The Problem With Consequentialism

One may define morality as the parameters that people use for permissible social interaction. Some people have constructed moral theories that society could choose to use. In that sense philosophical moral theories are something like political theories for building an ideal state.

Utilitarianism was constructed by British empirical philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Consequentialism was a latter offshoot of utilitarianism. Each of those two moral theories have fundamental flaws. The obvious problem is that people disagree about what the good is.

An example of utilitarian and consequentialism applied in Nazi Germany. Adolph Hitler and Eichman believed that the greatest good was in eliminating Jews, Homosexuals, gypsies and whoever in order to construct an idea state with perfect morality. The greatest good for the greatest number of Germans was regarded as having a pure Aryan nation.

The problem is obvious. When one uses a moral system and the consequences of acts to decide if a choice was good or bad morally speaking, the system becomes sort of meaningless. Consider a logical formula in the abstract that has undefined variables that remain undefined. Yet when the variables or literals are given concrete expressions (such as paragraphs about an act or even) the philosopher in evaluating the morality of the acts decides the concrete data can be used to evaluate the moral system itself. The moral system is forever self-defining. It is a tautology itself.

One could of course form a Venn Diagram kind of logical test with various acts pre-determined to be good or bad and then placed in the right circles, then determine if an act as a consequence has a majority of those good or bad marks, yet of course that is just a kind of utilitarianism with the marks arbitrarily defined by the ruler of that logical universe.

One solid objection to consequentialism is that it arms political lunatics to commit any number or sort of crime with the reasoning that the consequence sought is the necessary justification. In other words it is the familiar end justifies the means way of thing.