[This paper was written as my senior (undergraduate) thesis and was presented to an audience at Cedarville University. I am grateful to the various persons mentioned in this paper, along with many others (including Dean Erickson, Rebekah Hereth, Luke Lewallen, and Jeff Gates), for their significant and helpful contributions. I will soon post another essay, "Advice to Fellow Christian Pacifists," in which I modify several of the views expressed in this essay.]
The people of the world have gathered together to speak with God in order to determine whether God values a harmonious relationship with them. They have devised a test in which, if God truly values Her human creation, She must create a human person, torture it, send it to hell, and annihilate it. If She does this, the people of the world will, as they sincerely promised, pursue a harmonious relationship with God.
Would God have done something good if She created a human person, tortured it, sent it to hell, and annihilated it? In terms of the general welfare, it seems the answer is ‘yes.’ After all, God would have then acquired the devotion of all Her human creatures. However, it seems that in another sense the answer to this is ‘no’: God would have done something wrong if She treated a human person in this way. Put differently, although we might fairly say, “Well, on the grounds of accomplishing the general welfare, or the greatest good for the most people, this was successful,” we could also fairly say (it seems), “But what a nasty, evil thing to do to a person.”
Our intuitions in this latter sense seem best explained by the fact that we believe that our actions ought to treat human persons well[3] – we believe that our actions ought to be justified in terms of the proper recipients we know those actions would affect. Presumably, this is also why we believe slavery and genocide are wrong: Both fail to justify the actions in terms of the action’s effects on proper recipients[4]. Of course, both slavery and genocide have been defended on the grounds that they can sometimes preserve the good of the general welfare, but this fails to acknowledge our intuitions that slavery and genocide treat persons wrongly. Since our intuitions seem to favor this latter notion, it seems we are at least prima facie justified in endorsing the following moral principle, which I shall call the Principle of Effect (PE):
(PE) For any agent S, action A, time t, and proper moral recipient(s) R, if S reasonably believes that A will affect some R at t in a way that could maintain or improve R’s well-being at t and t+n, then S is morally obligated to justify A as attempting either to maintain or improve R’s well-being at t and t+n.
An example would (surely!) help. If I need to toss a pan full of hot grease out the window of a two-story apartment onto a busy city sidewalk, I probably will realize that doing so will affect human persons, whom I take to be important to treat well. Indeed, I likely will realize that my throwing the boiling grease out the window will result in serious burns to the persons on the sidewalk. Presumably, this action would be extremely difficult to justify in terms of the individuals it affects since it neither maintains nor improves their well-being, or general health. Thus, I likely cannot justify that action in the required way and, consequently, it fails to meet the necessary standards for morally permissible action. PE also rules out doing something (or refraining from doing something) which detracts from a proper recipient’s long-term well-being, given the requirement of “t+n.” Thus, if I implant a device in your chest that I know will cause you to experience extreme pain three years from implantation, I have violated PE: My action failed to attempt to maintain or improve your well-being in its later effects.
It is essential to mention what I mean and don’t mean by ‘well-being.’ A person’s well-being refers to her general health, which includes proper functioning of the organs, a state of general painlessness, those things necessary for psychological health (e.g., sanity, a healthy view of oneself, etc.), and the like. Thus, being shot in the arm is generally problematic for a human person’s well-being since it is problematic for proper blood flow, is antithetical to a state of general painlessness, and causes psychological trauma. Conversely, the pain experienced in scraping an arm or in receiving a flu shot are not ordinarily threatening to a person’s general health. They hurt, certainly, and are problematic in that respect; however, the pain of the flu shot is, in most cases, insufficient to justify the belief (for example) that one’s liver is shot, or that one’s heart is going to fail, or that one is in a general state of pain, and are therefore insufficient to justify the belief that one’s well-being (or general health) is endangered[5].
Consequentialists will perhaps be the first to reject this principle, and so I will deal with them first. The consequentialist might reply that treating persons in this way fails to be ‘right,’ but does not fail to be good (where ‘right’ has to do with treatment of persons and ‘good’ is identical to the overall general welfare). If by this distinction the consequentialist is suggesting that ‘right’ is not a moral category, then the consequentialist and I are not discussing the same issue, since as far as I am concerned the treatment of persons is a moral matter[6]. But perhaps the consequentialist is merely suggesting that the ‘general welfare’ morally overrides the side-constraints advocated by PE. This is severely question-begging since it simply denies without further consideration the sort of cases I have already envisioned. The consequentialist cannot plausibly condemn me for question-begging, since I have not merely assumed that consequentialism is false but have instead offered seeming exceptions to the consequentialist view. These considerations suggest that the consequentialist take seriously the sort of examples provided. However, despite these considerations, consequentialists needn’t get too touchy since PE is compatible with the thesis that the consequences of actions are morally significant. PE simply denies that the consequences are so significant that they override equally significant considerations, like the intrinsic value of persons.
Another possible objection is that rape and torture are morally impermissible because they demean human beings, but intending harm (the objection goes) needn’t always be like that. After all, I can kill someone in war without demeaning her. But presumably what’s wrong with demeaning someone is that such a person ought not to be treated in a demeaning way, which suggests that there is a way we should treat persons. I have argued that a necessary condition for proper treatment is to intend to maintain or improve the person’s well-being in all that you do. If you reject this as a necessary condition, then you would either have to maintain that demeaning someone isn’t always wrong (in which case many of my comments to the consequentialist apply also to you) or that demeaning someone is wrong in a ‘basic’ way and thus doesn’t need my PE for further justification. If you pursue this latter route, then you are committed to the following claim being true: “Demeaning someone is impermissible, but not because it fails to maintain or improve her well-being.” This is extremely counterintuitive since it suggests that demeaning you is wrong but not because it in any way hurts you, thereby suggesting that my treatment of someone (assuming demeaning someone treats someone) isn’t problematic on the grounds of treatment per se, since what’s wrong isn’t how my actions affect her well-being. But what else is there to harm about a person other than a person’s well-being, construed broadly? I suggest that the answer is ‘nothing,’ since it seems to me that if our concern really is with the person as an end-in-herself, the nature of our concern is going to be with that person’s well-being in some respect. It makes little sense to me to say, “It is wrong to torture a human person since a human person is an intrinsic good (or an end-in-herself), but that has nothing to do with the person’s well-being,” since comments like these seem to direct our attention away from the person. But if the moral issues don’t concern the person per se, then we’re back to the problem the consequentialist (and those like him) face: namely, the common intuitions I have offered as examples.
Since a particular conception of intended harm is central to the discussion at this point, I will offer a careful definition:
A is intended harm = def. A is an action (1) freely intended by some agent S (2) toward a proper moral recipient(s) R (3) such that A is intended to bring about something which S takes only to detract from what S takes to be the well-being of R.
It seems to me that PE is logically incompatible with the view that intended harm is at all morally permissible. To see why, consider the following argument, where A is an action (or inaction) that is intended by me to harm a proper moral recipient R at time t:
1 It is morally permissible for me to A to R at t just in case A maintains or improves the well-being of R at t.
2 But it’s not the case that A maintains or improves the well-being of R at t.
3 Therefore, it’s not the case that A to R at t is morally permissible for me.
The first premise is simply a restatement of PE. The second premise is plausible since intended harm purposes to detract from the well-being of a proper moral recipient. Since an action which detracts from the well-being of a proper moral recipient entails that the action neither maintains nor improves the well-being of the recipient, it follows that intended harm is logically incompatible with PE.
What follows from the argument? Presumably, many of the common ways of going about war and self-defense are morally impermissible since those ways frequently intend harm to proper recipients. However, does it follow from PE that killing is wrong? After all, not all killing is the result of intended harm. Consider the case of Sigmund Freud whose later days were spent in immense pain until finally his physician out of compassion gave him an overdose of morphine. Or consider babies born with defects which cause them horrendous pain. Surely in these cases it would be a mistake to consider active euthanasia intended harm. If anything, it seems these are cases where what is intended is improving the well-being of individuals since their pain is removed.
But this is mistaken. If I am on the battlefield and I capture a soldier who will likely be tortured until dead, I would not be intending to maintain or improve his well-being by ending his life[7]. Instead, I am depriving him of well-being in a way I deem less painful than other ways (e.g., torture and subsequent death), yet nonetheless depriving him of well-being.[8]
The first objection I will consider is expressed aptly in the words of C.S. Lewis:
You cannot do simply good to simply Man; you must do this good or that good to this or that man. And if you do this good, you can’t at the same time do that; and if you do it to these men, you can’t also do it to those. Hence from the outset the law of beneficence involves not doing good to some men at some times.[9]
And this in fact most often means helping A at the expense of B, who drowns while you pull A on board. And sooner or later, it involves helping A by actually doing some degree of violence to B. But when B is up to mischief against A, you must either do nothing (which disobeys the intuition) or you must help one against the other.[10]
For Lewis and those in agreement with him, PE is potentially impossible to uphold as a principle since it is logically possible (and sometimes actual) in which any course of action will harm someone. Thomas Nagel suggests the following as an escape from such a dilemma:
But what if the world itself, or someone else’s actions, could face a previously innocent person with a choice between morally abominable courses of action, and leave him no way to escape with his honor? Our intuitions rebel at the idea, for we feel that the constructability of such a case must show a contradiction in our moral views. But it is not in itself a contradiction to say that someone can do X or not do X, and that for him to take either course would be wrong. It merely contradicts the supposition that ought implies can – since presumably one ought to refrain from what is wrong, and in such a case it is impermissible to do so.[11]
I see Nagel’s response as implausible. In my view, ‘ought implies can’ is extremely plausible and hence quite a heavy sacrifice to make.[12] An initially possible solution to Lewis-type dilemmas is that they fail to show that PE is false since they fail to show that the sort of intentions (or attempts) specified by PE cannot occur. To illustrate, suppose that a lifeguard is walking down a peninsula when he realizes that two kids are drowning: one to his left, the other to his right. Suppose that the distance between them is such that, if he attempts to save one, he is unlikely to make it to the other in time. Suppose further that he agrees with PE and deliberates in this as to its implementation. He realizes the following three are possible courses of action:
(1) Attempt to save Child 1 instead of Child 2
(2) Attempt to save Child 2 instead of Child 1
(3) Attempt to save neither Child 1 nor Child 2
But he realizes that
(4) If (1), then he fails to abide by PE with respect to Child 2
(5) If (2), then he fails to abide by PE with respect to Child 1
(6) If (3), then he fails to abide by PE with respect to Child 1 and Child 2
In (1), (2), and (3), PE is not upheld since in each case there is a proper moral recipient whose well-being is not intended to be maintained or improved by the lifeguard. So far, PE isn’t sustainable in the Lifeguard Case. However, there is a fourth possible course of action: namely,
(7) Attempt to save both Child 1 and Child 2
The Lifeguard Case is one in which the saving of both children is unlikely, perhaps even extremely unlikely, but it doesn’t follow that an attempt cannot be made or intended, which is what PE suggests is necessary (and thus always possible). The lifeguard might intend to save both children, possibly carrying that out by sincerely attempting to run from one to the other.
It might be objected that this move is implausible since it is unclear in what sense it can be said that I intend to help the second individual, since my actions are not immediately directed toward that individual[13]. But it seems to me that this is mistaken. Suppose I intend to clean up ‘Christmas trash’: all the paper wrappings, bows and so on, tossing them in the garbage. Suppose I am also running short on time and realize I probably won’t be able to clean up all of the garbage. As I hurriedly clean up, could it plausibly be said that I am not really intending to clean up all the garbage? It seems not, and so the same holds true in the other case: I intend to carry the first individual closer to the second individual in order to help the second individual (as well as the first individual, of course). Because the intention is to help both individuals, it follows that the intention is also to help the second individual. Of course, it might be unlikely in Lifeguard-like cases that both parties can be saved. However, our duties extend only insofar as our capabilities, and so we must simply do the best we can in these cases.
This possible solution is unlikely to convince some[14]. They will see it as a foolish effort since by trying to save two lives one’s total efforts are divided in half, and this is problematic since one’s total efforts are necessary to save even one child. But because of the division, one cannot dedicate one’s whole efforts to one child, and thus both children will die. At least save one, the reasoning might go. There is a possible solution here for that person, a solution consistent with PE. The requirements for PE state that my obligations in these difficult cases apply just in case I reasonably believe that my actions will affect both children in a way that could maintain or improve their well-beings at the time. Since the objector claims this isn’t the case, it would follow that extreme Lifeguard cases fail to meet the requirements for the obligations imposed by PE. Hence, if I am in an extreme Lifeguard case, I am not obligated to attempt to save both children. Other moral principles will surely be relevant here and will serve to guide my actions or another’s actions, but that is for another discussion. It seems to me that this solution is more plausible than the first, and so I tend to prefer it over and against the first solution. However, whichever of these two options one endorses on this point will be consistent with PE: If my actions will make a significant difference, then I should attempt to make that difference; if my actions won’t make a significant difference, then PE does not obligate me to try.
Considerations of desert are among the more popular objections to pacifism, including the variety I defend. It seems those guilty of wrongdoing no longer deserve to be treated well, or at least not as well as those who are innocent, and thus my view is mistaken since I believe that all human persons (including the guilty) should be treated in accordance with PE regardless of their past, present, or future actions. But the first form of the objection is far too strong. It is morally heinous to suggest that guilty persons needn’t be treated well, since all human persons are guilty of something (and thus there is a degree of vagueness as to where one ‘draws the line’) and because it remains impermissible to rape or torture guilty persons, which likely means that we have a duty to justify our actions toward even guilty persons in terms of their well-being. Of course, this need not entail that there are no legitimate applications of desert. If an acquaintance of mine perpetually reveals my secrets to others, she deserves to be trusted less. Thus, considerations of desert are morally permissible insofar as they cohere with PE, and there are quite a few possible instances in which this is the case. Do considerations of desert such as imprisonment and corporal punishment cohere with PE? It seems to me that the answer turns on how such things are carried out. If imprisonment really does fail to maintain or improve the well-being of an individual – if corporal punishment really does fail to maintain or improve the well-being of an individual – then those things are impermissible. However, I am unconvinced that all forms of imprisonment fail to do what PE requires. For instance, some prisons function like rehabilitation centers, attempting through peaceful confinement and methods to reintroduce persons into society. Corporal punishment, if it is shown to detract from someone’s well-being[15], is impermissible since although they might intend long-term improvement for an individual, they are nonetheless impermissible since the means they employ do not meet the criteria for PE. Likewise, torturing someone in order to improve his character (torture-for-improvement) is impermissible since torture can reasonably be said to detract from someone’s general health.
It is here that the matter becomes somewhat more complex. One could argue that the structure of using chemotherapy on a cancer patient is sufficiently similar to torture-for-improvement to cause problems for PE. Like torture-for-improvement, chemotherapy can be (and often is) used to maintain or improve an individual’s well-being in the long run even though it detracts from her well-being in the short run. But since it’s obviously true that chemotherapy is morally permissible (the objection goes), it can’t always be impermissible to detract from someone’s well-being in the short run. Consequently, it seems that PE ‘casts the net too wide,’ so to speak: It is sufficient to rule out torture-for-improvement, but it fails to discriminate between obviously impermissible things (like torture-for-improvement, which it says is impermissible) and obviously permissible things (like chemotherapy, which it says is also impermissible).
There are grave difficulties for this line of objection. First, it will not do to suggest that torture-for-improvement is morally impermissible on other grounds, since those grounds would have to show that torturing someone to improve her is morally wrong but not because we are morally obligated to justify our actions toward that person. But then what would be wrong is not that a person is harmed and shouldn’t be, since we have no duties to justify our treatment of her in the first place. This requires a drastic re-interpretation or denial of our strong intuitions that we should justify our actions in terms of a person’s well-being. Consequently, it seems implausible to suppose that other justification is available as a plausible alternative. Secondly, either the structure of chemotherapy is sufficiently similar to torture-for-improvement to create a counterexample or it isn’t. If it’s not, then there is no use worrying about this and the objector must try again. If, on the other hand, chemotherapy is sufficiently similar to torture-for-improvement, then I am inclined to suggest that chemotherapy is morally impermissible given that it is sufficiently similar in structure to torture-for-improvement. Put differently, since torture-for-improvement is clearly wrong, if chemotherapy is sufficiently similar in structure, that speaks poorly of chemotherapy. It’s far more plausible to think this than it is to think that chemotherapy’s similarity to torture-for-improvement shows the permissible nature of torture-for-improvement. Moreover, it doesn’t seem implausible to deny that chemotherapy is morally impermissible since it detracts significantly from the short-term well-being of persons, causing vomiting, general weakness, hair loss, immense aches and pains, and (sometimes) depression. It is true that chemotherapy does save lives, but the way in which those lives are saved seems to me to violate the duties we have to those persons. In any case, it is far clearer to me that torture-for-improvement is impermissible than that chemotherapy is permissible[16].
[1] My defense of pacifism is Kantian insofar as it shares significant similarities with Kant’s views on respect for persons. Although I believe that Kantianism better supports pacifism than non-pacifism, this is a contentious issue, and even Kant himself seems to have fallen on the non-pacifist side of things. See, for instance, Kant’s Perpetual Peace in Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1991.
[2] I am thankful to fellow members of my Senior Seminar course – Timothy Cuffman, Danielle Early, Katy Hawkins, and Shawn Graves – for extensive comments on various drafts of this paper. I am also thankful for help from Aaron James, John White, Ryan Peterson, Rebekah Jones, Bill Patton, Timothy Ronco, and several anonymous readers.
[3] I leave it open-ended whether anything else falls into this category, such as non-human animals.
[4] By ‘proper recipients,’ I have in mind the following definition:
X is a proper recipient = def. X is such that any action which affects X is morally relevant.
[5] Danielle Early has cautioned me to make clear that I am by no means advocating that physical pain alone constitutes well-being. The reader will do well to bear in mind the various factors I have mentioned in this paragraph.
[6] And I do not merely assume this or declare it in some question-begging way, but rather utilize cases in which the proper treatment of persons seems clearly obligatory. Either the consequentialist accepts that our intuitions in moral matters have positive epistemic status, or she doesn’t. If she does, then she needs to take seriously the sorts of intuitions I have proffered. If she is not an ethical intuitionist, then it would seem that a conversation beyond the scope of this current paper is in order, but I see no good reason why it is inappropriate to assume ethical intuitionism in this case.
[7] It might be objected on religious grounds that killing some persons allows them to experience the Beatific Vision, or some sort of pleasant afterlife. However, it seems to me absurd to suggest that this provides grounds for permissibly killing “Heaven candidates,” since, if it were impermissible to kill Heaven candidates, one could permissibly walk into a church and slaughter people – a highly implausible position, to say the least. Additionally, the means taken to get there also (likely) violate PE, and thus even the necessary means to killing them is a problem.
[8] The reader ought to remember that by ‘well-being’ I have in mind ‘general health.’ Surely killing someone does not maintain or improve her general health. In fact, it does just the opposite: It takes away health entirely. For example, suppose I turn in a paper required for a course I am taking, which my professor immediately returns, informing me that my paper is in bad shape. Suppose in order to improve the paper, I burn it to pieces in front of him, justifying my actions in the following way: You said the paper was bad; I just got rid of the bad, and that makes things better.” Call it a gut instinct, but I gather that my professor wouldn’t consider this to be an improvement of the paper since there isn’t a paper any longer. The same seems to hold true in the case of killing, even in cases of ‘mercy killing.’
[9] Lewis, C.S. “Why I am Not a Pacifist,” in The Weight of Glory (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers), 2001, p.76. I use Lewis primarily since his critique of pacifism is paradigmatic and is well-worded.
[10] Ibid, pp.76-77.
[11] Nagel, Thomas. “War and Massacre,” in The Morality of War: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education), 2006, p.233. In fact, Nagel is contrasting consequentialist and absolutist treatments of war, defending the latter and attempting to provide a means of escape from Lewis-type dilemmas without having PE specifically in mind. Nevertheless, his solution to Lewis-type dilemmas apply to PE since PE is absolute insofar as it is a moral principle.
[12] I will offer one example as to why I think that is the case. Suppose I claimed that human persons, like us, have a duty to think of every possible number at once. This is not a task we could complete (or even conceive of completing), and so it seems implausible to think – on those grounds alone – that we could have such a duty. Against this, some have argued that the following examples suggest otherwise: If I promise a friend that I will meet her for lunch at noon in Las Vegas, but am (unfortunately) on a delayed flight hovering over the city, it still seems true that I ought to meet my friend at noon even though I cannot, and thus ought needn’t imply can. There is much that can be said here, but I will say only this for now: It is far clearer to me that I don’t have a duty to think of every possible number at once (on the grounds of ‘ought implies can’) than it is that I ought to meet my friend for lunch at noon in Las Vegas when I can’t.
[13] Shawn Graves has pressed me on these grounds in conversation.
[14] And I appreciate immense critical comments here from Timothy Cuffman and Katy Hawkins, who prompted me in this direction.
[15] Psychologists have produced evidence to suggest that the effects of corporal punishment are potentially quite harmful. See, for instance, the following articles: Ohene, S., Ireland, M., McNeely, C., & Borowsky, I. W. “Parental expectations, physical punishment, and violence among adolescents who score positive on a psychosocial screening test in primary care,” in Pediatrics, 117 (2006), pp.441-447; Katz, L. F., & Windecker-Nelson, B. “Domestic violence, emotion coaching, and child adjustment,” in Journal of Family Psychology, 20 (2006), pp.56-67.
[16] It is possible to see chemotherapy as a reason for further worry, since the following sort of example seems also to be impermissible assuming PE: Someone is about to be hit by a bus, so I push him out of the road and onto the ground, knowing that he will probably scrape his arm. The worry is that my actions fail to maintain or improve the person’s well-being, since my action leads to the scrape. This is a poor objection on the grounds that it is implausible to think that a scraped arm constitutes a subtraction from well-being. The implausibility lies in the counterintuitive nature of certain statements (e.g., “That flu shot took away my general health!”) and the failure of scrape-like pains to violate plausible criteria for what constitutes well-being, such as psychological health or a general state of painlessness.
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