Is ethics non‑consequentialist or consequentialist? In other words, are actions like stealing and killing and adultery wrong no matter if, hypothetically, they do unimaginable good that would not have happened without them and the agent knows that? Or are they in fact good then, meaning it all depends on the results?
For this discussion, we will proceed as if it is either one or the other. Let others debate if it is more mixed than that.
So is ethical behaviour inherently down to the results? Or is an action inherently ethical or unethical?
Let us look at the second question. If it were inherent then there is a complication. Not everybody thinks that it’s obvious that stealing or adultery are candidates for being inherently wrong, for they cannot clearly understand how or why. That person will need the bad results as a sign that the act must be bad in the first place, perhaps intrinsically bad. From this we see that even if you oppose “the end justifies the means,” you are forced into it. Do not believe religions and groups and individuals that say they don't put the end before the means. They are looking at the consequences and pretending that they don't need to see them to judge the act that led to them to be just bad in itself.
One reason acts being inherently wrong is so confusing is how it is strange to ban adultery always and yet allow killing under certain conditions. This assumes that what you do with life is more important than being alive. It is dehumanising to be considered valuable for what you do. Reason is clear — this morality is nonsense. The reason we are confused is because we are suffering religious and/or societal pressure to affirm supposedly unbreakable moral codes.
The trolley problem may help us with the question of non‑consequentialist or consequentialist.
There is a form of the trolley problem that may be presented as follows.
The five most diligent charity workers in the world need to live and save thousands of lives. Nobody else will do what they do. They are going to be incapacitated and die horribly without organs. For medical reasons, John's organs alone would suit them and keep them alive. Should society permit and endorse taking his organs to save them and have him strapped up to a machine to keep him alive comfortably to the end of his days? And he permits it. The argument that people will hear about this and worry that trust will fail and thus eventually more harm than good will come is thin. Nobody can measure that. It is not strong enough to count. Anyway, to move on the discussion we are assuming no harm comes as a result.
NON‑CONSEQUENTIALIST: Religious moralists and many others would say it is wrong to take John's organs. It is treating him as a means, a thing, to help others. They reject the argument that there is no choice. There is deliberate evil in you.
CONSEQUENTIALIST: The alternative view is that his organs should be taken as it is maximising life and quality of life. This one says there is no choice. There is no deliberate evil in you. If there is no choice then you are more evil or corrupt than you would be if you shot innocent people as a result of being hypnotised.
Notice that if the non is wrong, it murders your reputation and your value. If there were really no choice between killing evil Mario and good Maria you would have to pick evil John, for you may as well and it's up to you who dies. So in that sense it calls for your killing.
To have a morality at all, one has to treat a person in some way as a means, not as an end. But “the ends do not justify the means” is not a morality but a counterfeit. So is morality real? It is more like an attempt to make morality and never hitting the target right. Nobody says why you should make it a policy to be in one camp rather than the other. Why not just toss a coin? Using real suffering to get somebody onto a side is not a good or truly caring look.
The non tends to ban abortion. It rejects “my body my choice” for there is another body involved. Yet it says John's bodily autonomy is so sacred he has no right to give his body to save others. If bodily autonomy comes before life then abortion is not immoral.
The typical trolley argument says several people are on the track. The trolley will kill them but not if you can push somebody onto the track to derail it. That person will die. So do you cause the death of one or many?
Many use the trolley argument to state that one life is immeasurable so that one life means as much as two, a million, a trillion. That is the thinking underpinning the notion that you must not send death to or kill one to save the many. Though we feel it is right we cannot justify it. Part of us feels we are killing many for the sake of one. We feel we are using a moral principle to devalue and harm.
Let us talk about how it affects our psychology. The value of human persons is lost when the number is very big. It can be easier to worry more about one person you know dying than five billion of them. Something about size and numbers makes you objectify and devalue. If morality and psychology are that disconnected then how can we say that nothing matters but love and justice and compassion — i.e., morality at the end of the day?
The religious “wisdom” is that the reason the trolley dilemma is a dilemma is that you have two valid moral principles, and to follow one is to break the other. So it denies that the dilemma means that morality is faulty or incorrect. It says rather that the reason there is a problem is that morality is indeed valid and really true.
But morality is supposed to be guidance and here it gives you nothing. And this being an extremely urgent situation!
Evil happens either way. This shows that morality, rather than something attractive and to be venerated as if it were a God or part of God, is rather a burden.
If you are in fact dying from a terminal illness that will take you in about an hour, why can't you ask somebody to push YOU on the track to save 50 people? Why can't you jump or self‑murder? If assisted dying is a human right, sending a person on their way because they are suffering, then the answer is yes. The pusher knows you can't be thinking clearly — who would be when they are dying and when they are in an emergency situation — they know your consent is not real. Despite the fact that you are treated like an object to save others, and in a way you are not (for you are dying and you have the right to die), and that there is no real consent, it is obvious that saving the 50 was the right thing. It could be 1 or 5. It does not matter.
We conclude that in principle and in practice the immoral person and the moral one are not that different after all.
APPENDIX — AN AUGUSTINIAN TRAIN PROBLEM
The Christian Church says God only makes good. He does not make evil, for there is nothing there and evil is just a parasite on good and is really just a negative. So evil is our problem, not his. It also says that a being that was pure evil would not exist, for evil is nothing and is destruction. C. S. Lewis said Satan had to have some good traits to be alive, such as a survival instinct and determination and cleverness. He uses the good in his nature to do harm.
That doctrine, however, suggests that a person who is evil is less alive and less real than one who does not.
If a train is going to hit an evil person or a good person, you would have to dehumanise the evil one and let the train hit him.
APPENDIX — A SCI‑FI TRAIN PROBLEM
What if you could programme computers so that they eventually become self‑aware persons? There are five computers to be destroyed on the track when the train comes. You can stop this from happening by throwing one computer on to the track — then what do you do? What if you could throw a human being? What if there are five computers on one track and you can divert the train to hit five people on another? Or vice versa?