Consequentialism Discredited

Consequentialism Discredited
by Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone Institute

Over five years since the dark nightmare of lockdowns and mandates began, we are still asking the most fundamental questions.

How did all of this happen? How do we prevent it from happening again?

Of course, we’ve gained much clarity in the intervening years. For example, we now know that what happened wasn’t really a public health response at all, but rather that our military and intelligence agencies were using public health as a sock puppet. As Debbie Lerman describes in The Deep State Goes Viral:

I discovered that the US Covid pandemic response was not a public health response run by the HHS, CDC or any other public health body. Instead, it was a biodefense/counter-terrorism response, run by the Pentagon, National Security Council, and Department of Homeland Security.

In short, the deep state, having been alarmed that a virus that they might have created had leaked out of a lab which they were funding, responded as if we were under a biowarfare attack and implemented plans which included the deployment of a never-tested mRNA platform that had long been their hoped-for response in such a scenario.

From my very first op-ed opposing lockdowns in April of 2020, I observed that a very base form of consequentialist reason was at work in the argument for lockdowns. I later expanded upon these thoughts in Brownstone Journal. At that point, however, I was under the impression that what we were facing was merely unhinged public health “experts.” The revelations that Lerman and others have uncovered reveal a far darker consequentialism than that of Cuomo’s “If it saves just one life.”

My mind turns to the dark and dystopian video game Portal, which I played many years ago, whose plot centers on a malevolent AI that seeks to perform ”science” by experimenting on unwilling human test subjects whose survival is of no concern. The lyrics of the ending song of this game could be easily adapted to fit what our government did to us in the name of national defense:

This was a triumph
I’m making a note here, “Huge success”
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction
Aperture Science
We do what we must because we can
For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead
But there’s no sense crying over every mistake
You just keep on trying ’til you run out of cake
And the science gets done, and you make a neat gun
For the people who are still alive

It would be tempting to write off our malefactors as mustache-twirling villains with no concern for morality at all. Instead, I’d like to suggest that reality is far darker. These people were following the natural results of their flawed moral frameworks that focus only on their hoped-for scientific outcomes. 

In their minds, biowarfare is a foregone future outcome, and risky experiments, even on the entire population, are justified regardless of the short-term cost because of the potential good outcomes in the future. These people are bad, not because they lack a moral framework, but rather because they operate from a moral framework which is itself bad.

This distinction is lost on many of our allies against lockdowns and mandates. This is because they operate from a completely different and incompatible moral framework, based largely on rules and duty rather than outcomes. For example, the obvious violation of principles like “informed consent” or “bodily autonomy” makes it quite clear to many that what happened shouldn’t have happened. Those who hold firmly to such principles have a hard time imagining the inner monologue of the person who rejects absolute moral rules in favor of the argument that the “ends justify the means.”

What is really at play here is a long-running philosophical debate between the competing moral philosophies of deontological ethics and consequentialist ethics. It would be helpful then to review how modern thought got to this debate, and to acknowledge that the answers we need are found precisely in what modernity left behind from ancient and medieval thought.

The Nominalism of William of Ockham (1287-1349)

Despite the phrase “Occam’s razor” being his greatest claim to popular fame, what Ockham should be known for is his radical move of rejecting scholastic realism in favor of nominalism. Rooted in the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, the realist believes that essences or forms exist independently of the human mind or of individual instances. 

For example, there is a “treeness” that exists independent of any specific tree. This “treeness” allows us to recognize any tree as a tree. The nominalist rejects this, saying that we humans give the name tree from our own created mental construct. The radical changes made to the definition of the word “vaccine” in recent years is an excellent example of how prominent nominalism is in our contemporary discourse.

With regards to moral philosophy, the nominalist asserts that there is no essence of goodness by which an act is either good or bad. Instead, the Christian nominalist roots all goodness or badness in the will of God in his role as the lawgiver. Something is a sin because God said so, not because of anything intrinsic to the action.

To use the analogy of your car’s owner’s manual, there are two possible ways of interpreting its existence and content. You can see it as reflective of the wisdom of the creators of your car about what must be done for proper operation, or you can view it as a series of commands from the manufacturer’s attorneys about things which must be done for them to honor their warranty. With regards to your car, both ways of looking at things have truth to them. 

But with regard to God’s Law (and the Natural Moral Law, which is reason’s participation in God’s Law), the view of the Creator as an arbitrary giver of commands is a major departure from Thomas Aquinas’ beautiful exposition of virtue and law being interconnected in service of human flourishing. Nominalism rejects the image of a Creator who explains what is good for us and instead substitutes a Creator who gives commands and expects them to be obeyed. 

Under Ockham’s nominalist influence, Catholic moral thought became detached from the study of the virtues and drifted in a decidedly legalistic direction, a turn that would set the stage for Martin Luther’s rebellion. 

Moving on to the modern era, the denial of realism and essence would set the stage for David Hume’s (1711-1776) statement that one cannot derive an ought from an is. Without reference to an essence of “human nature” and its ends (teleology), the means of knowing God’s Law through our experience of reality is completely cut off. All that remains is human reason on its own.

Deontology, Categorical Imperatives, and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

For a more in-depth summary of Kant, I recommend Peter Kreeft’s treatment of him as one of the modern thinkers who served as “pillars of unbelief.” For our purposes, he represents the best attempt in modernity to save the concept of binding moral rules after having completely rejected metaphysics and the knowledge of God through his creation.

In contrast to metaphysical “pure reason,” he argues that “practical reason” allows us to recognize that there is a categorical imperative that binds all rational creatures unconditionally. Ironically, however, he offers several formulations of this imperative. Two of the more commonly cited formulations are:

• “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
• “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

The advantage of his moral framework is that it becomes easy to see why lying, cheating, stealing, and murder are always forbidden as a matter of duty. The problems with his framework begin to show when, in contrast to these “perfect duties,” he tries to smuggle in things like love, kindness, and charity as “imperfect duties.”

 In short, you have a duty to give to the poor some of the time, but not all of the time. (One can imagine the perfect Kantian being added to the parable of the Good Samaritan, convinced that he had already fulfilled his imperfect duty earlier that day.)

Simple rules also leave plenty of room for self-deception. As an example, see how so-called libertarians morphed the so-called “non-aggression principle” into a justification for locking people in their homes and forcing them to be injected with gene therapy.

Finally, and most troublingly, any weighing of the consequences of our actions finds no place in Kant’s moral analysis. He even approvingly quotes the Latin saying “Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus” (Let justice be done, and the world perish).

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and Consequentialism

In reality, Machiavelli is probably the originator of the system of consequentialism, but given that his name has become a pejorative, it is better to credit the most reasonable formulation of “The ends justify the means” as the source of its continued influence in contemporary thought. We therefore turn to the thought of John Stuart Mill.

Mill’s moral framework is initially very simple: an action is right if it creates the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people. To his credit, he recognizes the definitional problem of happiness and allows for a distinction between higher pleasures and lower pleasures, so as not to suggest completely base hedonism. He even allows for general rules which tend to create the best outcome over time, such as not lying.

Anyone who finds Kant’s framework as troubling with its lack of concern for good outcomes can see the appeal of Mill’s framework.

The obvious problem with such a moral system is its radical naivete. We humans aren’t very good calculators of the consequences of our actions, and we very frequently choose things that we believe will make ourselves and others happy, only to see them fail. The joke about economists, who always argue about maximizing utility, comes to mind: if we lay every economist in the world end-to-end they still won’t reach a conclusion.

Far too many people are utopians until it comes time to actually build the utopia.

Finally, any discussion about what is the best form of happiness is going to uncomfortably land us back to Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia or Aquinas’ discussion of the beatitudes.

Ockham proves to be an awful wrong turn in history, and our abandoning of virtue ethics proves to be a tragedy. Our humanity has an essence, and the life of virtue is part of that essence. Let us briefly consider the four cardinal virtues and how their absence was a cause of the terrible years which we have lived through.

Return to Virtue

Since we don’t teach these in our schools very often anymore, it is helpful to consult the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for concise definitions of virtues in general and the cardinal virtues in particular:

377. What is a virtue?

A virtue is an habitual and firm disposition to do the good. “The goal of a virtuous life is to become like God” (Saint Gregory of Nyssa). There are human virtues and theological virtues.

378. What are the human virtues?

The human virtues are habitual and stable perfections of the intellect and will that govern our actions, order our passions, and guide our conduct according to reason and faith. They are acquired and strengthened by the repetition of morally good acts and they are purified and elevated by divine grace.

379. What are the principal human virtues?

The principal human virtues are called the cardinal virtues, under which all the other virtues are grouped and which are the hinges of a virtuous life. The cardinal virtues are: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

380. What is prudence?

Prudence disposes reason to discern in every circumstance our true good and to choose the right means for achieving it. Prudence guides the other virtues by pointing out their rule and measure.

381. What is justice?

Justice consists in the firm and constant will to give to others their due. Justice toward God is called “the virtue of religion.”

382. What is fortitude?

Fortitude assures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It reaches even to the ability of possibly sacrificing one’s own life for a just cause.

383. What is temperance?

Temperance moderates the attraction of pleasures, assures the mastery of the will over instincts, and provides balance in the use of created goods.

So, what happened in 2020? Malefactors in government, business, and education who were intemperate in their pursuit of wealth, power, and prestige were willing to destroy everything so that they could benefit from what might have been the largest transfer of wealth in history.  

Those who knew better lacked fortitude and did what they knew was wrong out of cowardice. Workers were unjustly deprived of the ability to earn food for their families, children were unjustly deprived of childhood, and even God was unjustly robbed of the worship due Him. Finally, and most damningly, prudence was destroyed as we embarked on strategies that our 2019 selves knew wouldn’t work.

Also, because virtues (and the vices contrary to them) are habits, nearly all of us have become worse versions of ourselves. Any time we lacked the fortitude to stand up, we ended up not merely having less fortitude, but also less temperance, less justice, and less prudence. The common story of how many people turned to alcohol and drugs to numb the pain of knowing that there was no virtue or happiness in any of this is an example of this phenomenon. We have suffered moral injury.

Even those who did act with fortitude have shown evidence of moral injury, as I’ve seen many allies from yesterday use their courage in 2020 to fail at humility (and therefore temperance) through their pride, ready to substitute their false version of justice for real justice, and eschewing all prudence as they simply want to be told how right they were with no thought at all for actually working for the changes necessary to prevent the same or something even worse from happening in the future.

Conclusion

Much more could be written about the ancient and medieval moral theory of virtue ethics, but I leave the reader with the following simple thoughts. There is no reconciliation possible between the two competing modes of moral thinking that arose out of modernity; law, duty, intention, and consequences all really do matter, and the deontologist and consequentialist are always going to be talking past each other.

Instead, consider an alternative narrative. Everything that happened ultimately happened because we weren’t virtuous enough to prevent it from happening, because it happened most of us are now less virtuous, and the only way to prevent it from happening again is for us to inculcate the virtues in ourselves and in others.

Mere rationality as envisioned by modernity isn’t enough.

Consequentialism Discredited
by Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society