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The consequential versus the inconsequential
If I am, as my interlocutors at 4W describe me, a moral consequentialist (which I’m told is something bad, though I’m too thick-headed to understand why), then what are they—moral inconsequentialists? Shall we then just call them inconsequential for short? Now, if I am a moral consequentialist, here is what I understand the term to mean. Normally, if you shoot down an airliner with 50 passengers aboard, that would be an act of mass murder. But if the airliner has been hijacked by terrorists and loaded with an A-bomb and is headed for Washington D.C. and will destroy the city unless you shoot it down first, then shooting down the airliner is not an act of mass murder, but a just, rational, and moral act of self-defense. But to the Christian sect at 4W, shooting down the plane in the second scenario is just as morally monstrous an act of mass murder as shooting it down in the first scenario. In short, this dread moral consequentialism is the same normal process of moral reasoning by which, for example, we distinguish between a homicide that is murder and a homicide that is justified self-defense. If the 4W folks don’t understand me, let them take a look at the penal code of any state of the Union.
Meanwhile Paul Cella at 4W has posted a new entry summing up the debate so far as he sees it. I have replied. Email entry |