Flash Card Consequentialism - Part 1

I am a fairly proud consequentialist. I think consequentialists get unfairly derided a lot despite the fact that most people basically are consequentialist now, and have a hard time even imagining what it would be like not to be. If you're wondering how you can be this word, or deride this word, without really knowing what it means, I'll try to explain and pray I can be brief.

For me, the only description I'm willing to defend is the simple one, consequentialism is the view that given a choice, the better choice is the one with the better consequences. Seems mind-numbingly obvious, right? My consequentialism is tied strongly to conscious well-being, which you can think about as happiness as long as you promise not to twist that beyond recognition. Something that leads to more happiness is better than something that leads to more suffering. I know, very controversial.

Unless you're someone who gets their kicks writing fairy-tales where this might be bad, I'll have to point to some of the objections. For example, it may conflict with some rules that you hold as sacrosanct. Don't murder. Don't steal. Of course you can quickly think of cases where this might be the only defensible thing to do. Modern taboos NOT in the 10 commandments might seem even worse. Blackmail, torture, suicide... If a committed rules based person wants to dream up hypotheticals or drag up case studies, there are times when these seem to pretty clearly lead to better outcomes, and I would have to bite the consequentialist bullet there.

However, most of the time these are bad examples, and simply critiques drawn up by ignoring some of the consequences. Would it be bad to live in a world in a world where the police resort to torture, of course it would be, so even though it might be useful in case X, it's perfectly obvious that we shouldn't do it and establish that norm. Consequentialists don't just ignore the long-term, only the critics tend to do that.

The other complaint is to pick apart what happiness is, and whether that's actually what we want, but you already promised me you wouldn't do that, so I'll skip it.

I've touched on why I think consequentialism is right. Next, I'll touch on why I think it's important. After a break from my sponsors...