The Schalter

Written by: Stephen Gray

Throughout the modern era a debate has rumbled on, a debate in which both sides are so sharply divided and so inherently contrary that a conclusion is not only unlikely, it is almost certainly impossible. The subject is morality, the problem is how to decide what is moral.

The issue lies between the two main schools of moral philosophy: deontology and consequentialism. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but neither, crucially, can be shown to be wrong. And because both lie on opposite, but seemingly plausible, sides of the same coin, a tendency exists to employ whichever better suits a proposed course of action to give it the stamp of moral approval with little prospect of reproach. The casual observer, to whom morality seems a fairly well-formed entity, might well be shocked to discover this ability to flip right and wrong on their heads as fits the moraliser’s needs.

Setting out a comprehensive working model of either system has been the aim of many philosophers interested in morality. However close many of them have come, it can be said with some degree of certainty that no one has really succeeded. Conceivably, no one ever will.

So what do these two terms, these two moral options, mean? The foreboding names and lofty prose associated with both belie an easily graspable difference. The most well-known form of deontology is that of Immanuel Kant, an 18th century German philosopher, though he never used the term himself. The basic concept is that the morality of actions is determined by the nature of the action itself: all actions are either good, bad or neutral, whenever they are done. Perhaps the best way to understand the deontological viewpoint is to look at the flipside, consequentialism. Consequentialism holds that the morality of an action is determined by its consequences, by what results from it. An action is never intrinsically good, bad or neutral, but is deemed to be one of these in each particular situation based on the result performing that action has.

Take, for example, killing another human being. For basic deontology, murder is always morally wrong. The aspect of Kantian reasoning we’ll focus on runs like this: Boil the action down to its bare essentials, in this case taking another person’s life. Then, ask yourself what would happen if everyone in the world performed this action. If you reach a contradiction, or a situation that would bring about the end of humanity (a “contradiction in a system of nature” as Kant puts it), the action cannot be morally good. In the same way, making a cup of tea, helping an old lady across the road or rescuing a kitten are all morally acceptable actions, since we can very easily imagine a world where everyone does these things.

For the consequentialist, things are very different. The question is simply, in each individual case of killing, would the consequences improve the world? Now, what is an ‘improvement’, and what are identifiable consequences, are questions with books devoted to them. We’ll take the most common consequentialist view, that an improvement means increased levels of happiness in society, and that consequences are anything you can trace back to the action. So the kind of killing we’re most exposed to in modern society doesn’t, on the whole, seem to be morally acceptable. But imagine this, Bernard Williams’ jollily-named Jim in the Jungle thought experiment. Jim is travelling through the jungle and, in a clearing, comes across a general organising a firing squad. Twenty villagers are lined up, ready to be shot. The general, after some conversation, offers Jim a pistol and tells him if he shoots dead one of the villagers, the other 19 will be saved. If he refuses, the firing squad will shoot them all. For the consequentialist, the answer is obvious. Jim should kill one and save the others, society will be much happier with only one death than twenty. But remember the deontologists. For them, killing is always wrong, and Jim should refuse the offer and let the firing squad kill the villagers (assume these are his only two options). It’s an extreme example, but it should demonstrate just how different deontology and consequentialism are. If Jim shoots, the consequentialist has to admit he did the right thing, but the deontologist has to condemn his action.

The problem persists because deontology and consequentialism aren’t in themselves right or wrong. While most people have a leaning towards one or the other in a given situation, hopping between the two runs the risk of collapsing morality into a meaningless series of ponderings which have lost their clout. You could go with your gut instincts and use the tools left behind by centuries of dead philosophers to justify your inclinations. But deontology and consequentialism are antithetical to each other; they were thought up as mutually exclusive ways of determining morality. Using deontology for one thing and consequentialism for another ruins both and leaves us with nothing more than our basic urges. Maybe that’s no bad thing, and we’ll come to that later. In the meantime, most people are not aware of the distinction, and are as convinced by deontological arguments as consequentialist ones. I don’t suggest we pick sides, however, but I do suggest that we aren’t aware just how often we are exposed to half-baked moralising that flits between the two schools and relies on us not realising that this makes all reasoned morality useless.

In an issue of Glamour magazine eighteen years ago, PETA’s Director of Research and Rescue, the irreproachably-named Mary Beth Sweetland famously stated she used insulin developed through animal testing to treat her diabetes, justifying this on the grounds that she needed her life, “to fight for the rights of animals.” Well, fair enough, that makes sense to the consequentialist mind. Although some animals will have suffered to create this insulin, if Sweetland’s efforts within PETA bring us to a situation where we no longer need animal testing, you can say, on balance, that she’s behaved in a morally decent way and those animal lives were justifiably sacrificed. But we hit a problem. PETA is not a consequentialist organisation. PETA does not object to biomedical testing against animals on the basis that it won’t bring about a happier society (putting the arguments about the effectiveness of animal testing aside). It objects to it on the grounds that animal testing is intrinsically and irrefutably wrong. The insistence that animals are not ours to use for experiments for our benefit throws consequentialism out. Yet there we have Sweetland invoking it to justify her life-saving insulin. PETA, like anyone else, shouldn’t be able to have it both ways; to say that animal testing is deontologically wrong, but that their directors may use it, through consequentialism, in order to get that message across.

Over 72 hours during the summer of 1945, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The number of civilians and soldiers killed on the mainland as a direct result is thought to be in the region of 200,000. The deontologist in us objects, since killing is always intrinsically wrong. The consequentialist faces a problem: six days later Japan surrendered to the Allies and brought about an end to the Second World War. If no bombs had been dropped and the fighting had ended with more than 200,000 lives lost as a result, the consequentialist would be forced to admit that the bombings were moral, that nearly a quarter of a million, mostly civilian, lives needed to be lost in order to ensure a better future for those who survived across the world. That this would be almost impossible to predict is the problem for consequentialism here. Leo Szilard, who had worked with Albert Einstein on the beginning of the atom bomb, asked how we would characterise the action if it were Germany who had dropped the bombs on America, arguing that the act of dropping the bomb was, in itself, wrong. Does it make a difference to us that it was Allied forces who caused so much destruction, hoping to end the War, or would we have the same reaction if it had been the Nazis, hoping to overcome the Allies? As a consequentialist you would, evidence permitting, decide that the bombing was morally acceptable, as it brought about a better situation when it was ended, but also believe that a Nazi bombing was morally unacceptable, as a victory for the Nazis would have led us into a worse global society. As a deontologist you must hold that bombing, bringing about death as it did, would be equally wrong whoever had ordered it.

There are more everyday occurrences that do not rely on the mission statements of action groups or political decisions. Take, for example, something as mundane as the modern issue of file sharing on the internet. In this process a copy is made of an original piece of, let’s say, music, recorded by an artist which would normally be offered for sale. A digital version is held by the file sharer and made available to copy by people who may then listen to it without paying the artist. Deontology tells us this must be wrong. If we imagine a world where no one pays to acquire the music, most artists will no longer be able to make music, and no sharer will be able to get hold of said music in order to make it available to copy. Therefore, sharing mp3s must be morally wrong. But this is only half the story. The consequentialist may rely on two claims. Firstly, if he or she never intended to buy the artist’s music, the world would be no worse off as a result of copying the file, since the artist is not being deprived of anything. Secondly, it may well be the case that by seeking out new music on peer-to-peer platforms and sampling a range of new musicians, the file-copier discovers an artist and later goes on to purchase something they have recorded. Without copying the file, the artist would, arguably, never have had the benefit of the file copier’s custom. So it follows that file-sharing, by bringing about no detriment, and arguably some improvement, can be justified by consequentialism. By deontology however, it’s strictly forbidden.

Whether we fall on the deontology or consequentialism side of the moral fence is down to each of us, and we can be certain that there is no right answer. What is certain is that situations exist in abundance in which actions can be deemed moral, or decried as immoral, depending on which method we use. Is Mary Beth Sweetland’s insulin use immoral? Was Hiroshima the right thing to do? Is file-sharing always unacceptable? We will probably never be able to answer these questions definitively using the philosophical methods outlined here. Perhaps gut instinct is a valuable way to reach an answer to a moral conundrum, but if all these years of academic rigour have taught us anything, it is that we should treat with extreme caution anyone who utilises a mixture of deontology and consequentialism to try to convince us they’ve done the right thing.

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