Let me add that in light of commitment to our mutual best interests I am not focused on consequences but on the sheer value of loving relationships per se. A person who loves another for the sake of the other doesn’t focus on such economic transactions or quid pro quo receiving; rather, such a person seeks the good of the other beause s/he loves the other.

With respect to our general disagreement about consequentialism and the status of rights: I began wondering this morning how your view will work in the context of theodicy. I understand you to be saying that individual rights are inviolable and genuinely basic. Of course, “rights” do not describe the way a person must be treated, but the way a person should be treated (which is obvious because people’s rights are not always honored).

What then, are we to make of a God who sits by while people’s rights are perpetually trampled on? The direction almost everyone goes in theodicy is to point to a greater good served by God’s allowance of people’s rights being violated.

But, I don’t see how your view allows such a maneuver. If the violation of those rights is a basic evil, which cannot be justified by consequentialism, then how do you account for it?

It’s been an awfully long time since I last studied Mill. (Not since college in fact) However as I recall the problem, which is what you might have been referring to earlier, is over exception to rules. As I recall (but can’t really prove) Mill allowed for some exceptions to say the murder rule based upon context. The question then was how many exceptions there were and whether those had exceptions. Put an other way if there are too many rules it collapses into act-utilitarianism. As I recall though the way critics put this doesn’t do justice to Mill’s own views.

It really depends upon how one deals with exceptions.

So my answer is, yes, I believe most consider Mill a rule-utilitarian and I believe he introduced the notion. (As I said it’s been years since I last read Bentham or Mill’s two classic essays)

I agree with your assessment of what I am doing in my critique. By the way, I don’t know if there is a consensus opinion contrary to my reading, but I always understood Mill to be an act-utilitarian rather than a rule-utilitarian. I thought rule-utilitarianism was cooked up later to deal with perceived weaknesses in Bentham/Mill. Do most consider Mill to be a rule-utilitarian?

According to the rule-utilitarian you act according to the rules. It might hurt in this specific instance but would be better overall.

What you espouse isn’t an objection to rule-utilitarianism that is a logical problem. You just think it wrong. You’re critiquing it in terms of act-utilitarianism. But that’s not necessarily a failing of rule-utilitarianism. (Although I personally tend to see this as a problem, which is why I reject Mill)

if the events involve people, then how do you parse it?

I can see I haven’t made myself clear, let me try to clarify. You seem to be focusing in on the problem of how we should choose one course of action over another. That is not what I am talking about when I make a distinction between people and events. I tried to hint at my approach to decision making in the last paragraph of the post. When I am making a distinction between people and events, I have in mind something more like how God judges people verses events.

The exercise of a free will is a different thing, altogether, than an event. An event which involves people is still an event. A person falling off a bridge is an event. Even a decision is an event (in the way I am using the word). So ultimately, a decision was the right one or the wrong one based on the consequences of the decision. But, that is different than the person doing the deciding, the agent, the free will that distinguishes people from things. The agent is not praiseworthy or blameworthy based on the consequences of their decision. While the decision is right or wrong based on the consequences, the person deciding was morally praiseworthy or blameworthy based on their intent. So, take your example:

If I must choose to divert a train to save 10 people and diverting it will definitely kill another who otherwise would live, the situation necessarily involves both events and people. How do you decide?

As the person who must choose what to do about the train, you should try to evaluate which of your available options is best. You may consider which option is most likely to lead to more deaths. If the train is full of convicts, you may consider the relative worth of the lives of those on the train verses those who will die otherwise. I think it is both appropriate and inevitable that we will consider both deontological and consequentialist arguments and try to weigh them the best that we can.

You will probably have a hard time deciding what to do about the train, but when God looks down and judges your excercise of agency as being either praiseworthy or blameworthy, he will do so based on your motivations and intents. When he looks down and judges the event, he will decide if diverting the train was the better or worse option based on the consequences of both options. So, that is how I parse it.

You say that consequentialist theories cannot guide our conduct, but that is simply not true. We routinely make moral decisions after reflecting on the consequences of one choice vs. another. Our perceived duties cannot perfectly guide our actions any better than consequentialism because sometimes duties conflict and sometimes we have no obvious duty to guide us. All theories are imperfect in guiding conduct, not just consequentialism. In practice, both deontological and consequentialist considerations are part of our moral intuitions (which are what we really trust anyway).

Finally, I must respectfully disagree with your characterization of the penal substitution theory:

You in fact assume this Penal theory if you believe suffering is necessary for salvation.

I just flat disagree with that statement. Penal substitution refers to a specific mechanism of atonement in which Christ takes our place (substitution) and his suffering pays for our sins (penal). The simple claim that the suffering was an unavoidable part of what Jesus did to save us in no way entails penal substitution. As you are well aware, the necessity of Christ’s atonement is attested to throughout the scriptures (e.g. “there must be an atonement made, or else all mankind must unavoidably perish” (Alma 34:9)). I understand that in your theory the suffering of Christ was not instrumental in saving us, which is fine. However, saying that Christ could not have saved us without suffering (I think we both agree with this) does not entail penal substitution. That relatively benign claim was the basis of the question I posed about the atonement in #26.

I have layed out my meta-ethics in chapter 3 of vol. 2. It is an agape theory. We have a duty to do what realizes our mutual flourishing for the sake of the other persons as the unique persons they are. I would never compromise human rights for the benefit of the crowd. I wouldn’t murder a young black man and presume to be the one to judge who lives and who dies in such situations. I wouldn’t sacrifice an innocent person (I’m not Jack Bauer).

As you know I believe that Jesus’ suffering was a consequence of his free choice to enter into relationship with us, but not a necessary condition for our salvation. You in fact assume this Penal theory if you believe suffering is necessary for salvation. He is not obligated to enter into relationship with us — it is a matter of choice made out of love and not duty. Further, the joy of the relationship outweighs the pain of being in relationship with us because the value of loving relationships is incommensurate on my view.

In the end you base the goodness of an act on whether one meant well. You do that because you admit the moral calculus is just beyond us most of the time. That means that the goodness of an act, for pragmatic reasons, must be based on something other than consequences — it is based on the goodness of our motives and will. But the goodness of motives and will rather than consequences is a deontological consideration. So because consequential theories in fact cannot accurately guide our conduct because it takes too long, we don’t have the necessary information and so forth, you recognize that in fact we don’t rely on consequentialism and instead we must resort to the goodness of the will from which we act. That means that pragmatically we must be deontologists and not consequenatialists. To the extent ethics are a pragmatic guide to conduct, therefore, your view is internally inconsistent.

Does that explain it?

You didn’t answer the question of whether human rights are basic in your view. If they are basic in the sense that you are suggesting, then why are they not recognized as such? As you mentioned in #12, the really difficult moral dilemmas involve conflicts between individual rights and public interests. Why would these dilemmas be difficult if human rights are basic and unassailable? I suggest that they would not be.

My example about Jesus suffering doesn’t assume the penal substitution theory in the least; it merely assumes that Jesus’ suffering was necessary to our salvation. The question I asked is whether Jesus was morally obligated to do so. Was his choice the most morally correct course of action?

Why do you say good intentions are a deontological consideration? Are you going to categorize “having good intentions” as a duty? It seems a bit tautological to say that morality is duty based and one of those duties is to be moral. The reason I don’t think my position is incoherent is that I do not agree with your first point in #12 that people are events. The fundamental difference between people and events (due to the mystery of free will) makes moral judgments about people fundamentally different than moral judgments about events. That is what I am arguing.

Your argument about Jesus suffering for the rest of us assumes the Penal Substitution theory that I thought you jettisoned long ago precisely because of its unjust results.

I suggest that if you are really a consequentialist then you are paralyzed by the paralysis of analysis in moral decision making. There is always more to consider than can be considered and in the end you will reduce it to having good intentions like you do in your post — but that is a deontolgoical consideration! I believe your position is internally incoherent for that reason.

I am satisfied that consequentialist constraints will justify basic rights as a rule. I acknowledge those basic rights as a very important good, but I am not committed to protecting them at all cost. Are you? If one person could save civilization by untold suffering, would that person be morally obligated to do so?

William James raises this question in an effort to show that individual rights are so unassailable that even in such a case, we could not condone the untold suffering of one person to save all. I don’t think the answer is so obvious. After all, the entire plan of salvation is based on Jesus doing this exact thing. One interesting question is: Given that Jesus was the only one able to save all mankind, was he morally obligated to do it despite the tremendous person sacrifice? I don’t know the answer, but I think the answer is far from obvious.

So, it seems you are arguing against consequentialism on the grounds that it does not guarantee human rights, giving them absolute preference over other considerations, but I don’t think that is an obvious requirement of a moral theory.