Keywords of the Moral Life: Consequences

Sometimes, the Bad Chickens Roost in the Good Coops

The rain falls on the just and the unjust. Sometimes, consequences are judgments. Sometimes, they’re invitations.

Every Action Matters: Waking Up to a Moral World

In evaluating a moral action, the question of ends is unavoidable. Every action worth thinking about has an end in mind, and this is what distinguishes moral actions from any other kind of action. If I sneeze while driving, this may have devastating consequences for myself or others, but it isn’t an immoral action to sneeze, but if I’m playing on my phone and run a red light, the looking-at-my-phone-ness is wrong precisely because it was intended.¹

And so, quite literally, any action we take with an intended end—whether choosing to wash my clothes, or to speak harshly to the dog or to cheat on your taxes—is subject to this kind of moral inquiry. The kinds of things done as unconscious behaviors (and here we’re getting kind of blurry again—does chewing my food count? Does that bite count? What about this one?) aren’t what we’re talking about, but the actions and decisions we make with intended ends in mind.

This sounds pretty paralyzing, right? That every action we take with an intent is a moral action?

Well, yes, but bear with me: I begin this way to defuse the notion that only bad ends are the ones we should pay attention to.

If every action—both playing on my phone while driving, and choosing to drink my coffee while typing—are actions with intent, then they all invite me to consider what kinds of ends they have in view. I might try to justify my phone use as multi-tasking, or drinking my coffee while typing as therapeutic, but then I have to ask whether these are good ends: is responding to an email while driving 60 MPH justifiable or needed? Is drinking a second (third?) cup of coffee doing long-term damage to my nervous system for short-term benefits?

Now, it doesn’t follow, though, that the ends match the intentions.

The Chickens Always Come to Roost

This structure of our acting is unavoidable: every pool ball is intended to strike the eight ball, and sometimes, you get the outcome you want from an action. But sometimes, you miss the eight ball, jam up the cue ball in the corner and look like a genius on accident. Sometimes, you’ll get away with that email, and sometimes, that innocent cup of coffee will wind up on your laptop.

This, of course, is the problem with evaluating whether or not an action is moral simply by the outcomes: sometimes, good intentions for good ends go awry, and you sink the cue ball anyway. But sometimes, bad intentions for bad ends have deferred judgments, and you get really good at typing with one hand on the wheel. To say that an action is good or bad purely because of the effects it produces is to attribute far too much to our own agency, and far too little to the millions of other factors in play: a smooth road with no wind, that it was a short email you wanted to write, a bored auditor looking over your taxes.

That we get away with it, and sometimes get away with it for years on end has little to do with whether or not the action is good or bad, for the ends of our action work on us either way. The cheater becomes better at cheating and eventually, enjoys it. The driving texter convinces themselves that they’re pretty good at this, nay, very good at this. But sometimes, good intentions don’t get away with it: doing laundry at night because you want to honor your family’s need for clean clothes leads to a bad night’s sleep, or taking on that extra assignment at work leads to you being seen as the Team Player.²

(Like half the stock photos of billiards involved a woman laying on the table. This seems like a terrible billiards strategy at best.)

Roosting Chickens, Good and Bad

I’m problematizing the link between our actions and outcomes for no other reason than this is how the world is. The rain, we are told, falls on the just and the unjust, which enables the unjust to grow amazing Dahlias in the Fall, alongside the just. The rain makes it possible for the just to act prudently with their consumption, and to offset the gluttony of their neighbor.

The consequences of our intentions, in other words, are only part of the point: the larger point is that in intending good things, we become people who desire to intend good things. It doesn’t obviate the knuckleheads or the distracted drivers. It doesn’t eliminate chance or folly or fortune. There is no golden thread between pure intentions and bountiful outcomes. In fact, evil frequently flourishes in the world when the just do what they ought: people living modestly leads to the unjust making a meal out of their leftovers.³

And so, reader, refuse to read too much into consequences. I don’t say read nothing into them, but to consider that the furthest ends of our actions are frequently out of our hands. This is not a reason, I don’t think, to quit doing good, but to recognize that it’s a good thing that there’s abundant rain that can be squandered, abundant time given for the unjust to repent. For the just can receive good outcomes to their actions in gratitude, and the painful outcomes as an opportunity to be patient, to trust, and wait for the next rain which will come. But the unjust get the worst consequence of all: they have to live being hollow men in empty suits, deflated and crumpled when the outcomes don’t match their intents.

1. This gets us into some really interesting questions about the role of addiction in moral judgments: actions done out of addictions are still damaging, but are done with a compromised sense of freedom that bears on how we judge the act and the actor. For a fascinating read, see Kent Dunningston’s book here.

2. More and more, I find myself suspicious of appeals to being a “team player”. It’s the same logic of “make sure you love your work” which enables employers to pay workers less because of the intangible benefits of Meaningful Work. I can’t eat intangible benefits, and more importantly, my children who eat more than I do can’t eat them.

3. Consider here all of the histories which begin something like “the unintended consequences of X”, talking about how these seemingly good things in the world are actually malicious because they produce bad things. These should actually revise their thesis on this basis: pernicious things can only be unintended results if the intended actions were good actions. I’m looking at you, historians of the Protestant Reformations.