How to make sense of wrongness if you're a consequentialist

By Bentham's Bulldog @ 2025-04-13T15:26 (+16)

Crosspost from my blog.

One puzzle for consequentialists is how to account for rightness. Consequentialists claim that the only thing that determines whether an action is right is its consequences—what the action results in. But if consequentialism is correct, it’s hard to see where rightness and wrongness come in. Certainly some actions will be better than others, but how bad do the consequences of an action have to be for the action to count as wrong? Some actions are merely suboptimal but not wrong.

Now, I agree with Richard Y Chappell that the term right has different meanings and utilitarians can have different attitudes towards them. One of the meanings of right is just: what you have most reason to do. This sense of right is about what the best thing you could do is, rather than what you’d be blameworthy if you don’t do. By this definition, the right action is whichever generates the most well-being.

There’s another sense of right and wrong that utilitarians don’t really believe in. Deontologists tend to think that actions don’t just differ in how worthwhile they are—there’s some precise threshold beyond which actions become wrong rather than just suboptimal. You are, in some sense, not morally allowed to perform wrong actions, while you are morally allowed to perform some suboptimal actions. Consequentialists (rightly) disagree with this notion. You should just strive to do as much good as possible without worrying about what you’re “allowed” to do morally. So if right is used to mean “actions built into the fundamental moral facts that you’re morally prohibited from performing,” utilitarians rightly reject that.

But there’s a third sense of wrong that’s slightly more slippery, which utilitarians can gladly affirm. This is about who merits significant criticism and ostracization for their behavior. You, by not giving to charity, have not acted optimally. Ted Bundy, by killing people, has also not acted optimally. Yet there’s a categorical difference between your action and Ted’s. Ted should be thrown in jail—you shouldn’t. Ted is significantly and abnormally blameworthy while you are not.

Now, I think this is largely culturally determined. We judge Bundy because he’s abnormally bad. If there was a society full of Bundys, it wouldn’t be proper for members of that society to call Bundy wrong in the way we call him wrong in our society—indicating a distinct category of wrongness that merits serious blame.

This might sound outlandish. But everyone in our society also does terrible things. We spend money on ourselves while children die who we could easily save. In the eyes of God, the man who upgrades his car when he could have saved several children is pretty shitty. In a society of saints, we’d all be seen as Bundy. Letting a sick child die in his mother’s arms because you want a vacation or new car is really extremely bad—but we escape blame because we are all that bad and built to be so. Doing the right thing all the time is basically psychologically impossible. There are powerful arguments against the notion that rightness, wrongness, and obligation are fundamental, rather than simply higher-level descriptions of the extent of our reasons for actions.

I also agree with Richard that what determines how blameworthy a person is has a lot to do with the extent of their exertion of willpower for the sake of morality. If you have ten trillion dollars, while giving a million dollars to charity is a very good thing to do, you don’t get many virtue points as it requires almost no sacrifice from you. In contrast, if you’re poor but still donate, because doing so is psychologically taxing, you get virtue points. This is one reason why vegans get virtue points.

One of the best analogies for rightness is richness.

Does richness exist? Yes. Bill Gates is rich. Elon Musk is rich. Richness is real but it’s not built into the fundamental structure of physics. The laws of physics make no reference to who is rich.

Who counts as rich is also culturally variant. If everyone else in society was much wealthier than Musk, then Musk wouldn’t count as rich. There’s no precise threshold of wealth at which a person becomes rich—the term is vague and who counts as rich varies depending on the properties of others in society.

At the fundamental level, there is no such thing as richness. Most basically, there is just money which comes in degrees. Some people have more money than others. In this way, money is like reasons. One’s reasons for action come in degrees. It’s the reasons, like the degree of money, that are precise and objective, not the higher-order predicates like rich.

And lastly, neither rightness or richness are what matter. Instead, it’s the underlying facts—the facts that come in degrees—that are important. It would be very weird if a person didn’t care about how much money they had, but just cared about whether the term “rich” could aptly be applied to them. Obviously what matters is money not if the word rich can be used to describe someone!

Similarly, what matters is not whether you technically count as doing the right thing. If you’re deciding between two actions that fall just short of being right, but are pretty good, you shouldn’t beat yourself up about the action being slightly below the rightness threshold. It’s pathological to analyze one’s actions through the lens of ascertaining whether they’re good enough to count as right or wrong—you should just try to do as much good as possible without caring about which labels could be used to describe your behavior.