Why Consequentialism Does Not Work

Why bad moral theories always have evil, disgusting conclusions.

“Few beliefs have been more destructive of the respect for the rules of law and of morals than the idea that a rule is binding only if the beneficial effect of observing it in the particular instance can be recognized.”¹

There is some goodness and truth in the moral framework of consequentialism. The consequences of an action are important and should certainly play into your discernment of moral actions. However, to reduce the moral act to simply its effects has detrimental consequences. In this meager article, this will be shown with a specific lens on consequentialism concerning the action of torture. Many justify torture in a variety of ways - mostly to gain information. A spy or high ranking officer can be captured by the enemy, and tortured to gain information about an attack, weak points in their military, etc. It can easily be a matter of life and death if this could prevent a terrorist attack, for instance. If we had one of the conspirators of 9/11 the day before, the U.S. should’ve stopped it by any means necessary…right? This sounds very compelling, and many can sympathize with these situations, or parents can easily understand the actions of the character Keller Dover from the movie Prisoners.² [SPOILERS kinda]! In this story, a man’s daughter was kidnapped and he is confident that he knows the man who took them (and in the context of the story he does have very good reason to believe this). The suspect is released from police custody, then kidnapped by Keller, who is prepared to torture him until he tells them where his daughter is. This is indeed a heartbreaking story, and many would applaud this character for doing anything and everything to save his daughter. However, once it is held that the ends justify the means, a can of worms inevitably opens up.³ Consequentialism allows for actions such as torture, and this paper will show that it is never morally acceptable - leaving consequentialism unable to properly explain morality.⁴

Torture

There are various views surrounding torture. Many Americans have opposing views on torture depending on who is doing the torturing and who is being tortured.⁵ Among the views regarding torture:

“One is pragmatic, stating that torture can lead to mistreatment of or retaliation against ‘our’ soldiers when they are captured by ‘the enemy.’ The other is moral, stating that torture violates the constitution, human rights, humanitarian law, and ethical values and ideals. The pragmatic argument does not oppose torture because torture violates universal moral standards or the victims’ rights. Rather, it does so because any possible benefits of torture are not seen as outweighing its costs”⁶

This article will not treat any concept of “dirty hands” or entertain any thoughts of people in power being expected to do evil things for good results, even if they turn themselves in after the fact.⁷

Torture is “the infliction of intense pain to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.”⁸ There is much discussion on the definition of torture, since in many cases it is used too broadly or too narrowly. Some use it so broadly to include any concept of just use of force.⁹ Not all coercion is torture, and if all instances of discomfort are torture than torture itself is not seen as all that bad. For the purposes of this paper, this definition is sufficient because it encompasses more than just physical pain, although it may be better to include the desire for ascertainment of information as a reason since I don’t think it’s necessarily in the term coercion. Consequentialism similarly has a difficulty in providing a single, comprehensive definition, however all have the core feature of relying on the outcomes of actions.¹⁰ Although consequentialists would not dare to pose torture as a good thing, or something you can do always, they are ultimately unable to describe anything in those ways. Torture can just be a tool in achieving your desired and worthy end. “A poll found that in December 2014, Americans supported torture by a margin of almost 2 to 1…59% support vs. 31% opposition.”¹¹

The Sad Reality

An important point that many people don’t realize is that torture happens on a daily basis. Prisons are one example of an institution that typically involves a lot of torture, even today.

“From their inception, U.S. jails and prisons frequently tortured inmates. In the first few decades of the 19th century, prisons were supposed to be an improvement over previous forms of confinement. Prison reformers announced that they were instituting a humane alternative to the barbarism of earlier generations. However, prisons almost immediately began torturing inmates.”¹²

This ranged from excessive heat or cold, scalding showers, beatings, being forced to labor in terrible working conditions, or situations where the prisoners are kept in solitary confinement all night and had to work all day in silence (under pain of beatings).¹³ Many cases of torture either started out of a genuine desire for safety and conformity, or was merely a guise to mistreat people - as violence was their way of compelling obedience. Tasing, chemical agents, stripping, sexually humiliating people, etc. were generally meant to prevent them from rebelling against authority,¹⁴ especially at the times when the prisons were crowded and/or understaffed.¹⁵ The 13th amendment to the Constitution made an exception to slavery in the case of prisoners.¹⁶ For a long time after slavery was outlawed, there was a convict lease system, where mostly African Americans were arrested and sold to business owners, and apparently on quite minor offenses (if any).

“Perhaps we might think that progressive Americans gave up on such barbarity in the 20th century. Or, maybe we might be tempted to adopt the comfortable fantasy that only evil Southern sheriffs tortured people. However, jails and prisons all over the United States tortured inmates in the last century. Savage beatings, scalding, and forced injections of Thorazine occurred in Northern, Western and Midwestern jails and prisons…Most Americans will never confront the possibility that they will be tortured, but this is hardly true for many who are poor, mentally-ill or in some way marginalized from society.”¹⁷

This is part of the problem. No one sees or hears of what happens on a daily basis in our own country or hometowns. People are often outraged at cases of police brutality in traffic stops or attempted arrests, but are completely blind to the horrors of prison right now. Many either don’t know, or have the attitude that they deserve such treatment for the crimes they committed. Either way, torture is not something that can be done without violating someone’s human dignity.

The Evil Consequences of Consequentialism

One of the biggest problems of consequentialism comes out in situations like torture, or by extension, situations where you would be forced to do even worse things. In the case of torture, the enemy must be determined to be enough of a threat that it justifies torturing people. In other cases, this can get a lot worse - if any madman devised a crazy enough plan, consequentialists would be forced to act in any way since the ends would justify the means. Now, these are hypothetical situations, but they are closer to real cases than they appear at first glance, and they logically follow from the arguments of consequentialism.

Through the various scenarios, consequentialism has to either deny that there are inviolable human rights or that they can always be disregarded in pursuit of better outcomes or maximizing utility. This is another big problem for consequentialism since it has incorrect views on human dignity, the common good, and the relationship between the two. Consequentialists tend to write about how the ends can justify the means, but not necessarily that the ends always do. Some think that you can justify limited cases of torture without it being a slippery slope to cause more unwanted cases of torture.¹⁸

Consequentialism tends to be extremely subjective. It has much appeal in being an objective morality that is based on the outcomes of events. However, there are problems in conceptually determining the effects/effectiveness of an action as well as after the fact, you can come to find out the action did not produce the desired effect. This is evident in torture, since it is not as effective as one may think. Not only are countries aware of this, and further compartmentalize their sensitive information, but torture is just not very successful, since when in extreme pain, people will say anything and everything to make it stop. Consequentialists seem to be unsure about whether you know you are doing the right thing in the moment, or if you have to wait to see its lasting effects to determine if you did what was right or wrong. There is no confidence in your action because what if you torture someone and they don’t give you information? Then the end was not achieved, and all you did was violate another human person. There is, “the adage that harsh treatment of prisoners only produces bad intelligence, that a tortured prisoner will say anything to stop the pain.”¹⁹ It should not be expected that gunpoint confessions are not usable in court, but the information obtained from people who are being tortured for days in unthinkable ways are giving perfectly accurate information.

The Problem of Moral Certainty

To circle back to the problem of determined ends, this makes good actions unable to be known until after the fact. Even after the fact, further evidence could show the opposite of what the immediate outcome of your action was. This makes morality even more nebulous than a subjective morality based on pleasure and pain. This either makes morality something that is near meaningless since you’ll never know whether the ends justified the means, or it becomes not based on the outcomes themselves, but the outcomes you desired.²⁰ This makes morality actually lie in the intention of the person rather than in the consequences/outcomes/ends of an action. This option would make consequentialism so subjective that it would allow for anything. Every single person only acts for what they perceive is a good thing. The common goals of power, money, and pleasure are not going to ultimately fulfill people, however that doesn’t stop people from trying. Situations with masochists involve them wanting to be hurt or humiliated because they find pleasure in it. This does not mean that such disorder can be justified in that situation, it is just that someone is still acting for a good, even if it is not what is best for them.

Many things in our lives are also not quantifiable. One cannot answer in a number how much they love their mother/spouse/child. Love is nonexistent in a consequentialist worldview since one either has to weigh their personal needs as more important,²¹ or must maximize the overall good out of obligation. There are many kinds of consequentialism, some consider whether one should do what he believes has the best outcome for himself or for the external world.²² It does not claim that love does not exist, but how can there be self-sacrificial love when everything consists in a blind moral calculus?

There are plenty of situations where we cannot determine whether the ends justifies the means, even in a vacuum. In many situations where we “take the morality out of it,” one would be hard pressed to give consequentialist solutions. Think of how we are unable to predict weather with pinpoint precision. There’s such a large number of variables that it proves very difficult to predict what will happen based on the current information. Meteorologists can be generally and overall accurate, but there are plenty of situations we face daily where we cannot measure outcomes of current situations. For example, Josh attended a concert where the ticket cost him $50. He enjoyed the music, but did he enjoy it enough to be 5 hours of his hard work? Whether he does or does not, he either went into it without knowing whether the end result would be good enough to be worth his efforts, or was let down, meaning the end result did not justify the means of $50. To now introduce morality, he enjoyed the concert but snuck in and did not pay for a ticket. Does someone who couldn’t afford the concert but doesn’t prevent anyone else from enjoying it outweigh the slight profit for the band and venue? Or is there more to ethical actions than acting as though justice is measure on a scale?

Real Examples, Real Horror

There are countless examples to go through - from eugenics²³ to simple things like cheating in a board game. The importance is to notice the subjectivity present in this common example concerning the advancement in the science of medicine during the Holocaust.²⁴ Nazi scientists experimented on people without their informed consent and medicine benefitted from that. A consequentialist would either say the ends did justify the means or that there is somehow more to the ends than meets the eye. Meaning, ff there were experiments with uninformed consent today, then there would be a public distrust of medical professionals. No one would want to go to the doctor for fear of being subjected to a possibly dangerous experiment. So this is why, although it has a good immediate effect on medicine, it may have a worse later effect. Another famous example is how a doctor could steal and harvest the organs of a healthy person to save multiple people’s lives at the cost of the one. Although the immediate consequences justify the means, for some reason this concern for the deeper societal effects that somehow prevent this from being justified. However, maybe these people who are scared of being killed to save five other people should be more understanding, if consequentialism is the correct way to understand the world and the way we should act.

This is why consequentialism is so often in tandem with utilitarianism, since those who subscribe to these systems are focused on maximizing good things and minimizing bad things. This almost always tends to be in a very hedonistic way - maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for the most amount of people.²⁵ However, it seems hard to justify every action in this way either. Consequentialism seems to posit that there is some moral equation at work (how much pleasure in how many people is equivalent to how much pain is in another group of people), but it’s actually impossible to find solutions in real life situations. In situations such as deaths, it’s simple for the consequentialist to point out that the situation with less deaths is better, but when we think about everyday things like how much we eat or spend, it seems hard to quantify that against the poor and needy in the world and in our neighborhoods even.

Hypotheticals - A Consequentialists Worst Nightmare

The question of what maximizes pleasure poses questions that are impossible to answer without being arbitrary. The repugnant conclusion of Derek Parfit states: “For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living.”²⁶ This is in response to a number of utilitarian ideas, since some people have turned towards anti-natalism and other issues related to population ethics. It goes back to the lack of objectivity in consequentialism, since would you rather have 1 million people at “90% happiness,” or 2 million people at 89%? Would it be “better “"for the world to be filled with 10 people at 100% happiness, or 10 billion people who are happy enough to appreciate their lives? With the problem of quantifying happiness aside, how do you measure happiness to the number of people? Would it be moral for a society to have 1 million people at 100% happiness if it’s at the cost of 100,000 people at 5%?

If the ends do justify the means, then there doesn’t seem to be a problem with cheating in any situation. Whether it’s a game show, a sport, or school - if the results are what matter, then what is the problem with getting there by any means necessary? Aside from the the fact that torture is evil, the problem of consequentialism in torture is more about the application than the conclusions. A consequentialist could have the same conclusions about what someone should do in a situation as a Christian or a Nazi.²⁷ The problem obviously lies in the principles and not the outcome. The problem that has been shown is that there’s no way to justify almost anything in a consequentialist way, and at the same time it’s simple to justify anything.

To Where Do We Turn?

The philosophical solution to all of the problems in what is commonly referred to as natural law theory. Without requiring a second full length article, natural law theory is an ethical system that is based on a particular view of the human person where they, as rational animals, are fulfilled in being virtuous and acting in ways that are rightly ordered and achieve proper ends. This allows for a full and unwavering stance on the dignity of the human person that can never be overlooked or forfeited. Although one may have certain things taken from him, such as being put in prison to safeguard society, intrinsic evils such as torture would not be tolerated. Intrinsic evils are actions that are always and everywhere wrong, regardless of the person’s intention, the circumstances, or the consequences. In this framework, the ends don’t justify the means, but the ends are certainly still a factor. This is part of why natural law theory is appealing since it factors in everything about moral actions - not just the intention, not just the ends.

1. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 159.

2. Amazing movie (stop the Dano slander), but I would warn against watching it if you are not properly predisposed since it’s…intense.

3. No matter how many try to contain it or simply ignore it.

4. It is true that if consequentialism properly accounted for every moral action except for one, this would be a system we should push to the masses and just give that caveat. However, there are SO many things wrong with it.

5. Go figure

6. Bernhard Leidner, Peter Kardos, and Emanuele Castano, “The Effects of Moral and Pragmatic Arguments Against Torture on Demands for Judicial Reform.” Political Psychology 39, no. 1 (February 2018): 143.

7. These are interesting, though, and could be something to be explored further in the future.

8. “Torture Definition & Meaning,” at Merriam-Webster, at www.merriam-webster.com. (my fault if this isn’t your go to dictionary - I hate them all).

9. Darrell Cole, “Torture and Just War.” Journal of Religious Ethics 40, no. 1 (March 2012): 27.

10. Oscar, Horta, Gary David O’Brien, and Dayron Teran, “The Definition of Consequentialism: A Survey.” Utilitas: A Journal of Utilitarian Studies 34, no. 4 (December 2022): 368-369.

11. Leidner, et al., “The Effects of Moral and Pragmatic Arguments Against Torture on Demands for Judicial Reform.” 144.

12. Derek S. Jeffreys, “Torture as the Norm,” 11 March 2015, at Political Theology Network, at www.politicaltheology.com.

13. Jeffreys, “Torture as the Norm.”

14. Something a consequentialist could get behind.

15. I really want to talk about the personalistic norm right now but I will refrain momentarily.

16. This has not been changed and is still in the U.S. Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States…” See “13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865),” 10 May 2022, at National Archives, at www.archives.org.

17. Jeffreys, “Torture as the Norm.”

18. Mirko Bagaric, and Julie Clarke, Torture : When the Unthinkable Is Morally Permissible. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 42.

19. Douglas McCready, “When Is Torture Right?” Studies in Christian Ethics 20, no. 3 (December 2007): 384.

20. They don’t want to admit this though.

21. Barry Maguire “Love in the Time of Consequentialism.” Noûs 51, no. 4 (December 2017): 686.

22. Christopher Howard, “Consequentialists Must Kill.” Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy 131, no. 4 (July 2021): 729.

23. Ionel Narita, “Paradoxes of Consequentialism.” Journal for the Study of Religion & Ideologies 8, no. 23 (Sum 2009): 37.

24. Yes, it happened.

25. Sounds easy enough, right?

26. “The Repugnant Conclusion,” 16 January 2017, at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at www.plato.stanford.edu.

27. Many atheists will say the rules surrounding Christianity can produce better effects when compared to other nations.