Truth or consequences?

Consequentialism is a way to try to replace tradition all in one go, with “rational calculation.”

I had a neighbor who used his leaf blower, I imagine, more than any other human being in history. Knowing that those infernal devices are a source of tremendous noise and air pollution, and believing that he could easily have used a rake instead, I decided to shoot him. It seemed obvious to me that the overall consequences of discouraging the use of such contraptions would easily outweigh the value of his life… He was an old fellow, after all, and wasn’t even contributing to GDP!

The above is just a fantasy, of course, although I did occasionally consider shooting the leaf blower itself, especially when he was using it at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. But I share that fantasy as an example of consequentialist moral reasoning. FPR’s slogan is “place, limits, liberty.” Consequentialism runs roughshod over the first two, and can easily lead to the destruction of the third.

The breakdown of traditional European society, triggered largely by the print revolution (see Mary Harrington’s forthcoming book, The King and the Swarm, for more on this) prompted a rather desperate, four-century-long effort to reground morality on a “rational” basis. Bacon and Descartes kicked off that project, and it was picked up by any number of thinkers over the next four centuries. One of the less tasty fruits of that effort is consequentialism, and its subcategory, utilitarianism. (Consequentialism says we should judge actions solely by the consequences they produce, without specifying which aspect of those consequences we should be focused on. Utilitarianism says it is the utility, or pleasure, produced by actions that are the consequences that matter.)

By positing one universal solvent for moral dilemmas, consequentialism acts to erode the particularity of different places. All of a culture’s customs and mores must be evaluated based on their consequences, which for the consequentialist are easy to discern, almost by definition. If in a particular culture, for instance, everyone is required to take off their shoes before entering a home, this custom will be judged based upon some surface criterion, like “Is the time spent taking one’s shoes on and off worth the increased cleanliness inside the home?” Whatever answer one comes up with, it ignores the fact that there may be a deeper meaning attached to the practice: removing one’s outside shoes at the threshold of the home sets apart the world inside the home as a distinct realm from the world outside. But whatever the “consequences” of such a distinction may be, it is far too difficult for the consequentialist to pretend to calculate whether it is “worthwhile” to preserve. So such deeper meanings will simply be ignored, and the argument for and against the custom will turn on the utility of keeping the floor clean.

But even more dramatically, consequentialism entails a wholesale rejection of limits; in particular, our very limited knowledge of what “all” the consequences of some action will be. The repercussions of anything I choose to do can, over time, affect almost anyone on the globe, either negatively or positively.

For instance, I stopped at a local bookstore to work on this essay, and ordered a hot latte. While browsing the shelves, I found a book by two friends, which I did not know existed, and decided to buy it. Perhaps my purchase, by increasing the demand for coffee, will help prop up some cruel dictator in a coffee-growing country, or help fund a revolution leading to his overthrow. As I write this sentence, the extreme air conditioning in the bookstore is making me shiver: maybe my trembling hands will cause me to have an accident as I drive home later, and kill a man who is about to invent the cure for cancer . . .or kill a man who would become the 21st-century Adolf Hitler. It could be that, unbeknownst to me, one of my friends has a gambling problem, and the royalties from the book I bought will encourage him to gamble even more. Chaos theory famously points out that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil may help produce a tornado in Texas some time later. Obviously, every human action can have as great, or even greater, unforeseen consequences.

In contrast to consequentialism, respecting our inherited moral traditions is a way of acknowledging our own limits: they represent the accumulated wisdom of generations of our ancestors. It is very unlikely that my own limited mind can think up a superior moral code from scratch. Of course, those traditions may be in need of modification, but those modifications will always make use of other parts of the tradition in addressing the part that is in need of amendment. Consequentialism is a way to try to replace tradition all in one go, with “rational calculation.”

Given that no one can actually perform the sort of calculations that genuine consequentialism would require, what actually takes place when some action is justified based upon its supposed consequences? Australian philosopher John Finnis describes the usual procedure:

Now, individuals and societies do in fact solve these problems for themselves, and so make [consequentialism] seem workable. They focus on something which they have already set their hearts on [such as]… an end to the war, the detection of those heretics or criminals, re-election as president, an end to that young woman’s suffering… The good consequences of this, and the bad consequences of omitting or failing to get it, are dwelt upon… Thus, the calculus is forced through to provide a determinate solution [that will be] the quickest, cheapest way of getting what was first focused upon[, for example,] the nuclear or firestorm bombing of the enemy’s hostage civilians, the inquisitorial torture of suspects or informers, the fraudulent cover-up and destruction of legal process, the abortion of unborn and ‘exposure’ of newly born children… Of course, by focusing on some other alternatives, and on some other long-term or overall consequences of choosing the favorite alternative, and on the life possibilities of the proposed victims, and so on, one can in every case find reasons to condemn the favorite action on ‘consequentialist grounds’. But in truth, both sets of calculations in such cases are equally senseless. What generates the ‘conclusions’ is always something other than the calculus…” (Natural Law & Natural Rights, page 117)

In other words, consequentialism is a neat trick that allows you to cook up a justification for whatever it is you wanted to do anyway.

Finally, turning to the third member of our website’s triumvirate, consequentialism can also endanger liberty. There have been thinkers, such as Ludwig von Mises and Henry Hazlitt, who have used consequentialist reasoning to reach libertarian conclusions. However, since no one can really predict with confidence all the outcomes of any policy, much less prove them to everyone’s satisfaction, there are even more people who have used consequentialism as an argument for restricting liberty. For instance, it was an image of the horrific consequences that might result from allowing people to make their own health and safety decisions during COVID that were used to justify lockdowns. (And I’m not even making any claim about the wisdom of the lockdowns here, just noting that, whether wise or not, they most certainly restricted people’s liberty!)

None of this is to say that we should ignore the foreseeable results of our choices. If I am thinking of driving the family car down the highway at 120 miles per hour, the high chance of a fatal crash at such a speed should lead me to rule out that option. To ignore that danger would be a failure to exercise the virtue of prudence. The problem with consequentialism is not that it urges us to pay attention to consequences, but that it requires us to pay attention to nothing else.

Prudence should enter into our considerations only when choosing among actions that are otherwise licit. If I begin thinking about what the consequences would be of killing a relative so that I can inherit his money, I have had, as the English philosopher Bernard Williams put it, “one thought too many.” One can always imagine some scenario in which the money I inherit would be put to a much better use than how my relative presently uses it. And so, by inviting us to consider the “overall consequences,” it can create the illusion that killing him is a good idea. This is a trope in many detective shows, where some doctor or scientist, who is about to make a breakthrough medical discovery, kills the person who is going to report him for fraud because “their life was worth less than the many lives I’m going to save.” That person is rightly seen as a villain.

Oddly enough, many people, who would readily agree on the villainy of the detective show antagonist, throw that moral intuition out the window when it comes to the actions of their own government. So we can regularly find people online claiming that, if the U.S. has to wipe out the entire population of Iran in order to eliminate the threat of the Iranian government getting nuclear weapons, so be it.

I think there are two reasons this happens: first of all, many people understandably do not want to think badly of their own government. If they see that their government has acted based on this sort of consequentialist reasoning, it is more comfortable to accept it than not. Secondly, the governmental officials who have justified their actions based upon consequentialist arguments, or who hope to do so in the future, are anxious to “educate” the population to accept such reasoning.

Naturally, officials directing a nation’s war efforts, even in a fully just war, will often face difficult and tragic decisions. It may be impossible to strike at the enemy without a very high chance of injuring or killing non-combatants, perhaps very many non-combatants. And it won’t always be obvious just what exercising sufficient care for non-combatants will entail, or what military targets were truly vital to hit, despite probable civilian casualties, versus which ones actually could have been left alone without much risk. But as murky and fraught as such decisions are, those foggy areas are very benign weather compared to deliberately targeting civilians in order to bring one’s enemy to its knees.

As Finnis put it:

For every government that has the physical capacity to make its threats credible says this to its potential enemies: ’If you attack us and threaten to defeat us, we will kill all the hostages we hold; that is to say, we will incinerate or dismember as many of your old men and women and children, and poison as many of your mothers and their unborn offspring, as it takes to persuade you to desist; we do not regard as decisive the fact that they are themselves no threat to us; no do we propose to destroy them merely incidentally, as an unsought-after side-effect of efforts to stop your armed forces in their attack on us; no, we will destroy your noncombatants precisely because you value them, and in order to persuade you to desist.” (Natural Law & Natural Rights, page 224)

In short, we are not permitted to do evil merely because we contend, even if sincerely, that good may come of it.

* Gene Callahan has a PhD in political theory from Cardiff University. He is the author of Economics for Real People and Oakeshott on Rome and America, and has written shorter pieces for numerous academic and popular outlets.

Source: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/10/truth-or-consequences/