SS+Consequentialism+bad+FL


 * Consequentialism causes paralysis – all actions risk catastrophe, thus no action is justified.**
 * Fried, prof. of law at Harvard, 1994** (Charles, “Absolutism and its Critics”, p. 170)

This line of analysis is enough to show that some quite plausible interpretations of absolute norms lead to impossibly stringent conclusions, lead in fact to total paralysis. But the case is in fact even worse. For it the absoluteness of the nor is interpreted to mean that the consequences – such as the death of an innocent person – is overwhelmingly bad, then not only are we forbidden to do anything, for anything carries with it a risk of death, we are indeed required to do nothing but to seek out ways to minimize the deaths of innocent persons. For if such a death is so bad that no good can outweigh it, we are surely not justified in pursuing some good, even if that good does not present this risk when we might instead be preventing this most undesirable of all consequences. So this interpretation is to actually a prescription for paralysis, it is more like an obsession. This norm, by virtue of this view of its absoluteness, takes over the whole of our moral life. Finally, since every action will endanger the life of some innocent, even action intended to rescue some other innocent, we cannot escape the further corollary of this interpretation that we must choose that course and only that course of action expected to produce the greatest net saving of life – including, if need be, the deliberate, cold-blooded killing of an innocent person. This situation is worse still, for this interpretation is not only obsessive, it also opens the possibility of insoluable contradictions within any system containing more than one absolute norm. The judgement that it is categorically wrong to lie would be interpreted in an analogous way to mean that a false belief is absolutely bad – that is, so bad that nothing can justifiy producing or even not eradicating it. But obviously, telling the truth will very often increase to some small extent the chances that an innocent person will die, and in any event the time spent in eradicating false belief will not be spent in warding off the danger of death from innocent persons. Now, deontological systems avoid the paralysis, obsession, and contradiction of this interpretation. They are at once less and more stringent. They would not allow killing an innocent even to save several innocents from death; but the consequentialist interpretation would require the killing.


 * It is impossible to evaluate a moral action based on consequences.**
 * Smart, prof. of philosophy at the** **University** **of** **Adelaide****, 1973** (J.J.C., “Utilitarianism For and Against”, p. 82)

No one can hold that everything, of whatever category, that has value, has it in virtue of its consequences. If that were so, one would just go one for ever, and there would be an obviously hopeless regress. That regress would be hopeless, even if one takes the view, which is not an absurd view, that although mean set themselves ends and work towards them, it is very often not really the supposed end, but the effort towards which they set the value – that they travel, not really in order to arrive (for as soon as they have arrived they set out for somewhere else), but rather they choose somewhere to arrive, in order to travel. Even on that view, not everything would have consequential value; what would have non-consequential value would in fact be traveling, even though people had to think of traveling as having the consequential value, and something else – the destination – the non-consequential value.