Imagine that a serial killer has taken shelter among a group of children in a school. He poses no threat to the children themselves, but if he is allowed to escape, he is likely to kill again, perhaps on a massive scale. The school is surrounded by the security forces, but they can’t get the target in their sights. A junior officer asks the commander what they should do. “Blow up the school,” comes the immediate response. The junior officer hesitates. What about the children? The commander points out that the death of the children won’t be their fault — but the serial killer’s. It will also be an unavoidable effect of a virtuous and necessary act. If the killer isn’t stopped, he may well go on to murder a lot more children. The school is blown up and the killer with it.
Why is the commander wrong? Partly because, morally speaking, he is a consequentialist. He believes that the way to judge human actions is to calculate their probable effects, then assess whether they are largely positive or negative. What counts as positive or negative is clearly a problem. Different people are likely to return different, sometimes conflicting, answers to this question. Perhaps the most familiar kind of consequentialism is utilitarianism, which weighs the sum-total of happiness which will result from your action against the sum-total of unhappiness it may cause. (You will, of course, need to define what counts as happiness, since what it meant for Plato isn’t what it meant for Marx or Jacob Rees-Mogg). What matters isn’t so much your intention, or the nature of the action itself, as the impact it will have on the world, which is to say whether it will increase overall human happiness or not. Actions are as actions do.
But how do we know what impact it will have? Any ethics based on consequences is bound to be retrospective. Only when you look back can you evaluate the fruits of your actions, since only then will they have come into existence. Trying to calculate them in advance is a tricky business. It would take a sizable team of investigators to trace the results of even the most trivial act. Perhaps I see an advertisement from the top of a bus, the colours of which remind me of another advertisement some years ago, which first turned me on to smoking. I take up smoking again — then die of lung cancer a few years later. As a result, one of my children drops out of college, becomes delinquent and hits you over the head with a whisky bottle one dark night in Hackney. After the assault, you develop blurred vision and drive your car into a butcher’s shop in Greenwich, gravely injuring an elderly customer. Their partner sinks into depression, and jumps off a bridge.
It’s impossible, then, to say how many people are involved in a single action — and I haven’t even mentioned the agency which designed the advertisement, the workers who built the bus, or those who extracted the rubber which went into its tyres. Who owns an action is a question which much concerned the ancient Greeks. For them, humans move precariously, in a tangled net of cause and effect which can never be grasped as a whole. Only God, or an omniscient narrator in a novel, can do that. What we do can spin out of our control, breed multiple effects, merge with the acts of others and confront us as an alien force. In this sense, we are all, like Oedipus, “guilty innocents”, caught up in potentially lethal situations which we never got to choose and might not even be aware of. The Christian doctrine of original sin, for which we’re all implicated in a condition for which none of us is actually guilty, is an equivalent of this tragic way of seeing.
There’s also the question of what doesn’t happen as a result of what you do, or don’t do. Maybe one of the schoolchildren you blow up would have grown up to discover a cure for cancer. We’re speaking here of what one might call the subjunctive realm — the spectral world of what might have come about had you acted differently. Here, however, one needs to tread carefully. It sounds reasonable to say, “If I hadn’t been delayed in getting to the airport, I would have been on the aircraft that crashed into the Atlantic with no survivors”. But it could be argued that if you’d been on time for the flight, history would have been different, and this alternative history might not have included the air crash. Perhaps you can’t alter one bit of history without changing the lot.
So judging solely from consequences has its problems. And there’s another reason, too, why it isn’t the soundest form of ethics. It’s strongly counterintuitive to claim that we think things are good or bad only according to the difference they make in the world. It’s not only that a bad action can have positive effects, or vice versa. It’s that we sometimes feel like saying that a way of acting is good in itself, regardless of the results it might produce. It’s good that someone is willing to go to their death to defend the cause of the innocent, even if the whole project backfires and leaves the innocent worse off than they were before. Similarly, it’s good that you don’t slaughter thousands of Gazan civilians, even if it means that you don’t get your hands on the militants of Hamas.
“It’s good that you don’t slaughter thousands of Gazan civilians, even if it means that you don’t get your hands on the militants of Hamas.”
In Robert Bolt’s play A Man For All Seasons, the 16th century martyr Thomas More refuses to take an oath denying the authority of the Pope even though this means his beheading. He takes his stand, regardless of the consequences, because to do otherwise would be to betray his own identity. The real-life Thomas More was more of a consequentialist: he refused to deny the sovereignty of the Pope because he feared burning in hell if he did.
Actions which contain their value wholly in themselves are rather like works of art. Like art, they resist being treated in a merely functional or utilitarian way. We don’t ask what the “Mona Lisa” is for. Even actions of this kind, however, may have consequences which they don’t intend, or which are surreptitiously intended. Take, for instance, Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove, in which Kate Croy and Merton Densher are a young couple in love but without the means to marry. They befriend Milly Theale, a fabulously rich young American women, who Kate discovers to be terminally ill. Kate persuades Densher to pay court to Milly, who has fallen in love with him, so that he and Milly may marry and Densher will inherit her fortune when she dies. Milly learns of the plot against her, but bequeaths her wealth to Densher on her deathbed anyway. Like a martyr, she uses death creatively, placing it at someone else’s service. The effect of this astonishing act of forgiveness and generosity causes Densher to fall passionately in love with Milly’s memory.
Remorseful for his and Kate’s plotting, he refuses to accept the heiress’s bequest. He is willing to marry Kate — but without Milly’s fortune. If Kate chooses not to marry him, he will make the legacy over to her. For her part, Kate insists that she will marry Densher only if he accepts Milly’s money, thus testifying that he has put his devotion to the dead woman behind him. Unable to resolve this deadlock, the couple part forever and the novel closes.
Milly’s dying act is meant to transcend the tangled web of cause and effect in its supreme disregard for consequence and calculation. It belongs to the category of action which James often calls “beautiful”, meaning those ways of behaving which have nothing in them for oneself and are performed purely for their own sake. There is a recklessness about living in this self-squandering way, a kind of extravagant pointlessness, but it is more than outweighed by its sheer grace and radiance. Milly’s is an aristocratic ethic, so to speak, as opposed to the mean-minded bookkeeping mentality of Kate and Densher.
Milly’s final act seems like a riposte to consequentialism. It will certainly have no consequences for her, since she will very soon be dead. Yet her action has momentous effects for Kate and Densher. The question is whether Milly herself has foreseen those effects. Is she a saint or a schemer? Has she acted to demonstrate her moral fineness, win Densher’s heart forever or break up his relationship with Kate? Is her splendid disinterestedness a devious act of aggression? As usual with James, the answer is unknowable. The novel carefully allows us no access to Milly’s motives. It’s hard to say whether her graciousness is a form of egoism or altruism, a humbling of the self or a final assertion of it.
The commander who orders the school to be blown up, then, seems to believe that, morally speaking, the end justifies the means. This can certainly be the case. Hardly anyone thinks that it’s wrong to lie to the Gestapo about the whereabouts of your Jewish grandmother. The greatest of all theologians, Thomas Aquinas, wouldn’t have agreed. But though he thought lying was absolutely wrong, he didn’t think that “absolute” meant “very wicked”. He just meant it as a synonym for “should never be done”. Almost everyone, however, maintains that if you see a 10-year-old kid sneaking out of your front door with a five pound note of yours, it’s not permissible to shoot him in the back. (A lot more Americans are likely to do this than the British are — not because the British are morally superior to Americans, but because they don’t have guns.)
So there can be no general rule here. Some people probably believe that it doesn’t matter if you kill a million Palestinians, so long as you eliminate Hamas in the process. It’s worth asking how this makes such people different from Hamas. There are also those of us who hold that massacring the innocent — non-combatants — is never morally permissible whatever gains it might bring you, and that to see such mass slaughter as mere collateral damage is a moral obscenity. Dresden, Coventry and Hiroshima were cases of mass murder. If you’re allowed to do that, then you’re allowed to do more or less anything, and all talk of morality becomes superfluous.
