Viliam_Bur comments on Philosophical Landmines - Less Wrong

84 [deleted] 08 February 2013 09:22PM

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Comment author: fubarobfusco 09 February 2013 12:21:33AM 14 points [-]

What's gone wrong? "Consequentialism" is used in philosophy as a term for the view that the morality of an action depends only on the consequences of that action.

Worse, the idea of consequentialism (or "utilitarianism") is often taken by people with a little philosophy awareness to mean the view that "the ends justify the means" without regard for actual outcomes — that if you mean well and can convince yourself that the consequences of an action will be good, then that action is right for you and nobody has any business criticizing you for taking it.

What this really amounts to is not "the ends justify the means", of course, but the horrible view that "good intentions justify actions that turn out to be harmful."

Ambiguity on "ends" probably does some damage here: it originally referred to results but also came to have the sense of purposes, goals, or aims, in other words, intentions.

Comment author: Viliam_Bur 11 February 2013 09:10:11AM 2 points [-]

Thanks for making this obvious. Yes, this is the typical consequentialism strawman, but I did not notice how exactly are the meanings of the words redefined.