Facebook and Philosophy [2010] by D.E. Wittkower

Author:D.E. Wittkower [Wittkower, D.E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
Published: 2011-02-07T06:00:00+00:00

proposed by Peter Railton.11 According to Railton’s indirect strategy—what he calls “sophisticated consequentialism”—we shouldn’t aim to be impartial in our decision-making by trying to do the most good overall. We won’t be very successful—try as we might, we’re simply not ideal observers—and we’ll probably end up alienating a lot of people and creating a lot of unhappiness, including our own. Instead, the impartial demands of morality should act as a kind of screen for evaluating our decision-making procedures, rather than as a decision-making procedure itself.

By this view, what ultimately matters is the destination (whether I’ve done the most good), not the journey (how I arrive at the decision to act the way I did). At the end of the day, I need to have done the most impartial good that I can do. But when I’m going about my daily business, I shouldn’t be thinking about which action can do the most good—instead, I should make my day-to-day decisions in ways that are much less cold and calculating. Doing this, I’m apt to do more good in the long run than if I’m always consciously trying (and failing) to do my impartial best. Like some of the critics of consequentialism discussed earlier, Railton is worried about the alienating effect of impartiality—but if we don’t need to think like an ideal observer in our day-to-day decision-making, there’s no longer anything alienating about impartiality. As long as we arrive at living the sort of life that a good impartialist would endorse, for Railton and other indirect consequentialists, it really doesn’t matter how we get there.

One mystery here, however, is how we know we’re living good lives from an impartial point of view if we’re not actively trying to be impartial in our day-to-day decision-making. Railton wants us to get the best of consequentialism (doing the most good) without all of the alienating baggage that seems to come with the theory.

But how exactly do I have any confidence that my partial decision-making procedures have led me to a good life from an impartial point of view? And even more mysterious is how exactly this indirect strategy squares with friendship, in the face of the empirical fact that there’s just so much good that could be done for so many people.

11 Peter Railton, “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality,”

Philosophy and Public Affairs 13:2 (Spring 1984), pp. 134–171.

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