Devotion to a principle regardless of consequences and circumstances does not seem particularly sensible, for consequences and circumstances may disprove a principle or render it useless in a given context. Sometimes it may very well be explicitly against your interest to follow a particular principle, even to the point at which following the principle requires extreme misery or even your death. Sometimes the consequences of a particular principle being implemented as a norm may have generally destructive results and ultimately not par with the intentions of the wielder of the principle or the prescription of the principle itself.
The idea that consequences don't matter at all, that one should stick to a principle without any concern for what the outcome of it really is, can be quite dangerous. If it ends up being the case that one's principle causes mass-misery and death, why should one stick to it? It seems like some sort of dynamism has to be aknowledged, which is to say that principles must be revalueated over time, and hence it may be counterproductive and nonsensical to value a principle for its own sake for one's entire life. Sticking to an abstract principle even if it means the total annialation of the human race as such is a recipe for madness.
The idea that circumstances don't matter at all can also be rather dangerous. Sometimes one may find themself in a situation in which their principles do them no good at all or are even explicitly opposed to their well-being or their very life. The most obvious example of this is probably absolutist pacifism, since the pacifist must abstain from defending their lives when it comes under the explicit threat of violence - if they are going to absolutely stick to their principle, that is. Hence, it may make sense for certain principles to have qualifiers relating to situations or circumstances. This doesn't necessarily mean that the principle is not consistently applied, but that the scope of its application is built into it. For example, presumably people do not wish to apply the concept of "rights" to inanimate objects.
Consequences and circumstances are precisely what can give principles a context and establish a way in which they can become meaningfully instrumental. No principle, strictly speaking, can sensibly be treated as nothing more than an end in and of itself. It may relate to other principles and it may be relational to certain consequences and circumstances. In terms of "usability", some principles could be concieved of as instrumental means towards other principles, the attainment of which are constituted by consequences. A principle may not absolutely be a goal in and of itself, but an instrumental part of obtaining certain goals. The attainment of a goal is in some sense a consequence (and a principle itself) and certain principles may function as guidelines with respect to the means to the attainment of such consequences. But the more basic point is that principles and goals are relational to eachother and that principles do not exist in a vacuum.
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There is a flaw in your reasoning. Without some overriding principle, you can't measure how good or bad the consequences are in the first place.
I didn't argue against having principles to measure consequences against. I'm argueing against principles in a vacuum.
How do you define a "principle in a vacuum," if not one that is prior to evaluation?
I'm, in a roundabout way, saying that princuples are interconnected - except at that point at which they are irreducable. My problem is when libertarians treat high-order concepts that clearly are not irreducable as if they were irreducable first principles - such as "self-ownership".
So what I mean by a "principle in a vacuum" is one that is divorced from its interconnection to other principles or one that is treated as contextless - or simply assumed to be "self-evident" without being grounded in anything.
I suppose what I take issue with is the use of vague maxims that are assumed to be true without extended explaination. The non-aggresion principle by itself and as a vague maxim, for example, may be problematic. To treat it as an axoim is problematic.
I see. Well, none can disagree with that.
I think that consequences and circumstances can be a vital element to give such principles a context so that they are not just vague maxims.
In other words, the inverse problem of an arbitrary "the ends justify the means" notion would be the problem of a vague maxim that has no real connection to consequences or ends, or doesn't have any real applicability in the world and thus is acircumstantial.
Destructively, one might want to counter that even the view that one should take consequences and circumstances into account in ethical decision making is a principle in itself. The problem isn't principles per se. You can have a principle that says, "Don't adhere to your ethical rules of thumb as if they are unquestionably right, even in situations that are radically different from the ones they were designed to address." You can have a principle that says, "Do your best to take account of all of the features of a situation that you think are morally relevant, and try to make the best decision you can." When you have good principles, there's no problem adhering to them consistently.
The problem is -- and you've discussed this ad nauseam in thinking about axiomatic approaches to ethics -- that a lot of theories are really rigid and implausible. As you know, some libertarians are among the most guilty people on the planet with this stuff. What they're doing is taking generally applicable rules like, "Legitimate property claims ought to be respected, and stealing is therefore wrong" and overgeneralizing them to make an absolute principle out of the idea that "Stealing is always wrong."
So then you confront them with a thought experiment in which a horrible tragedy can only be averted using something that belongs to someone else, but either they're a jerk and refuse to listen to your pleas, or maybe they're not home. And because they're committed to their rigid principle, they either have to writhe and twist themselves around so that they can say that stealing is wrong but that you can still do it (i.e., "Well it would be wrong, but everyone would do it and I don't see how anyone could blame you" or "Well it would be wrong, but all it means for it to be wrong is that you'd have to compensate him if he wanted you to"), or they shout at you for making up ridiculous examples, or they bite the bullet and insist that you should let the world burn because stealing is wrong.
But the problem isn't adhering to principles as such. The problem is adhering to stupid overgeneralized principles that have very obvious counterexamples. And what you're identifying is that those counterexamples are effective because they invoke circumstances to which the principle should not apply, including those where adhering to the principle would produce awful consequences.
Great posting (I submitted it to /r/Anarchism on reddit.com)
I just thought I'd jump in and say two or three things:
a) I think the deontological point of view is that actions are themselves the only thing that can be immoral, which is why I think they're so heavy on static principles. But, like utilitarianism, I just don't believe that's how people really think. I don't think people can just sit by and watch someone being murdered and honestly not feel anything (assuming they weren't in danger themselves.)
2) I'd suggest looking into emotivism, if you haven't already. I'm sort of playing around with it since it seems to be a more realistic view of ethics I'm just trying to reconcile it with the rest of my ideology.
3) Francois's point above (about bootstrapping the "good vs. bad" process) isn't entirely true, I don't think. "Principles" are a static delineation of an idea. Even the principle that one should judge by consequences is static, so we can generalize the issue (like emotivism does with reducing morality to the prediction of honest emotional reactions) without needed to have first delineated a "principle" before hand.
just my two cents.
ha, well looks like my listing style changed after "a"...oh well, you know what I mean.
>Destructively, one might want to counter that even the view that one should take consequences and circumstances into account in ethical decision making is a principle in itself. The problem isn't principles per se.
Well but the principle itself is flexible enough to adapt to themajority of circumstances without digressing too much from a realistic view of ethics. Also the fact that consequentialism doesn't usually completely divorce itself from at least a basic deontology doesn't validate deontology. At most it just means that the validity of the use of a minimal set of principles needs to be argued by anyone advocating it.
Sorry, Joel; I don't understand the objection. Alex's post had to do with adhering to principles at all costs, and my point was that not all principles were open to his criticisms -- rather, he might be better served by focusing his attacks on certain kinds of principles which lacked the flexibility to accommodate unusual circumstances and extreme consequences.
I'm not sure how your comments address what I said, especially not in the passage you quoted. But on their own merit, I'd point out that consequentialism needs an articulation of its own in terms of principles in order to be taken as a true moral theory and not simply a theory of the good. This is why Mill spoke of acting in ways that tended towards the good; moral rules need to inform our conduct -- to help us to decide what we ought to do -- and are empty if they apply only in retrospect.
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