A Problem For Consequentialism

One of the most popular ethical theories in academic philosophy today falls under the broad category of consequentialism. Generally speaking, consequentialism states that the rightness or wrongness of an action depends entirely on the consequences of said action.1 Therefore, there is no such thing as an individual act that is always, universally wrong, because it may be the case that the act would offer a good consequence in particular concrete circumstances. It is, in fact, not the act itself that is wrong at all; it is, instead, a mis-calculation of the pleasure, or happiness, or utility, or value, or misery that resulted from your action.

Historically, Catholic philosophy has rejected consequentialist ethics for a variety of reasons, not least because it involves a rejection of inherently immoral acts. But this is not a full-scale rebuttal of consequentialism. Today, I just wanted to share one objection2 I recently read from Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand.

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Hildebrand begins by differentiating between direct and indirect values. I have detailed one way that Hildebrand distinguishes between values here, but Hildebrand has a different kind of distinction in mind here. The distinction between direct and indirect values lies in why we value certain things.

Things that are directly valuable are valued because of what they are themselves, not just for what positive value they create. You might say that they are important in themselves. When we value them, we do not wait to see if they resolved all practical difficulties, produced maximal pleasure, or were preferred by the majority. We just value them because they are good, and deserve approbation. Here you could think of a morally good act that, while being the best available decision, still failed to achieve its end. Imagine, for example, a parent who runs into a burning building to save their child but ultimately dies in the process. Though he was not successful, the parent is still a martyr, and someone who is admirable.3 You should still want to be like that parent!

Indirect values have no such “inherent” value to them. Something that is indirectly valuable is valuable strictly or primarily insofar as it provides some sort of good that goes beyond what the thing itself is. Hildebrand describes these values as “borrowing” value from the good that the indirectly valuable thing produces. An exemplar case of this is medicine. There is nothing, or very little, that is inherently valuable in the chemicals that would have to come together to cure cancer. But insofar as they are able to offer a great good, namely saving the life and health of many persons, these chemicals would be immensely valuable indirectly. If the nature of cancer changed to become immune to those particular chemicals, they would lose much of what we had found valuable about them.

The point here is not that directly valuable things are actually good and indirectly valuable things do not matter. Rather, this analysis is concerned with what is valuable about these two instances. In one case, the very utility that the parent’s act is meant to have fails to obtain, but the value of act remains. The parent is still a hero. In the other, when the utility disappears, so does the value. The only value that the drugs have comes from what it aids and produces: health in persons.

In his work The Nature of Love, Hildebrand writes this:

This position overlooks moral value and disvalue entirely and sees all human action only as indirectly valuable or disvaluable, that is, it sees only the value or disvalue which action has as a means for the realization of a good. Utilitarianism reduces, as it were, the moral value of all human action to the indirect value which human action and behavior can possess to the extent that it is a cause of the realization of extra-moral goods. It is the same indirect value which even a morally bad action can have when we speak of it as a felix culpa (a fortunate fault), although we are clearly aware that the moral disvalue fo the action is not thereby taken away.4

So, Hildebrand’s concern about consequentialist ethics is this: consequentialism reduces all value to indirect value. Specifically, all acts are valuable only insofar as they produce a good outcome, and only in correlation to that production. Therefore, it requires us to say that, at least when it comes to moral values, there are no direct values at all, but just indirect ones.

This seems rather implausible for the reasons that I have listed above, and Hildebrand offers another example. Imagine two scenarios. In one, a father performs the action described above but succeeds, saving his one child from a burning building. In the other, someone accidentally walks in on a burglar who is about to murder and rob four children. For symmetry’s sake, we will say that the burglar was planning on throwing the the children into a burning building. But upon discovery, the burglar runs off without the accidental intruder doing or saying anything, and the children are saved.

Here is where Hildebrand takes issue: on a consequentialist assessment of the above situations, it is not clear why the father’s action would be morally better, more morally praiseworthy, than the accidental intruder’s. Both actions resulted in the improbable rescue of at least one child from a horrible death that was preceded by terrible anguish. In fact, in the accidental intruder’s case, more children were saved from their grisly fate. So it seems that the act of the accidental intruder was actually more morally good than the father’s. It was more morally good, one should even say more heroic.

But that is ridiculous! While the consequences of the act are probably greater in the second, anyone saying that stumbling across a murder and accidentally stopping it is the more morally praiseworthy act is missing something about the nature of human acts. Hildebrand’s point is simply that some acts have value of their own, just by the nature of the act itself. If we reduce the moral value of an act to its circumstances and consequences only, we miss something important about how these acts work.

I…think so? Much of this comes down to what you take the nature of moral philosophy to be. Classically, moral philosophy was taken to be a study of what kind of person you should strive to be. This has traditionally taken the form of the virtue tradition, by which moral philosophers sought to figure out what kinds of habits a person ought to cultivate.

Hildebrand’s point is that the moral person ought also to figure out how to properly respond to the things around him, and consequentialism treats many things that ought to be treated as valuable in themselves merely as means to some further end. I think this tension is clearest in the value of moral actions themselves. It is always open to the consequentialist to bite the bullet on this, but I think that would be quite surprising, for reasons I have already mentioned.

Finally: I have no doubt that the consequentialists of Substack will explain to me the issues with this argument. Please do! Hildebrand’s argument itself is only cursorily mentioned, so I would be surprised if it needed no development from here. Fire away (charitably, please).

I should also point out that Hildebrand is not an Aristotelian or Thomist. In fact, Hildebrand has similar concerns, though not in exactly the same form, about Thomistic ethics. I do not think his concerns land in quite the same way on Thomism, but my point is just that a Tu Quoque response on the assumption that Hildebrand is a Thomist or Aristotelian will not work.

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