John Dewey and Consequentialism-Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

John Dewey wrote that “To name causes for a state of affairs is not to excuse it. Things are justified or condemned by their consequences, not by their antecedents.”

Dewey’s concept of justification by consequents exemplifies a philosophical point of view on ethics named consequentialism. It may perhaps work best within a philosophy of utilitarianism, for if one is going to make a sort of ethical philosophical equivalent of a particular system of non-Riemannian geometry, of which there are a potential infinite number, and each requires that it merely be self consistent for validity as well as cohering to a given description of what a geometry system is, then the circumstances subject to ethical decisions should be regarded a priori as of equal unit value. That is, if pre-existing moral criteria make particular resolutions more valuable than others, or if select circumstances are deemed implicitly more valuable than others, it becomes absurd to attempt to justify a moral action by its consequence, as the moral action’s value is in maintaining the status quo of the antecedent. In which case the value of the consequent is determined by the antecedent regardless of the success or failure of the decision in producing a consequent valued highest by the antecedent state.

Consequentialism as a method of evaluating antecedent moral actions by their ability to produce a good result would value most highly victory over failure in a winning is everything approach to moral decisions. A moral decision becomes equivalent to a football game plan and particular play choices determined as good or bad or even morally correct upon the basis of their contribution to winning.

For some, morality is more than that; doing the right thing is good for-itself. An aretaic ethics motivated Socrates to have the opinion that the only thing to fear in life is doing the morally wrong things. That isn’t a philosophy of winning is everything and any means is justified by a good end or consequent. The pursuit of the morally good for Socrates was more like the saying of Jesus that those who save their lives will lose them (within a secular context of choosing to follow the ways of the world and corrupt secular politics instead of Jesus Christ as the personification of the Truth of God and the ultimate good in-itself).

There are ethical systems of rule based utilitarianism instead of Dewey’s act-based utilitarianism where antecedent ethical choices bring one to have prefabbed moral criteria for making moral decisions in emergent situations. The greatest good for the greatest number might be determined a priori in some circumstances such that the consequences of a moral rule enacted invariably produce good results. The rule itself might produce a statistically prevalent product of good justifying its use even though some failures results.

Act based utilitarianism determining moral values by the effect of the action or not action’s consequences does seem to require an arbitrary break-up of the continuum of past, present and future of circumstances in which the moral act is made in order to set moral values in the future. One might say that an act is never moral, and only becomes so a fortiori by the amount of good or bad to human beings, animals or the world retroactively applied the past… It seems a linguistic transformation of moral philosophy and moral philosophy away from the present to past individuals judged today upon the basis of their actions in the past. Morality becomes separated from individuals and becomes sociologist-historian-philosopher’s device for painting history’s players as moral or immoral souls.

It isn’t necessary to take up an extreme act or rule base utilitarianism or exclusive select antecedent or consequents circumstances as logical premises upon which to determine the moral good or evil of a particular moral act. One may use antecedent circumstance and consequent effects together in a synthetic effort to attempt to affect a circumstance intentionally. The moral act is determined by prevailing, anteceding moral value selection, through intention to act to preserve those moral value criteria and in the consequences of intervention. Obviously unintended consequences may arise reducing the utility of making a moral intervention, yet that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Moral awareness of right and wrong in a tranching (comparative, variegated values and circumstances) of sometimes conflicting value prioritization is a phenomenon in-itself. Anthropogenic global atmospheric heating is said by a few scientists to have the potential of ending life on Earth, or reducing the population by 95% in a couple of centuries. Moral decisions made upon belief or disbelief in global heating caused by industry or in mass extinction of biological species through human causation can have a vast range of responses and adaptations of public policy. Consequentialism would confer a moral judgment upon today’s global heating deniers on the basis of the future well being of civilization on Earth. If humanity mostly perishes because of climate change and crashed food and energy supply then fossil fuel producers and global heating deniers will be judged post hoc as immoral. Yet in making moral decisions contingent upon consequents exclusively, tremendous moral risk is taken implicitly today when no moral decision need be or can be made. Failure to make a moral decision today based on best available knowledge is effectively a moral judgment for-itself; a bad one permitting needless risk today.

Determining moral values exclusively through consequentialism is a license for moral unaccountability of deleterious externalities of industrial culture and resource use. Consequentialism seemingly can only be applied without harm if the risks of failing to act immediately are acceptable. The philosopher William James called that sort of situation a forced option; failing to act presently determines a future consequences.

Generally for James the consequence would be apparent at the time of the moral choice, yet it needn’t be, and that is an essential reason why consequentialism might be considered morally acceptable only if the possible failure to make a right, interventionist moral choice today has proportionately unacceptable future consequences as is the case in failure to defend against global warming, resource and biodiversity depletion etc.