Comments Elsewhere

Joe Miller to Micha: “Why think that you need to have your consequentialist card revoked? There are good consequentialist reasons for thinking that there ought to be limits to the sorts of actions that are permitted in war. It just requires a move to indirect utilitarianism.”

Joe explains the line of argument further below: “I would argue further that, because exceptions are so rare and because the opportunities for mistakes are so great, that it’s also utility-maximizing to disallow making exceptions. That will mean giving up on some opportunities to maximize utility by breaking rules, but that loss is outweighed by eliminating all of the incorrect rule-violations.”

Well, this is one possible consequentialist ground for placing some means completely off-limits. I’m not sure it’s the most convincing one, though: at best it seems to make a case for a rule of extreme caution, not a rule of absolute prohibition; if it really makes sense to say that utility could ever outweigh the disutility of nuclear massacres, and all actions should be judged by the balance of utility over disutility that they cause, then all these constraints seem to suggest is that you should demand that people very carefully demonstrate the alleged benefits of the nuclear massacre before you let the bombs drop. But that hardly captures the intuition that a lot of people want to capture — that incinerating innocent people is categorically wrong, not just a policy that bears a very high burden of proof. Even if this objection is decisive, though, it doesn’t actually mean the end of the game for consequentialism; it just means the end of the game for utilitarianism. But not all consequentialists are utilitarians; and if you think (as G. E. Moore, for example, did) that consequences like cruelty, enmity, ugliness, etc. are great positive evils in themselves, without any reference to their effects on anyone’s utility or disutility, then you may have pretty strong grounds for condemning certain kinds of atrocities as evils in themselves (because they essentially involve some of these great evils) no matter what further effects they may have on things like pleasure-pain balances.