Welcome back to the Fourth Wave podcast. Today, I want to try to rebut a rebuttal someone might raise against inconsequentialism. But before we get into the rebuttal, I want to do a quick little recap for those who didn't listen through season two yet on consequentialism. So consequentialism basically says that the ends justify the means, or that the consequences of an action determine the morality of said action. So for example, lying is immoral, but if you use it to save lives, it becomes moral.

That's what consequentialism would say. Another one, aborting a fetus is immoral, but if you abort a fetus to save a mother's life in an ectopic pregnancy, than is moral. And of course, our list could go on. We have all of these sorts of things which we call moral dilemmas. During the season though, we explored how there are double standards and that we recognize certain actions really aren't justified.

So killing someone at the bottom of a donor list so you don't both die seems like it should fit into the same category as lying to save lives, right? Two people die or you kill one and only one person dies, right? And we recognize that that that's not right. Or killing and cannibalizing your children in a siege or famine like we see in, I think it was second Kings, that just doesn't seem right. It seems a little bit wrong there.

Pretty clearly so, right? Killing your kid and trading with a neighbor who's then gonna kill their kid so you can all eat and live another day. Yes, many lives are saved but is that really moral? So in season two, which I think is probably one of my favorite seasons just because I think that it is the root of so much. We unpacked the inner workings of consequentialism, and we handled some rebuttals to my claim that inconsequentialism is better.

Now inconsequentialism isn't really a position, it's just a phrase that I coined to represent the antithesis of consequentialism, right? Consequentialism's opposite, basically just saying that the ends are inconsequential, like it doesn't matter what they are, the means are what are determined for us to do. And of course the ends are important. We want good ends, we want the well-being of our society and our family, but our job as Christians is to do the right thing. And I think that what you end up finding is God has created such a world in which if you do good things and you live the way you're supposed to, it doesn't mean life is gonna go smoothly, but you tend to have less friction, things tend to work out.

If everybody lives the way that God calls you to, it does work. It's just that there are a lot of people who don't live the way that God wants them to. But our job is to, like Jesus Christ, eat that cost and bear that burden and show the world what it should look like if they would also self sacrifice and love and live the right way. So some people say this position is pietistic or pharisaical, and I addressed those sorts of rebuttals at the end of season two. So I recommend that you go back and listen to the whole season, which will give you a bit more context for this episode.

However, there's a significant rebuttal to inconsequentialism which I didn't address, and I want to do that today. I came across an interesting quote from Augustine the other day while reading a fantastic book about materialism and economics. The book is called Being Consumed, and I'll link that in the show notes. So let me go ahead and start with the quote from this book, which then goes into quoting Augustine. Quote, Does this mean that the end justifies the means?

In places, it seems as though Augustine is saying so. When good and bad do the same actions and suffer the same afflictions, they are to be distinguished not by what they do or suffer, but by the causes of each. For example, Pharaoh oppressed the people of God by hard bondage. Moses afflicted the same people by severe correction when they were guilty of impiety. Their actions were alike, but they were not alike in the motive of regard to the people's welfare, the one being inflated by the lust of power, the other inflamed by love.

So, it's argued that we can have situations in where the same means are used with a view towards a different end, so different motivations, different purposes, and in one instance, it's right, it's moral, and in the other instance, it's immoral. So another way to look at it might be, take a surgeon's scalpel and an attacker's knife. They are the same thing in essence. They do the same thing. Their job is to cut open flesh.

Yet, one is used benevolently and the other is used maliciously. The same means produce different moral outcomes. Therefore, what determines the morality, at least in some instances, is the end result or the result aimed for, right? The intent. We could even take Jesus' words here when talking about lust.

To look at a woman can be done with compassion or with lust. Yet two people are both looking, one to help and one to objectify. Two people can give a coin to charity, one with generosity and the other one seeking recognition, yet the actions or means are the same. So how can inconsequentialism be true if it's clear that two identical means can produce different moral results? I think the first step to understanding this would be to recognize that means are also ends, and ends are often means.

So there's usually a chain of causation, and this chain of causation transforms means and ends. For an amoral example, for the end of going to the store, right, your purpose going to the store, you use the means of a car. However, for the end of moving the car, you use the means of stepping on the gas. And we can even go to the tail end of this. Well, the the means of going to the store is to for the end of purchasing groceries.

Well, that end of purchasing groceries is really for the means to your sustenance, your eating. And means and ends are really just chained sorts of things. But if we just go back to going to the store, we could trace that end of going to the store back nearly an infinite amount. There's an infinite succession of means and ends. And the same thing is true if we look at something like, let's say, lying.

Lying can be said to be a means. In Nazi Germany, we may have used lying as a means towards the end of saving Jewish lives. However, lying in itself is really an end fashioned by the means of discriminatingly selecting language. I say what I do in order that I arrange things in such a way as to construct a believable untruth. So this understanding, point number one, that really there's this chain of means and ends, and means can become ends, is going to be really important as I think there's some conflation or false equivalence going on when we talk about means and ends, and we'll get to that later.

But this, this point number one is going to be a foundational point. The second important factor we need to understand is the two types of moralities. We have things that are inherently moral and things that are situationally moral. Inherently immoral things are things grounded in or outside of the character of God. So for example, God is love, God is truth.

Not loving, not telling the truth are antithetical to who God is, therefore, they're inherently immoral, like you can't escape it no matter what. To lie, to not love is immoral because those contradict who God is. They they're just naturally against God. But then we have things which can be situationally immoral. And these are things like working on the Sabbath to save somebody.

Right? The Sabbath was this tack on that God was trying to, He's saying, Hey look, I have a gift for you. I want you to rest and I want you to just depend on Me and trust Me. And so they did, they didn't work on the Sabbath, Israel didn't plant or harvest and those kinds of, or they weren't supposed to. But if there's somebody in a ditch that needed to be saved, you could save them because God said, I didn't create this day to be legalistic, I created it for your good.

And if there's somebody who needs help, then you help him on the Sabbath. Work is not bad and so therefore you can work when it's to save somebody. The example that I use all the time is my kids and the stove. Our daughter is old enough to cook eggs on the stove but not by herself, we don't want her. She might forget to turn off the stove, she might, you know, put get oil there and there might be a fire and so we don't let her use the stove by herself.

Now, is using the stove a moral thing? No, it's not a moral act at all. It's not an immoral act, it's an amoral one. But because of who we are, our situation, how old our kid is, and the discretion that she does or does not have, we choose to say that you may not use the stove at certain times and at other times she can. So that's a situational example of morality.

So one set of morality, the inherently moral, is grounded in God's character, and the other is created by decree. So let's look again at our example for the episode, the surgeon and the attacker. So that brings us to the question of what what is cutting flesh? Is cutting flesh inherently wrong or is it situationally wrong? Cutting is obviously not inherently immoral because God had Israel Circumcise their children, though at other times, He tells them not to cut and mark their skin when they're mourning.

Inflicting pain is not the standard for determining whether something is moral or not, quite obviously because of some of God's decrees here in terms of circumcision. But also we know this like diets, religious fasting, withholding things, drugs from an addict, and other sorts of actions might cause pain, but they're not deemed morally wrong. So keeping this distinction between that which is inherently, intrinsically immoral and that which is situationally so is going to be important. Now this leads us into a third point, which is the double effect. This concept is going to be important for us to parse through this issue as well.

Just a reminder that a double effect is when you perform an action which has two consequence. So a pregnant mother who takes chemo for her cancer may have her cancer killed, but her baby might also die. That's a double effect. She's taking medicine to kill the cancer, but as a side effect, the child dies. The mother knows that that's a possibility, she doesn't want it, she doesn't intend it, and the child dies as a result.

At the same time, a mother like the one in second Kings who kills her own child for her family to eat and for her neighbors to eat, would not, that would not be considered a double effect. She sought out the life of her child. Now she didn't like it, she didn't want to have to do it, but she wanted it enough to actually do it because the lives that she weighed of her and her neighbors were more valuable than the life of her child. So the life of somebody was sought out and taken. That is not a side effect.

We might even be able to extend this, it's not a double effect, but extend this concept to other things, and we can start to draw out distinctions. So for example, let's take having sex. Having sex can be good or it can be bad. If you have sex with a spouse, it's good because it's for the end of relational intimacy, commitment, bearing children, etcetera. Things that that God determines are good.

If you have sex with another spouse, the end being pursued is lust fulfillment, excitement, ends actually produced because fulfillment and excitement aren't necessarily wrong, but because you also have relational ends like breaking up relationships, breaking up families, doing harm, losing trust, all those things, you end up with some pretty negative consequences as well. We see something similar. Worship can be good or bad, the means of worship, just like the means of sex can be good or bad. For worship, it depends on who is the object of being worshiped. If you worship God, that is good.

If you worship an idol, that is bad. So now we can look at this two different ways, right? Somebody might say, Well, see, worship as a means, it can be good or bad. Like, so the end justifies the means. But notice that we have special words for worshiping idols, that's called idolatry.

And if you change that, if you say, worshiping God or idolatry, right? We wouldn't say that those are the same things because we base them on the object in focus. Same thing with sex, right? Same thing with sex, it depends on the object in view. That's because things like sex and worship were created by God or instituted by God, and as part of what it means to do those things in the way that God created it is sex does not exist outside of this intended union, and neither does worship.

Now we can take go back and take a look at the Cancer instance with the pregnant mother. And the intended object of destruction with the mother who has cancer is the cancerous cells, though the baby might also die. With the cannibalistic family, the intended object of destruction is an innocent human being. In the former case, the death of an innocent child is not an intended end though that end might occur. In the latter case, the death of a child is a necessary end and the end in view when implementing the means.

If we go back to our very first point, that means and ends are series of other means and ends. We have to look at the whole chain here. When we look at the series of moral actions, it's clear that in the cannibalistic scenario, murder is obviously done and as a means to obtaining survival. The end of murder becomes the means to the good of saving a life. But on the chemo example, while the end of a child's death results, it is not an intended means wielded for another purpose.

And this goes back to our first point, that means can become ends and ends means. When you are wielding a means like murder which was an evil end that you fashioned to wield, then that is a problem. So with the surgeon example, the surgeon uses the means of cutting flesh or we would say surgery. Pain and death are mitigated through anesthetics and care. Cutting flesh isn't an inherently immoral action like lying or killing innocents and the object in view is health, like removing the bad or repairing the good.

In the end, I am not sure how satisfactory satisfactorily this answers, this objection. It's something that I am still thinking through, but I feel like if you take into account the chain of means and ends, and if you are able to recognize that we have two types of moralities and then you can accurately distinguish between good and bad double effects, I think that and understanding just intentions but also the objects of focus for an action, I think that helps to think through how there are some differences here that might not otherwise be observable. So, as you think about consequentialism and as you think about rebuttals against it or its application, hopefully you find this a good jumping off point for you to consider that. Anyway, that's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it.