger inter-

val separates th e runners. True enough, but we don’t think that it show s thatthere really is a greater significance in the difference between first andsecond than in any other difference. We do, after all, also attach great

significance to finishing in the top three. We give medals to the top three

and to no others. We could just as easily honor the top three equally and no tdistinguish between them. When we draw these lines-between the first an d

th e rest, or between the top three and the rest, or between the final fou r an dthe others-we seem be laying down arbitrary conventions. And saying thatgiving 10% is right and giving only 9% is wrong seems analogously con-ventional and arbitrary.

By contrast, good and bad are scalar concepts, but as with many other




scalar concepts, such a s rich and tall , we speak of a state of affairs as good

or bad (simplici ter). Thi s distinction is not arbitrary or conventional. Th eutilitarian can give a fairly natural acco unt of the distinction betwe en goodand bad states of affairs . For example: consider each morally significant

being affected by som e action. Determine whether h is conscious exper ienceis better than no experience. Assign it a positive number if i t is, and anegative one if i t isn’t. Th en add together the num bers of all morally signif-icant beings affected by some possible action. If the sum if positive, thestate of affairs is good . If i t is negative, th e state of affairs is bad.

Note that although this gives an account of a real distinction betweengood and bad, it doesn’t give us reason to attach much significance to thedistinction. I t doesn’t m ake the difference between a minimally g ood stateof affairs and a minimally bad state of affairs more significant than thedifference between pairs of good states of affairs or between bad states of

affairs.Why not say something similar about right and wrong: that they are

scalar phenom ena but that there is a point (perhaps a fuzzy point) at whichwrong sha des into right?

Well, what would that point be? We said earlier that differences in good-

ness should b e reflected by differences in rightness. Perhaps th e dividingline between right and w rong is just the dividing line betwee n good an d bad.There a re two reasons to reject this suggestion. T he first is that it seems tocollapse the con cepts of r ight and wrong into those of good and bad respec-tively, and henc e, to make the forme r pair redundant. T he secon d is that, onthe accoun t of good an d bad states of affairs we offered the utilitarian, it isnot clear that there is any satisfactory account of the difference betweengood and bad actions w ith wh ich to equate the difference b etween right and

wrong actions. To explain this point w e need to explore what a utili tarianmight sa y about the difference between good a nd bad actions.

4. Good and Bad Actions

It will often happ en that all the states of affairs an agent has the powe r to

produce are bad or a l l are good. For example, Mother Theresa has to choosewheth er to give a drink of water to a dying man . If she gives him th e water,

he will be slightly better off than he would otherwise be, but it might wellbe that the situation is bad if she gives it to him an d bad if she doesn’t. Butit is utterly implau sible to say that she d oes wrong if she gives it to him, andalso do es wrong if sh e doesn’t. It is also implausible to say that it would be

a bad thing to give the man a dr ink. Perh aps th is is because the man’ssituation is improve d by the drink, even thoug h it is s till bad. He is now less

badly off than he was before. Perhaps we can say that, so long as h i ssituation is better after the action than before, the action i s good. But thiswon’t d o. I t could b e that his situation is gradually deteriorating, so tha t thedrink slows the deterioration, but doesn’t even halt it, let alone reverse it.



114 HOWARD-SNYDER AND NORCROSS

He is actually worse off after he gets the drink than he wa s before, but hewould have been even worse off without the drink. I t would be a verystrange account of the difference betwee n good and bad actions that judged

this to be a bad action.

Clearly, we can’t s imply compare states of affairs before and after aparticular action. When we think of someon e doing a good or a bad thing,an underlying concept is that of making a difference to the world. A goodaction mak es the world better than it would have bee n if the action hadn’t

been performed. We com pare, not states of affairs at different times in th e

same world, but at the same time in different worlds. Mother Theresa’s

action is good, it seems, because the dying man i s better off than h e wouldhave bee n if she hadn’t given him the drink. A good action, on this proposal,

makes the world better than it would have been if the action hadn’t been

performed.

The current proposal is that a utilitarian judg es a n action as good or bad(or neither) by com paring the world that results from it with the world thatwould h ave resulted if i t hadn’t been performed. T he latter world prov idesa neutral point in terms of value. Any action that results in a better world is

good. An y action that results in a worse world is bad. If the resulting wo rld

i s of equal value , the action is nei ther good nor bad. The re are problems w iththe proposal, though. When we wonder what the world would hav e been

like if a particular action hadn’t been performed at time t, h o w d o w eimagine things to have been changed? Two approaches with prima facie

plausibility can be easily dismissed: ( i) We ima gine the agen t to have re-maine d immo bile at t; ( ii) We imagine the agent to have been absent fromthe scen e at the t . Within (ii) there are two possibilities: ( ii)a We imagine a

world identical to the actual world before t , in which the agen t miraculously

vanishes from th e scene at t ; (ii)b We imagin e a world as similar as possibleto the actual world before t, in which the agent is non-miraculously absentf rom the scene at t . That is , we imagine what would have had to have been

different before t in order for the agent to have been absent a t t .4 Both

immobil i ty and absence f rom the scen e fai l to g ive u s a satisfactory neutral

point with which to compare the results of an agent’s actions. Not only do

they give the wrong moral judgements about som e act ions , as we shal l argueshortly, but, perhap s more importantly, they don’t seem to capture what we

mean when we ask what would have happened if the action hadn’t been

performed. T he com parisons they invite are simply not the correct ones.

Whe n we wonder what would have happened i f we hadn’ t done something,w e don’t su ppo se ourselves to be imm obilized, or t o be r em oved f rom the

scene, miraculou sly or not.

If we are to judge an act ion by com par ing its consequences with wh atwould ha ve happened otherwise, we need an intuitively acceptable accou ntof the la t ter not ion. T he bes t account w e know is to be found in th e wri t ing

of Alan Donagan. Dona gan defines an action a s “a deed do ne in a particular



REJECTING THE RIGHT 11 5

situation or set of circumstances; ... [consisting] partly of [the agent’s] ownb od il y a n d m e n ta l ~ t a t e s ” . ~e continues:

Should he be deprived of all power of action, the situation, including

his bodily and mental s tates, would change according to the laws ofnature. His d eeds as an agent are either interventions in that natural

process or abstentions from intervention. When he intervenes, he canbe described as causing whatever would not have occurred had heabstained; a nd when he abstains, as allowing to happen whatever wouldnot have happened had he intervened. Hence, from the point of view ofaction, the situation is conceived as passive, and the agent, qua agent,as external to it . He is like a deus ex machina whose interventions makea difference to what otherwise would naturally come about without

them.6

In considering what would ha ve happened if an agent hadn’t acted, Donaga ndoesn’t ima gine her to be imm obile or absent f rom the scene. Instead, h easks what would hav e happened in “the course of nature” (his phrase). Th ecourse of nature can include not only the agent’s physical presence, but also

changes in her “bodily and mental states.” It is the exercise of humanagency that giv es an agent the option to intervene in the course of nature orto allow nature t o t ak e its course. All of an agent’s deeds are either interven-tions or abstentions. Tho se that make a d ifference to the course of nature,or what would h ave happened anyway, are interventions; those that leave

the course of nature unchanged are abstentions. Whatever problems there

are with this analysis of the difference between doing and allowing7, itseems to have a good deal of in tui tive suppor t. How, then, does th is account

of what would have happened anyway fare as par t of an analys is of thedifference betwe en goo d and bad actions?

The m ajor problem with th is la tes t sugges t ion is that it entails that lettingnature take i ts course is never good or bad. I f som eone al lows to happen

what would have happened anyway, her behavior is morally neutral. Thismay be m ore am enable to anti-consequentialists, who are more inclined toinvest the doing/allowing distinction with moral significance than ar e con-

sequentialists, but it will be unacceptable nonetheless. Even those whoclaim that it is generally worse to do bad things than to allow them to happen(and that it is better to d o good things than to allow them to happen?) will

admit that some al lowings can be very bad and some can be very good. Acouple of ex amp les will suffice.

Consid er an agent, called Agent, who is a lazy good-for-nothing, and just

happens to be the spi t t ing image of a courageous f reedom f ighter w ho iswanted b y the oppress ive government . B oth Agent and the f reedom f ighter

are in a bar one night w hen the forces of evi l ar r ive, but the f reedom f ighterhappens to be in th e toilet. The chief pol iceman announces that they hav e

been give n reliable information that the freedom fighter is in the bar, an d




they won’t le av e until they kill her. He imm ediately s po ts Agent. T he police

thrust A gen t against a wall and tell her to hurry up and say whatever she has

to say befo re they shoot her, because they are in a tearing hurry to ge t to thedonut shop before it closes. Agent, seizing her chance to redeem he r pitiful

life, mu mb les “it is a far far better thing that I do now than I have ever donebefore.”s The police shoot Agent, and leave the bar satisfied, before thefreedom fighter, unaware of what has happened, emerges from the rest-room. A gen t had the chance to reveal her identity and save her life, but she

chose to let things happen as they would have happened had she not exer-cised her agency at all. According to the analysis of good and bad actionswe a re considering , this would be neutral. It is, however, hard to imagine a

better can dida te for a good action than this one.9 If we ha ve a theory of goodand bad actions, i t had better classify this a s a good action. T he earliersuggestion, that we consider what would have happened if Agent had re-

mained immo bile, also falls foul of this examp le. Absence from the scenefares differently, depending on whether we su ppo se Agent miraculou sly or

non-mirac ulously absent.Allowings can also be very bad. Suppose that Agent stumbles onto an

experiment conducted by a twisted scientist, named Scientist. He is seatedat a desk with eleven buttons, numbered ‘0 ’ through ‘ lo’ , n front of him.

H e tells her that the buttons control the fates of ten peop le. If no button is

pres sed within t he next thirty seconds, all ten will die . If the button m arked‘10’ is pressed, all ten will die; if ‘ 9 ’ is pressed, only nine will die, and so

on down to ‘0’. He was, he explains, about to press ‘ 0’.How ever, to honorher arrival, he turns control of the buttons over to Age nt. She is free to pressany button she w ishes, or to press none at all . Supp ose Age nt either doesn’t

press any button, or presses ‘10’. Either would be a very ba d thing to do ,

according t o any plausible account of good and bad action. But the accountw e are conside ring judges them both to be morally neutral. Wh at is perhaps

ev en more counterintuitive, if Agent presses ‘9*,he has do ne a good thing!

This example also counts against both immobility and absence from the

scene.It seems, then, that none of the accounts we have been considering, of

what would have happened if Agent hadn’t exercised her agency , helps theutilitarian prov ide a satisfactory account of the difference between good and

bad actions. I t is also clear that none of these can explain the differencebetween right and wrong actions. In the absence of any other plausiblealternatives, we must reject the suggestion that the dividing line between

r ight and w rong is the line between good and bad.Is there an alternative account of wrongness? In the next section, we

conside r different versions of the view that an actio n is wrong if and only ifit is blam ewo rthy. We argue that this view-even on the most plausible

constru al of it-is unacceptab le to the utilitarian .




5. Wrongness as Blameworthiness

We tend to blam e and punish agents for their wrong actions and not for

actions that are not w rong. And we tend to consider it wrong to blame or

punish someone for an act ion that was not wrong. Some phi losophershave argued that being blameworthy is of the essence of wrong act ion.10T his concep t ion o f wrongnes s is at t ract ive, f rom the consequent ial is tpoint of v iew, s inc e censure com es in degrees . If th is is what wrongnes scons is ts in , then wrongness might a lso come in degrees . This account

would not require u s to draw a sharp l ine between th e r ight and the wrong,at least not a line which has any more significance than the line betweenone wrong action and another, or between one right action and another.Punishment, praise and shame come in degrees. The degrees can be as fine as

you like. You can give someone one more lashing, on e more day or hour in

prison. You can ostracize him for one more hou r or one mo re year. Th edifference between on e lashing and two lashings is not significantly differ-

ent from the difference between two lashings and three, or the differencebetween n o lashings an d one. One can feel shame to different degrees too.Th e scalar nature of punishment is well-suited to reflect the scalar nature ofwrongness.

Consider the followin g definition of wrong action:

WA: An action is wrong if and only if it is appropriate to impose varioussanctions on the agent.

What d oes it mean to say that i t is ‘appropriate’ to san ction? Since app ro-priateness is a normative notion, the most natural understanding is to thinkof it as meaning ‘obligatory’.” In that case, WA would be:

WA1: An action is wrong if and only if w e ought to impose various sanc-

tions on the agent.

But if WA is to be understood a s WA1, it leads to a definitional circle orregress. It tells us to understand what is wrong in terms of what it is wrongnot to do. (We take i t that ‘wrong’ and ‘ought not to be done’ are inter-

changeable.) But we don’t have a better grasp on the notion of ‘ought tosanction’ than w e have o n the notions of ‘ought to keep promises’ or ‘oug ht

to feed the hungry.’ Trying to understand the wrongness of one action interms of the wrongne ss of other actions is unenlightening.. There is an alternative account of appropriateness according to which it

is still normative. Th at account says that an action is appropriate if and onlyif it is optimific. WA would then amount to:

WA2: An action is wrong if and only if i t is optimific to punish th e agent

This suggestion avoids the uninformative circularity of WA 1 I 2 Let us sup-

pose that WA2 expresses the sort of connection between wrongness and




censure that people have in mind. Can it provide the utilitarian with adistinction between badness and wrongness?

We believe that WA2 is not available to the utilitarian as a way of

distinguishing wrong actions from bad actions. For he cannot ident i fywrong actions with actions which it is optimific to sanction. To see th isconsider what Sidgwick says about praise.

From a U tilitarian point of view, as has been before sai d, we m ust mean

by calling a quality, ‘deserving of praise’, tha t i t is expedient to praiseit, with a view to its future production: accordingly, in distribu ting ourpraise of human qualities, o n utilitarian principles, we ha ve to con siderprimarily not the usefulness of the quality, but the usefulness of thepraise.I3

Th e utilitarian will, of course, say the same a bout censure a s Sidgwick say sabout praise: we should assess whether it is good to punish or blame some-

one by assessing the utility of doing so . Punishing or blaming are actionsjust like promise-keeping or killing and, like those actions, their value is

determ ined by their consequences, their power to produce utility.If there is a conceptual connection of the sort asserted by WA2 between

an action’s being wrong and its being appropriate to punish the agen t, andif Sidgwick’s account of when it is appropriate to punish is correct, then weshould be able to determine whether a n act iswrong by determining whetherpunishing the agent of that act will produce more utility than not. On theother hand, if there is good reason to reject thi s method of deciding whethersomeo ne has done wrong, then there is reason to reject WA2.

We subm it that there i s reason to reject the claim that the wrongness of

an action is determined by whether punishing the agent wo uld produce moreutility than not. This is because our co ncept of wrongness is constrained by

one or both of the following principles which conflict with WA 2.

1. If action x is wrong, then an action y done by so meo ne in exactly

similar circumstances, with the same intention and the same con-sequences, is also wrong.

We might call this the principle of universalizability. It might, howe ver, be

optimific to punish the agent of x but not the agent of y. Hence, according

to WA2, x would be wrong, but y would not.

2. If someone does the best she can, and does very well indeed, then

she has done nothing wrong.

But it c an sometimes be optimific to punish a utility-maximizer. For exam-ple, imagine that Agnes has always produced as much utility as it waspossible for her to produce. Moreover, none of her act ions has led to anyunfortunate consequences, such a s someone’s untimely dea th or suffering.




Punishing her a s a scapegoat might nevertheless produce more utility thannot doing so . It is absurd to say that she has do ne something wrong just invirtue of the fact that it is appropria te to punish her.

Given any one of these constraints on any recognizable understanding ofwrongness, the utilitarian cannot say that whether an action is wrong isdetermin ed by whether it is optimific to punish the agen t for doing it.14

It might be o bjected that the conflict between principles (1) and (2) andWA2 can be explaine d away if we see the relationship between the con ceptsof wrongness and censure as less simple than the one w e have suggested.Instead of saying that wrongness is a necessary and sufficient condition forthe approp riateness of censure, it might be urged, we need a conne ction thatallows for exceptions. Why not say that wrongness makes it prima facieappropriate to censure the agent?15This prima fac ie appropriateness can beoutweighed by such factors as the agent’s motivational state or very extremeconseq uences of, say, not punishing an innocent person. We recognize intu-itively that the approp riateness of punishing or blaming som eone for doingwrong is occasion ally outweighed by oth er considerations, e.g., if the agenthas suffered a great deal as a result of his action. So the suggestion is:

WA3: An action is wrong if and only if it i s prbra facie appropriate toblame its agent.

Presumably also, the fact that an agent has done no wrong is a primafaciereason not to punish the agent. Both kinds of reasons can be overridden,particularly in the sorts of bizarre cases that philosophers come up with.This would accou nt for our disinclination to say that Agne s did somethin gwrong, even if w e grant that it was appropriate to punish her.

Th is suggestion w ill not work, however. The utilitarian does not think it

is prima fac ie appropriate to blame the agent of every wrong action, orprima fac ie appropriate not to blame someone who has don e no wrong. Thisis because the soZe determinant of the appropriateness of blame or punishmentis how much utility will be produced by doing so. Imagine someone (say,Agnes) who ha s done no wrong. Suppose that punishing her will producevery slightly more utility than not doing so. The utilitarian will judge thatpunishing her is better than not. If her innocence did crea te a presumptionagainst punishing her, then that presumption shou ld be enough to outweighthe very sligh t gain in utility. But this i s not how the utilitarian sees things.

We subm it that there can be no conceptual c onnection, for the utilitarian,between w rongness and punishability or blameworthiness. In the next sec-tion, we argue that this is not a strike against utilitarianism.

6. Rightness and Goodness as Guides to Action

We raised the question of whether there was a connection betweenwrongness and censure because this seemed to b e the best candidate forexplaining the distinction between w rongness and badness. This conceptual



120 HOWARD-SNYDER AND N O R C R O S S

resource is not available to the utilitarian. And there see ms to be n o otherway to draw the distinction. In that case, utili tarianism should not be seen

as giving an accou nt of r ight action, or of which actions ough t to be per:

formed, but only as giving an account of what is good and what is betterthan what. The fundamental moral fact about an action is how good i t isrelative to other available alternatives. Once a range of options has been

evaluated in terms of goodness, all the morally relevant fac ts about thoseoptions have been discovered. There is no further fact of the form ‘x is

right’, or ‘x s to-be-done’.This is not to say that it is a bad thing for people to use the word ‘right’,

‘wrong’ or ‘ought’, in their moral decision-making, and even to set upsystems of punishment and blame which assume that there is a clear andsignificant line between right and wrong. It may well be that societies that

believe in such a line are happier than societies that don’t. It might still beuseful to employ the notions of rightness and wrong ness for the purposes ofeveryday decision-making. If it is practically desirable that peop le shou ld thinkthat r ightness is an all-or-nothing property, our proposed treatm ent of utilitari-

anism suggests an approach to the question of what function to employ tom ove f rom the good to the right. In different societies the resu lts of emplo yingdifferent functions may well be different. These different results will them-selves be comparable in terms of g oodness. And so different functions canbe assessed as better or worse depending on the results of employing them.

Opponents may grant that utilitarianism is unable to provide an accountof wrong ness and that it should not be seen as giving an account of r ight andwrong action. They will undoubtedly go on to claim that this is a strikeagainst that theory.

To meet this challenge, we need first to understand what motivates it.

Why think i t is a strike against an ethical theory that it fails to give an

account of wrongness? H ere’s what people have told us in conversations on

the topic: “A moral theory is no good unless it guides our action. And if a

theory doe s not te l l u s what we ought to d o, or what it is wrong to do , it does

not g uide o ur action. By your own adm ission, the theory you h ave describeddoes not tell us what w e ought to do. So it is an inadequate morality.”

This arg umen t has three premises:

1.

2.

If a theory doesn’t guide our action, it is no good.

If a theory doesn’t tell us what we ought to do , it doesn’t guide ouraction.

3. Utilitarianism, as we have described it, does not tell us what weought to do.

To assess this argument we need to disambiguate its first premise. The

expression ‘guide our action’ can mean several things. If i t means ‘tell us




‘wrong ’ and its cognate s in the above sentence with other mora l term s suchas ‘an action wh ich produces less than the best possible conse quenc es’ orsimp ly ‘bad’ and th e principle remains true. If the agent cares abou t doin gthe best he ca n, then he w ill be motivated to d o so, feel guilt if he doesn’t,

and so on. It is true that few of us care about doing the best we can. But then,

man y of us d o not care about doing what we ou ght either.18Whe ther internalism is correct or not, i t looks a s if p remise ( 2 ) in the

abo ve argument i s false. Abolishing the no tion of ‘ought’ will not seriouslyunderm ine the action-guiding nature of morality. The fact that on e action isbetter than ano ther gives us a moral reason to prefer the first to the sec ond .

Morality thus guides action in a scalar fashion. This should come as no

surprise. Other action-guiding reasons also come in degrees. Prudentialreaso ns certainly see m to function in this way. My judgem ent that pizza is

bette r for m e than cauliflower will guide my action differently depen dingon how much better I judge pizza to be than cauliflower. Whether moral

fac ts are reasons f or all who recognize them (the debate ove r internalism)is an issue beyon d the scope of this paper, but whether they a re or not, th esignificance each of us gives to such moral reasons relative to other reaso ns,such as prudential and aesthetic reasons, is not something which can be

settle d by a moral theory.

There are two other reasons we have encountered for requiring con-sequentialism to provide an account of the right. The first might be ex-

pressed like this: “You say that consequentialism is not a theory of the right.Well, what is it a theory of, then? It is surely not a theory of the good. A

particular species of consequentialism, such a s utili tarianism, is a theory ofthe good, but there are no restrictions on the kind of good that a con -

sequentia lism may be a theory of. We are left with nothing that i s distinctivea b ou t c o n ~ e q u e n t i a l i s m . ” ~ ~

Thi s is not correct. We can still claim this distinctive fea ture for c on-

sequentialism: it includes the view that the goo dness of an action depe ndson th e goo dness of its consequences. Of the acts available to the ag ent, thebes t action will be the one that produces the best con sequen ces, the next best

will b e the on e that produces the next best consequen ces, and so on. We can

als o claim that the better the action, the stronger the moral reason t o performit. This is not to conce de the point to our oppo nents. The fact that there is a

mo ral reason to perform some action, even that there is more moral reason

to perform it than any other action, doesn’t mean that one ou ght to performit. (Most of us would acknowledge that one has more mo ral reason to

beh ave in a sup ererogato ry fashion than simply to do one’s duty.) T his

distinguishes consequentialism from deontology, which allo ws that on emay have a stro nge r moral reason to perform an action which prod uces

worse consequences. For example, if faced with a choice between killingon e and letting five die, the deontologist may ac know ledge that five d eath s

ar e better than one, but insist that the better behavior is to allow the f ive to




die. Ac cord ing to that view, morality provides stronger reasons for allowin gfive deaths than for killing one.2oOne advantage of the suggestion we offerhere over, say, the view that i t is of the essen ce of consequentialism to insistthat the agent ought always to do whatever will produce the best conse-quences , is that it allows satisficing consequentialists and scalar con-sequentialists t o count as consequentialists .

We have also encountered the following reason for requiring utilitarian-ism to provide a n account of the right as well a s the good: Th e utilitarianwill have to provide a function from the good to the right in order tocompare her theory with various deontological alternatives21. Our chiefmethod fo r compa ring moral theories, according to this suggestion, consistsin comparing the ir judgem ents about which acts are right or wrong. I t is truethat contemporary discussions of the relative merits of utilitarianism anddeontology hav e often focused on particular examples, asking of the differ-ent theories what options are right or wrong. However, to assume that amoral theory m ust provide an account of the right in order to be subjectedto critical scrutiny begs the question against our proposed treatment of

utilitarianism. That utili tarians have felt the need to provide accounts ofrightness is testimony to the pervasion of deontological approaches to eth-ics. Part of what makes utilitarianism such a radical alternative to deontol-ogy, in our view, is its claim that r ight and wrong are not fundamentalethical concepts.

7. Conclusion

In this paper, we h ave argued that consequentialism is best conceived asa theory of the good, and not as a theory of the right. We have shown, firstof all, that if consequentialism does include an account of rightness andwrongness, then it should treat them a s matters of degree. Having shownthis, we arg ue that consequentialism should not include an account of right-ness and wrongness. The only possible ways of doing so are by linkingwrongness to badness or to punishability, and these moves are unavailableto the consequentialist . In addition, we have argued that the fact that con-sequentialism i s not an account of the right is not a strike against that theory,since it doesn’t detract from its action-guiding capacity, nor does it make it

vaccuous. A further advantage of consequentialism’s rejection of the right isthat it provide s a solution t o the problem of supererogation. No longer are allacts which fail to produce the best consequences classified as wrong.22, 3

ENDNOTES

‘See for example, Joel Feinberg, “Supererogation and Rules,” Ethics 71 (1961):

2Michael Slote, Cordirtion-scrzseMorality arid Corzseqireririalisrtr (Boston: outledgeand Kegan Paul, 1985) chapter 3, discusses this suggestion.

276-88.




31t might be objected that maximizing utilitarianism does in fact give a scalaraccount of wrongness, if not of rightness. Some actions are closer to being rightthan are others, and so are less wrong. However, the claim that an action is closerto th e best action than is another is quite consistent with the claim that it is no lesswrong than the latter.

4Th is involves a backtracking counterfactual.

5Alan Donagan, The Theory of Moraliry, (Chicago: Chicago University Press,1977), p. 42.

6Donagan, pp. 42-3. For a useful discussion of this passage and the distinctionbetw een doing and allowing contained therein, see Jonathan B ennett, “Negation andAbsten tion: Two Theories of Allowing,” Erhics, October 1993.

’For example, this analysis seems to suggest that human agency issomehow outside

nature, that human agents have the power to break the laws of nature.*Apologies to Charles Dickens.

9If you are uncomfortable with the fact that the consequences of Agent’s behaviorrun through the wills of other agents, consider th is alternative: Agent is out moun-tain-climbing and notices that the freedom fighter is directly below her. She imme-diately looks up to see a large rock about to hit her. She could move, but then thefreedom fighte r would be killed. She a l l ows herself to be hit , and killed, by the rock,thus saving the freedom fighter.

IOEthicists as diverse as J. S. Mill, in Utilifarianisnt, hapter 5 , paragraph 14, RobertAdams, in Chapter 5 of The Wilde Lectures on Religion and the Foundation of

Ethics (unpublished manuscript), and J. L. Mackie in “Moralityand the RetributiveEiiiotioiis, ” CrinrinalJristice Erhics (Winter/Spring, 1982), 3-10, endorse this view.

1lAlterna tively, we could understand it as meaning ‘permissible’. We shall focus onthe obligatory reading here, since it seems the most popular. Note that the chiefobjection to the obligatory reading also applies to the permissibility reading.

‘*At first sight, (WA2) appears to endorse maximization. That is, i t might look asthough it enjoins legislators, judges, police, and ordinary people in everyday life to

punish in a way that produces the best consequences. But it doesn’t. According to(WA2), to say that judges and others ought to punish in an optimific manner meansthat it is optimific for third parties to punish them if they failed to do so, and it maywell turn out that this is not the case.

13Henry Sidgwick, The Merhods of Ethics 7th ed. reissued (Chicago: University of

Chic ago Press, 1962), 428.

I4It might occur to the reader to wonder whether a satisficing version of (WA2)

would work better that the ‘optimific’ version. The principles we have expressedhere would produce conflicts with such a version also.

l5When w e say that someone has a prbra jac ie obligation to do x, we do not meanthat, at first sight, it appears that she should do x . We mean that there is a




presumption in favor of her doing x, which can be outweighed by other considera-tions.

IsSidgwick, p. 34.

17There can b e reason s that are not necessarily motivating, e.g. prudential reasons.You may have a prudential reason to act in a certain way, be aware of the reason,and yet be not in the least motivated so to act. We are not here thinking of cases inwhich other motivations-moral, aesthetic , self-indulgent and the like-simplyoverwhelm prudential motivations. In such cases you would still be motivated toact prudentially, but more motivated to act in other ways. If you simply didn’t careabout your own well-being , prudential reasons would not be in the least motivating.But someone who didn’t care about her own well-being could still have, and evenbe aware of , prudential reasons. Similarly, if you are asked what is the sum of fiveand seven, yo u have a reason to reply ‘twelve’, but you may be not in the least

motivated to do so, for you may not care about arithmetic truth, or any other truth.There may be reasons other than moral reasons that are necessarily motivating. Forexample, the belief that a particular action is the best way to satisfy one of yourdesires may p rovide a necessarily motiva ting reason to perform that action. Themotivation may be outweighed by other motivations.

%late, op. cir., points this out.

19We have heard this objection from Daniel Howard-Snyder and Shelly Kagan.

2 q h e full story about what distinguishes consequentialism from deontology willhave to be more complicated than this. It will have to incorporate t he claim that th econsequentialist ranking of states of affairs is not agent-centered. See SamuelScheffler, The Rejecrioiz of Coizse(liieiirialisirl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) fora discussion of this notion.

2lTh is was suggested by an anonymous referee.

22We conducted the argument largely in terms of utilitarianism, but i t seems to us

that everything we have said in this paper about utilitarianism can be said aboutother forms of consequentialism.

23We are indebted to Jonathan Bennett, Daniel Howard-Snyder, John O’Leary-Hawthorne, and Michael Slote for helpful comments. We take ther term “scalar”from Slote, op. cir., who discusse s scala r morality in Chapter 5 .

snyder norcross_a consequential case

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