I’m gonna unlist these two posts since it turns out I had misunderstood consequentialist ethics.
So this is a kind of goofy thought experiment about responsibility and ethics.
Imagine two people who hand out bread to the starving.
One, Alice, is trying to help people but has accidentally & unknowingly got poisoned bread and is hurting the people she’s trying to help. It got mildewed or something.
The other, Bob, is trying to kill people but accidentally forgot to put the poison in. The entire jar of poison is back on his kitchen counter. He thinks it’s all laced up because he’s a big old himbo.
In teleological systems of ethics, such as consequentialism (and its hyponym, utilitarianism), Bob is a hero and an all around mensch. Those systems are all about end results, and fewer people are starving because of him. But to me, it feels messed up to laud him. He is trying to kill them.
In virtue systems of ethics, it’s all about the character of the agent, Alice is a good hero. But, I mean, I can’t really get behind that, either, since we will know her by the trail of dead from all the poisoned bread.
In deontological ethics, both are heroes, since neither Alice nor Bob broke any of deontology’s rules. So I obv can’t get behind that.
Now, die-hard teleogists would be like “whaddayamean it feels bad what Bob’s doing? He’s our boy, he’s following our system, that feels great” (and a similar response from the virtue ethics team)—their feelings stem from their system. That is cart before horse to me. Feels before reals FTW♥
So what’s the existentialist response to all these bread-poisoning shenanigans? You’ve got to case-by-case it. A system (whether outcome-based or agent-based) or a set of rules can’t replace taking responsibility. Alice ought to follow-up on the consequences of what she’s doing, and Bob ought to set his heart straight.