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The Best Effect: 
Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism
by ryan darr
university of chicago, 320 pages, $35

When I was a teenager, it occurred to me that it would probably be virtuous to suicide bomb people who had just been to confession. After all, if you take the truths about eternal life seriously, the bomber would be launching the victims to heaven, and doing so in a maximally generous way, forfeiting not only her life but her very salvation. (Was it a lack of faith that was holding me back?)

When I asked my dad about this, he explained, somewhat taken aback, that this would certainly not be virtuous. Virtuous actions aren’t simply about maximizing good outcomes. Instead, they involve—among other things—obedience to the commandments. And, to give a more practical rebuttal to my idea, he pointed out that there’s no way to know whether the victims had made a good confession. You might, for all you know, be sending them to hell.

I remember feeling a bit relieved, as the danger of accidentally sending someone to hell gave me an out. (I wasn’t worried about actually becoming a suicide bomber, but—ever the egoist—I didn’t like the idea that failing to engage in terrorism would reflect badly on me.) At the same time, I didn’t find his claim about obedience to be entirely convincing. It seemed more plausible that virtue involved goodness-maximization, even when maximizing goodness involved disobedience or self-sacrifice.

After all, why would God teach us that those who die in a state of grace will go to heaven, if he didn’t want us to use that knowledge to send people there? Doesn’t the call to “take up your cross” mean we should imitate him in sacrificing ourselves for others? And isn’t our salvation the most precious thing we could give up (and therefore the best possible sacrifice), while other people’s salvation is the best possible gift we could give them?

There are many layers of idiocy to the thinking that underlies this string of questions. The most salient is a complete failure to understand the gospel. My teenaged mode of thinking regarded salvation as something merely mechanistic; in doing so, it left no room for God’s grace and his providential action. It neglected the fact that salvation is essentially relational, that it involves the interaction of God’s grace with our freedom in the context of an I-and-Thou relationship. And it denigrated this life, treating it as a sort of video game, valuable only insofar as it brings about a certain result, namely, salvation. (There is also the problem of pride. It’s tempting to imagine oneself the savior of the world, but that job is already taken.)

Salvation isn’t some fungible, generic state of eternal well-being. There’s a reason why the foolish virgins couldn’t borrow oil from the wise virgins, namely that salvation involves the consummation of a personal love. And this life isn’t a video game. Christ is really present in the poor whom we are called to serve; our actions and relationships in this life aren’t merely currency for purchasing the next. Moreover, we are saved not by our actions, but by a Person. Though the process of salvation can involve or require some actions—he respects our freedom, and won’t save us “without ourselves,” to use St. Augustine’s formulation—these actions flow out of, and are ordered to, our transformation in him.

In any case, it’s not surprising that this was the particular shape my teenaged idiocy took. My thinking was consequentialist—I was not ultimately concerned with the ethics of how an end was achieved, but rather with optimizing the outcome—and consequentialism is widespread in our society. It’s easy to tell a neat story about Christian theology’s contamination by secular values. Bentham’s utilitarianism, Truman’s justification for dropping the atom bomb, and Peter Singer’s defense of infanticide all led to a culture in which I elevated consequentialism to the theological plane.

But consequentialism was not a secular creation; it was originally developed by Christian ethicists. This is the story Ryan Darr tells in The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism. As Darr writes, in the view of its founders, “consequentialism provides a new justification for Christian morality.”

In tracing the genealogy of consequentialist morals, Darr’s book offers a new critique of consequentialism. Consequentialist reasoning isn’t a natural, default way of doing ethics, a mode of moral reasoning in which we are free to engage as soon as we are liberated from the strictures of religion. Rather, it was invented, and invented for culturally contingent reasons.

In seventeenth-century England, Christian ethicists Henry More and Richard Cumberland began developing what Darr calls the “consequentialist moral cosmology” with its attendant “consequentialist moral rationality.” This cosmology includes the view that rational “creatures ought to obey God because God knows best how to realize maximal goodness in creation.” The consequentialist moral rationality involves the following beliefs, which Darr points out are not self-evident, nor were they widely held prior to the seventeenth century: that the good is “a state of affairs to be realized,” that states of affairs can be ranked and quantified and “must therefore be commensurable,” and that we can reasonably “attribute to an action not only the effects that it directly realizes but also further effects that would not have occurred had the action not occurred—even if these further effects are mediated by the actions of many other agents.”

Today we associate consequentialism with tough ethical dilemmas—can you murder one person, if by so doing you save five lives?—but Darr explains that the “early consequentialist theological tradition . . . was not particularly interested in revising Christian morality.” Instead, More was seeking to present novel arguments against ethical and theological voluntarism. Ethical voluntarism, More’s main target, is the belief that the “good to be done and the evil to be avoided are determined solely by the will of God, which chooses freely and not from prior or independent rational or moral standards.”

There were already arguments against voluntarism that did not require the invention of the consequentialist moral cosmology. Thomism and its Reformed equivalent proffered non-consequentialist arguments against voluntarism. But because Descartes, Hobbes, and others had made scholasticism seem gauche, More and Cumberland’s approach—which relied on geometric and mechanistic paradigms—was a more respectable way to argue against voluntarism. As Darr writes: “Despite his forceful criticisms of Descartes and Hobbes, More followed their lead in seeking alternatives to scholasticism. Rather than looking to Thomistic and Reformed theology for an alternative to ethical voluntarism, More discovered another option in the revival of Platonism in the Italian Renaissance.” And More’s arguments were taken seriously. Hobbes, whom More routinely criticized, “apparently said that he would embrace More’s views if he ever had to reject his own.”

Today’s consequentialists often speak as though consequentialism were the most rational approach to ethics, whether because they imagine it to be self-evident or because they suppose it is less encumbered by metaphysical or historical baggage than other approaches to ethics. Neither of these claims is particularly compelling.

There’s nothing about consequentialism that is self-evident. Sure, most people have the (correct) intuition that good actions are generally aimed at good outcomes. But most people also have the (correct) intuition that there are some actions—rape and intentionally convicting the innocent, to give two examples—that we should never commit. It’s not clear why the first intuition counts as “self-evident” while the second is some kind of superstitious hangup. And though it’s true that consequentialism isn’t self-contradictory, neither is it self-contradictory to believe that you should generally seek good outcomes but should not do so when doing so would involve the violation of an exceptionless moral norm. If both approaches are internally consistent, what makes consequentialism more rational?

One possible response is that our belief in exceptionless moral norms is a leftover from Christianity and doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. However, Darr demonstrates that the same is true of consequentialism itself. If we are to jettison our Christian hangups, consequentialism needs to go, too.

Darr provides a detailed account of how consequentialist thinking evolved over the course of generations. These developments are fascinating, and I would recommend that anyone interested in them read the book. The extremely rough overview is this: William King, Lord Shaftesbury, and Francis Hutcheson inherited the consequentialist project from More and Cumberland. They were forced to modify it in response to the theological controversies of their day, in large part in response to the problem of evil as posed by Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique. These modifications led to a situation in which it was logical for the next generation of consequentialists—the Anglican utilitarians—to defend voluntarism. This generation also rejected the consequentialist cosmology, maintaining only the consequentialist moral rationality. And ultimately that rationality, stripped of a Christian cosmology, was adopted by Bentham, and then by his utilitarian heirs today—including Peter Singer and others who defend infanticide, euthanasia, and various other practices that More would have found horrifying.

This kind of thing happens all the time in intellectual history. People shift their stance on one issue precisely because they think that by doing so they will preserve their stance on some other issue, which they regard as more important. It doesn’t work out as intended: Younger generations can latch onto the modified values while neglecting the values the older generation intended to preserve. And when these values come into conflict for reasons the older generation didn’t foresee, the younger generation may jettison the very principles that the older generation was trying to protect.

This phenomenon is particularly interesting in the case of consequentialism, because—to use Darr’s formulation—consequentialism “attribute[s] to an action not only the effects that it directly realizes but also further effects that would not have occurred had the action not occurred—even if these further effects are mediated by the actions of many other agents.” From the consequentialist perspective, More is responsible for Peter Singer’s defense of infanticide. Similarly, Peter Singer and Bentham would be responsible for my religiously motivated act of terrorism, had I engaged in suicide bombing under their influence.

One of the theoretical “gotchas” against consequentialism is this: If the consequences of espousing or believing consequentialism are bad enough, we should not espouse or believe consequentialism—even if consequentialism is true. What Darr shows empirically is that consequentialists have not done a particularly good job of forecasting the consequences of belief in their philosophy. In other words, it really only makes sense to espouse consequentialism if you expect that doing so will have good long-term effects, but it’s extremely difficult to know what the effects will be on the scale of multiple generations. It’s just a great mystery. So if you want the ability to reason about the morality of your acts during your own lifetime, this is an additional reason to look for a non-consequentialist approach to ethics.

Darr begins his book with a quotation from Elizabeth Anscombe:

But if someone really thinks, in advance, that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration—I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind.

There are really only two ways to approach exceptionless moral norms: Either you think they exist, or you don’t. Neither position can be proved (or disproved) using purely abstract reasoning, and so we must accept whatever belief seems more convincing. Either it is always wrong to rape people, or any act—including rape—can be morally permissible if done for the proper reasons.

The most infamous upshot of consequentialism is that there could be a situation in which it is morally right—perhaps morally obligatory—to rape a person or to violate some other moral norm. To give an example involving rape: Imagine you work in a prison run by an evil government, and the people who run the prison decide to have one of the prisoners raped. They know you are opposed to rape, and so to torment you they credibly offer you a massive sum of money to be the one who rapes the prisoner. You know that the prisoner will be raped either way and will be no worse off if the rapist is you (rather than someone else), and you know that with the money you could save hundreds of lives. In the consequentialist framework, it would surely be a “greater good” to save hundreds of lives than to preserve yourself from the experience of being a rapist. Within this framework, it is morally laudable—perhaps mandatory—to commit rape. (There are plenty of situations in which this might not be the case—for example, perhaps your participation would weaken opposition to this practice—but it’s always possible to come up with a different situation in which there really is no additional cost, other than the psychological harm you would undergo, and in which the rape would therefore be laudable.)

If this reasoning is wrong, then consequentialism is wrong. To many people, the absolute wrongness of rape, and therefore of consequentialism, will be obvious. Others would do well to think about the history of consequentialism and to ask how it is actually supposed to work. And if it doesn’t work—if our ability to forecast the long-term consequences of our actions is so feeble that we can’t meaningfully engage in any kind of consequentialist moral reasoning—then it’s hard to see what the value of consequentialism is.

Audrey Pollnow writes from New York City.

Image by Marcus Winter, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.