Consequentialism—the moral philosophy that emphasizes that we can judge the goodness or badness of an action by its effects—is a purportedly objective moral theory that helps adjudicate public policy disputes. According to the standard story, when there is disagreement in public life involving the distribution of goods or the creation of moral norms, consequentialism comes to save the day, helping us navigate difficult public choices purely on the effects, and setting aside whatever theological visions people might attach to moral life in the world.
But this story of consequentialism is hardly the whole story, according to Ryan Darr. In The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism, Darr lays out a compelling genealogy of consequentialism that emphasizes not only its concern for acting well within a coherent moral cosmology, but also that throughout its early history, consequentialism was driven by explicitly theological concerns. He has two chief aims for his work: to recover the history of consequentialism and articulate the significance of consequentialism’s origins for modern life. Part 1 explores the work of seminal figures such as Henry More and Richard Cumberland as they sought to fend off voluntarism by articulating a new form of moral reasoning. Far from offering a rationalist account of the distribution of goods, More and Cumberland provided a new justification for the Christian moral life: God governs the world through divine commands designed to produce the best effects in the world.
More and Cumberland’s innovations produce a variety of effects, including elevating the question of causal responsibility. According to Darr, no longer could people be only concerned with their motives for action, but with how those actions transpired in the world. Part 2 details the aftermath of More and Cumberland, as the theodicies of Pierre Bayle raised questions of how evil could exist in a world planned to produce the best possible effects. One of the key innovations here is making God and humanity part of the same moral community; the happiness that God intends for humanity and the happiness humans pursue are the same.
In contrast to earlier theologies in which beatitude is a good beyond the world, the consequentialists see the happiness that God intends for us to be part of this life. This has great stakes, however, for how evil in the world is understood; for if God intends our happiness in creation, then evil compels us to pursue good effects more vigorously as a social project. Throughout part 2, various figures, such as Anthony Earl Cooper (better known as Lord Shaftesbury), Francis Hutcheson, and William King, rise to the defense of consequentialism’s moral cosmology, though they are ultimately unable to offer a compelling defense of consequentialism’s moral cosmology in the face of evil in Darr’s estimation
The successors of these early figures are detailed in part 3, as we meet John Gay, Edmund Law, and other Anglican utilitarians. It is through their work that our modern understanding of consequentialism begins to come into view. By this point, the utilitarians no longer saw God and humanity as part of a moral community. Rather, God wishes humanity to be happy on the terms of creation, and utilitarians saw it as their job to rationally exposit what that happiness might look like for the breadth of society instead of just a few. Importantly for Darr, this was not a secularizing move either, accommodating consequentialism to the aims of a secularized public policy. Rather, it was part of an effort to bring older concerns for teleology together with what was good for the broader public in which Christians found themselves.
Most know consequentialism from the infinite variations of the trolley problem, in which participants are asked which people should die when confronted with a runaway trolley. But the trolley problem is one which does not retain the concerns of the older consequentialists. In the newer world of the trolley problem, God is absent, much less concerned with human happiness. The trolley problem is framed as a way to reduce suffering, divorced from how we pursue meaning in our actions. In the conclusion to his book, Darr reframes the modern version of consequentialism by supposing what it might look like to recover older theological concerns for modern consequentialism. Should modern consequentialism recover a sense of divine providence, of moral cosmology, of teleology in our actions? Darr’s proposals here are suggestive and intriguing, for if consequentalism is once again reinscribed with some of these earlier concerns, the trolley problem becomes a richer question. No longer is it a cold calculus which seeks to justify the suffering of the few for the sake of the many, but it becomes one in which our moral actions have real stakes because God is present in the deliberation.
Darr’s work is a significant intervention in the fields of moral philosophy and theology. The history is judiciously told, deftly lifting up key concerns of the past which haunt the future by asking what has been lost from view. For when the broader concerns of teleology, cosmology, and divine agency are obscured, consequentialism frequently looks indistinguishable from technology. Darr’s alternative to this vision, which makes humans into moral calculators, is that we should once again become sensitive to divine action within a suffering and complex world.
Myles Werntz is an associate professor of theology and director of Baptist studies at Abilene Christian University (Texas).
Myles Werntz
Date Of Review:
December 28, 2024