Clues for Consequentialists

Abstract

In an influential paper, James Lenman argues that consequentialism can provide no basis for ethical guidance, because we are irredeemably ignorant of most of the consequences of our actions. If our ignorance of distant consequences is great, he says, we can have little reason to recommend one action over another on consequentialist grounds. In this article, I show that for reasons to do with statistical theory, the cluelessness objection is too pessimistic. We have good reason to believe that certain patterns of action will tend to have better consequences, and we have good reason to recommend acting in accordance with strategies based on those advantageous patterns. I close by saying something about the strategies that this argument should lead us to favour.In his 2000 paper entitled 'Consequentialism and Cluelessness', James Lenman argues that consequentialism can provide no basis for ethical guidance.1 Our actions have profoundly far-reaching consequences, only a small portion of which are within view when we make our decisions. There is every reason to think that overall consequences will largely be determined by unforeseeable ones, and there is no reason to believe one thing or another about how these unforeseeable consequences will turn out. In our epistemically impoverished states, maximizing subjective expected utility is hardly more promising as a strategy for bringing about better consequences overall than, say, choosing acts randomly or choosing the acts that look worst. 2For reasons related to statistical theory, Lenman's account is too pessimistic. We have good reason to think that murder tends to have terrible consequences. We also have grounds for making many other consequentialist judgements. Of course, we will often make mistakes, including believing that we have a more accurate view of

The Causal Mechanism Theory of Legal Causation

“…One proposed solution to this problem is that morality is concerned with the effects that our conduct would tend to have. If so, then as Joanna Burch‐Brown (2014, 105–14) has argued, if we want practical guidance about what morality asks us to do, “we should reason about what sorts of causal mechanisms might lead to hidden systematic effects, and about how likely it is that such causal mechanisms exist.” As she points out, “it is conceivable that murders tend systematically to have positive results hundreds of years hence, but it is difficult to imagine what mechanism could cause this pattern.” Burch‐Brown suggests that the conduct we should deter is conduct that is dangerous to some degree, which is to say, tending to cause harm through some causal mechanism or other. This article has argued that an efficient tort regime must impose deterrent cost when the defendant engages in dangerous conduct that actually leads to injury through the causal mechanism that accounts for why the conduct is dangerous.…”

The epistemic challenge to longtermism

“…Closely related concerns about the predictability of long-run effects are frequently raised in discussions of consequentialist ethics-see for instance the recent literature on 'cluelessness' (e.g. Lenman (2000), Burch-Brown (2014), Greaves (2016)). Going back further, there is this passage from Moore's Principia: '[I]t is quite certain that our causal knowledge is utterly insufficient to tell us what different effects will probably result from two different actions, except within a comparatively short space of time; we can certainly only pretend to calculate the effects of actions within what may be called an 'immediate' future.…”