To paraphrase Weinberg: With or without consequentialism, good people can support good things and bad people can support evil things; but for good people to support evil things—that takes consequentialism.
Obviously this is a very blunt and stylized idea, but I do think that consequentialism is a particularly effective subversion of people who otherwise would have been guided in good directions by their moral instincts.
If you looked at non-consequentialist ideologies that was contemporaneous with Bentham, so many of them advocated for policy positions that we now consider evil.
Nor are non-ideological people immune. Plenty of “ordinary men” do evil things when people around them do.
I reject the paraphrased claim in at least a couple ways:
One, deontological or virtue ethics induce people to make bad choices when it comes to trolley type problems, compared to consequentialists who make the better choice(s).
Two, it begs the question by presupposing evil people instead of fallible humans. I expect this is downstream of broader mistake v conflict theory stuff, and don’t expect us to resolve ethics in this comment section, but seems worth calling out foundational disagreements as being sufficient to explain differing conclusions.
I think there’s two things going on in different people.
The “I’m altruistic, and altruistic people should have more power” thing feels very much like the kind of generic self-justification thing (“I’m $INGROUP so therefore I’m good, and good people should have more power”) that will make anyone feel their power-grab is justified. Many secular Westerners have been taught that “I’m of the True Religion” or “I’m of the Best Nationality” aren’t acceptable justifications for claiming your own superiority over others, but “I’m altruistic” sounds non-ingroupy so it bypasses that immune response.
Knowing about consequentialism can help further rationalize that, but without the self-serving instinct one wouldn’t be motivated to generate the “this is why I should have more power” story and accompanying rationalization in the first place.
But then, if someone is mostly altruistic and someone else has already generated an elaborate “this is why we should grab power” rationalization, the altruistic person may not be able to notice the flaws in the logic, and their consequentialism will then drive them to adopt that reasoning.
So you get two kinds of people: ones whose moral instincts would have been overpowered by their self-serving ones anyway, and ones whose moral instincts would have held firm if not for the story that the former group sold them on.
To paraphrase Weinberg: With or without consequentialism, good people can support good things and bad people can support evil things; but for good people to support evil things—that takes consequentialism.
Obviously this is a very blunt and stylized idea, but I do think that consequentialism is a particularly effective subversion of people who otherwise would have been guided in good directions by their moral instincts.
If you looked at non-consequentialist ideologies that was contemporaneous with Bentham, so many of them advocated for policy positions that we now consider evil.
Nor are non-ideological people immune. Plenty of “ordinary men” do evil things when people around them do.
Thomas Carlyle coined the term “dismal science” to argue in favor of slavery, against people like Mill and other economics-minded utilitarians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science
I reject the paraphrased claim in at least a couple ways:
One, deontological or virtue ethics induce people to make bad choices when it comes to trolley type problems, compared to consequentialists who make the better choice(s).
Two, it begs the question by presupposing evil people instead of fallible humans. I expect this is downstream of broader mistake v conflict theory stuff, and don’t expect us to resolve ethics in this comment section, but seems worth calling out foundational disagreements as being sufficient to explain differing conclusions.
I think there’s two things going on in different people.
The “I’m altruistic, and altruistic people should have more power” thing feels very much like the kind of generic self-justification thing (“I’m $INGROUP so therefore I’m good, and good people should have more power”) that will make anyone feel their power-grab is justified. Many secular Westerners have been taught that “I’m of the True Religion” or “I’m of the Best Nationality” aren’t acceptable justifications for claiming your own superiority over others, but “I’m altruistic” sounds non-ingroupy so it bypasses that immune response.
Knowing about consequentialism can help further rationalize that, but without the self-serving instinct one wouldn’t be motivated to generate the “this is why I should have more power” story and accompanying rationalization in the first place.
But then, if someone is mostly altruistic and someone else has already generated an elaborate “this is why we should grab power” rationalization, the altruistic person may not be able to notice the flaws in the logic, and their consequentialism will then drive them to adopt that reasoning.
So you get two kinds of people: ones whose moral instincts would have been overpowered by their self-serving ones anyway, and ones whose moral instincts would have held firm if not for the story that the former group sold them on.