Evaluating the Inefficacy Objection to Consequentialism

In the last decade, philosophers have gravitated toward a new generation of replies to the inefficacy objection to consequentialism in ethics. I focus on this new generation of replies, and evaluate its prospects. The new replies often aim to vindicate (or, more often, partially vindicate) consequentialist reasoning about specific cases by using more realistic modeling of the subtle consequentialist dynamics of specific situations to show that individual acts have some important expected efficacy. I note that one interesting point of agreement in this new generation of replies is that contrary to what was suggested by the previous generation of replies, there is no 'one-size-fits-all' consequentialist analysis of all collective action problems that depends only on factors such as the collective consequences and number of individuals involved.

At the same time, and as a consequence, this new generation of replies to the inefficacy objection has important limitations insofar as they are intended to vindicate consequentialism. One limitation is that even if we agree with these models that e.g. voting (or consumer choice) often has efficacy in some specific actual contexts of voting (or consumer choice), the same models also show that other acts of voting (or consumer choice) could be almost entirely inefficacious in different specific contexts of voting (or consumer choice). Therefore if we think consequentialism delivers the wrong verdict on some of these latter cases of genuine inefficacy (even if they are hypothetical cases), then the new generation of replies do not have ability to vindicate consequentialism as a general ethical theory.

Mark Budolfson
https://www.budolfson.com/
Associate Professor
Department of Philosophy
University of Texas at Austin

About the Speaker:

Mark Budolfson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and of Geography and the Environment at the The University of Texas at Austin, where he is Co-Founder of the Population Wellbeing Initiative. Budolfson works on interdisciplinary issues in public policy, economics, and ethics, especially in connection with sustainable development, planetary health, and collective action problems such as climate change and other dilemmas that arise in connection with common resources and public goods. Current research includes sustainable development and climate change economics, global ethics and international institutions, population-level bioethics, and business ethics & individual reasons for action in collective action situations. His work integrates knowledge from environmental science, philosophy, economics, geography, animal welfare science, public health, and other disciplines, and introduces methods to weigh competing values along ethically important dimensions. He has published in venues including Science, PNAS, Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, Social Choice and Welfare, and World Bank Economic Review.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. Free pizza and refreshments will be served at the event. Sometimes we look for each other after the talk for further discussion about the topic.

The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here (to be posted).

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai