To say that anything less than the optimal solution (whatever that is) is immoral or unjust leads us down the path of absurdity.
Don’t say that then. Expected utility isn’t about partitioning possible actions into discrete sets of “allowed” vs “forbidden”, it’s about quantifying how much better one possible action is than another. The fact that there might be some even better action that was excluded from your choices (whether you didn’t think of it, or akrasia, or for any other reason), doesn’t change the preference ordering among the actions you did choose from.
So consequentialism doesn’t say whether it is moral or immoral to kill the 1 to save the 100 or to allow the 1 to live & the 100 to die? It seems like we haven’t gotten very far with consequentialism. I already knew that either 1 would die or 100 would die. What has consequentialism added to the discussion?
consequentialism doesn’t say whether it is moral or immoral to kill the 1 to save the 100 or to allow the 1 to live & the 100 to die?
Consequentialism says that the way to evaluate whether to kill the one is to make your best estimate at whether the world would be better with them killed or still alive. If you think that the deterrent effect is significant enough and there won’t be any fallout from your secretly killing an innocent (though secrets have a way of getting out) then you may think the world is better with the one killed.
This is not the same as “do whatever you want”. For starters it is in opposition to your “I don’t think inaction is moral or immoral, it is just neutral”. To a Consequentialist the action/inaction distinction isn’t useful.
Note that this doesn’t tell you how to decide which world is better. There are Consequentialist moral theories, mostly the many varieties of Utilitarianism, that do this if that’s what you’re looking for.
Don’t say that then. Expected utility isn’t about partitioning possible actions into discrete sets of “allowed” vs “forbidden”, it’s about quantifying how much better one possible action is than another. The fact that there might be some even better action that was excluded from your choices (whether you didn’t think of it, or akrasia, or for any other reason), doesn’t change the preference ordering among the actions you did choose from.
So consequentialism doesn’t say whether it is moral or immoral to kill the 1 to save the 100 or to allow the 1 to live & the 100 to die? It seems like we haven’t gotten very far with consequentialism. I already knew that either 1 would die or 100 would die. What has consequentialism added to the discussion?
Consequentialism says that the way to evaluate whether to kill the one is to make your best estimate at whether the world would be better with them killed or still alive. If you think that the deterrent effect is significant enough and there won’t be any fallout from your secretly killing an innocent (though secrets have a way of getting out) then you may think the world is better with the one killed.
This is not the same as “do whatever you want”. For starters it is in opposition to your “I don’t think inaction is moral or immoral, it is just neutral”. To a Consequentialist the action/inaction distinction isn’t useful.
Note that this doesn’t tell you how to decide which world is better. There are Consequentialist moral theories, mostly the many varieties of Utilitarianism, that do this if that’s what you’re looking for.