Ethics & Moral Philosophy

The consequentialist tradition, most powerfully developed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), holds that the moral worth of an action is determined entirely by its consequences. The right action is the one that produces the best outcomes — for Bentham and Mill, the greatest happiness (or well-being, or preference-satisfaction) for the greatest number.

This has the immediate appeal of common sense: of course outcomes matter. If you can save five lives by pressing a button, press the button. But consequentialism generates notorious counterexamples. If a doctor could save five patients by killing one healthy patient and harvesting her organs, should she? The utilitarian arithmetic says yes — five lives outweigh one. Almost everyone's moral intuition says no. The philosopher needs to explain why.

Mill tried to refine Bentham's crude calculus by distinguishing higher and lower pleasures — intellectual and moral satisfactions outweigh physical ones, so we cannot simply add up hedons. More recent consequentialists have developed sophisticated accounts of well-being, preference, and impartial value. But the organ-harvest problem — and its many variants — continues to press the theory, suggesting that consequences alone cannot explain what is morally relevant about actions.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) offered the most powerful alternative to consequentialism: a morality based entirely on duty and rational principle, independent of consequences. His central claim is that morality is grounded in reason, and that rational beings — human beings — have a special dignity that places them outside the realm of mere means and ends.

The practical expression of this is his famous Categorical Imperative, which he formulated in several equivalent ways. The most famous: "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." In other words: ask whether you could coherently will that everyone, in your situation, act as you propose to act. If lying to escape an inconvenient promise is wrong, it is because a world in which everyone lied to escape inconvenient promises would undermine the institution of promising entirely — a contradiction in the will.

A second formulation gets at Kant's deepest conviction: "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means." This is the formula of humanity. The organ-harvest case is wrong not because of bad consequences but because it uses a person — instrumentalizes her — as a mere means to others' ends. People are not instruments.

In the 20th century, John Rawls (1921–2002) developed an influential account of justice that combined elements of deontology with a contractualist framework. His A Theory of Justice (1971) remains the most important work of political philosophy published since WWII.

Rawls' central device is the "original position" behind a "veil of ignorance." Imagine you are about to be born into a society, but you don't yet know what position you'll occupy: rich or poor, talented or ordinary, member of the majority or a minority. Behind this veil, what principles of justice would you choose? Rawls argues you would choose, first, equal basic liberties for everyone, and second, arrangements of social and economic inequalities that benefit the worst-off members of society — since you might be one of them.

This is not just a thought experiment. It is a device for identifying principles that are genuinely impartial — chosen without self-interest because no one knows their self-interest yet. It produces a kind of contractualist morality: an action or arrangement is just if all rational persons could agree to it behind the veil. The veil of ignorance is one of the most elegant and productive philosophical inventions of the 20th century.