Does that make me a consequentialist or non-consequentialist?
One must make choices based upon knowing the probable outcomes of one's actions
I would say this is a consequentialist position.
Nubbinator brings up a good point about causality He states
Furthermore, from the consequentialist perspective, everything threatens to devolve into a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy where it is impossible to tell if an action directly caused the result, if it was merely a part in causing the end result that would have ended the same way regardless of action, or if the action had any impact at all on the subsequent action.
This is one issue I have the consequentialism. How do you dodge the causality bullet? We know things cause other things, but it's a fallacy to look at the consequences and "know" what the cause was (we call this "
post hoc, ergo proper hoc or "after this, therefore because of this". It's better put in English: Correlation does not imply causation). We can induce or abduce a probable cause based on logic but you can't know.
Then take action with either respect or indifference to the consequences.
I think this is your response to the potential issue. If I read you right, you take action based on what you think the consequences may be, but also accept the outcome without passing the buck. I would say this is one of my favorite consequentialist positions I've heard thus far, as it answers clearly a lot of the potential issues that can arise with moral luck.
I guess what I'm saying is this:
One good part about non consequentialism is that you always know what is right going into an ethical problem. a "true" consequential position would not know if they took the right action or the wrong one until they saw the consequence, which doesn't help when you're leading up to the action and trying to decide. On the flip side, this makes it much harder to figure out what is actually right.
But instead if you just take the consequences into consideration, and then don't judge yourself based on the result, it's a halfway measure. you know the action you took was the right one (regardless of a good or bad consequence).
I was reading a book once where a military person made a difficult choice in a battle. He asked his officer later if it was right or not. The officer replied that he does not second guess his people in the field. This makes a lot of sense to me, as only the guy on the ground has full access to the info, and any choice he makes must be considered. You can look at the effects and try to second guess someone in hindsight, but you can't know if another action would be better or worse from that.
In a similar way, you don't second guess your prior actions. They were made with all the information you had available, using a method that is ethical (taking into account a good outcome) and therefore they must be correct. I rather like that.
I poop
Therefore I exist
defaecare ergo sum epistemology is next month.
I am descendant from a long line of Puritans/Congregationalist/Unitarian Universalist ancestors. As such, a certain amount of guilt and self doubt have always played a large part in my sense of propriety. My conception of the morally correctness of my actions is based on the nature of my inner motives and how they are be judged by the community of my upbringing. Regardless of the outcome, my actions are morally right if my motives were morally correct. Despite having moved around the country over the years, my morals and ethical sense of right and wrong remain unchanged.
Very much non-consequential, similar to my own. You may be interested in reading Kant sometime.
