If you were omniscient you would be a consequentialist

Darling, just don’t put down your guns yet, if there really was a God here, he’d have raised a hand by now

-Papillion, The Editors

I

Suppose you knew the consequences of all your actions completely through all time and space.

The first thing you’d realize is that your actions have so many consequences. If you raise your pinky 100 years from now there will be a completely different set of hail storms. Exactly which set of Horrific crimes occurs depends on how you twitch your little toe and unfortunately, there may be no option on which the answer is zero.

The second thing you’d realize is that you can’t help but hurt people. Given the chaotic interconnectedness of all things, the only thing you can do that won’t kill people by commission at some point is freeze in place until you die. But freezing in place until you die surely can’t be what you’re required to do, especially when there is so much good you can do by staying alive.

Rules like “don’t kill” start to seem meaningless. Rules like “don’t lie” might seem somewhat more cogent, but become odd under inspection. How relevant will concepts like “lying” feel when you trace out the path of how each word alters different beliefs both towards truth and towards falsity, misleading and rightly shaping belief alike?

II

At this point, the best attempt to defend the proposition that our omniscient being doesn’t need to be consequentialist about killing is as follows:

1. There is a distinction between what you intend and what you knowingly cause

2. You will cause numerous people to die, whatever you do

3. But you needn’t take actions that intend the death of others, for example, shooting a person.

I find this implausible.

1. You are considering all the effects of your actions out to infinity, and you know every feature of every situation that will result intimately. The people that will die or never be born, the people that will live, their joys and struggles. You can see them all so closely. From this point of view, I don’t think raising your arm to shoot and raising your arm in a way that redirects the winds over Arabia is going to seem that morally distinct to you.

2. When you do something as a side effect, it usually doesn’t enter into your calculations or plans, yet every consequence of every action will be part of your plan for the world.

III

But perhaps, even though if you were omniscient, you would be a consequentialist, you shouldn’t be a consequentialist in your current position. Perhaps non-consequentialism makes a special sense for the epistemically finite.

I simply note that any such view threatens to collapse into consequentialism, with consequentially motivated guardrails to protect your sanity or prevent you from doing harm through hubris. Such arguments are always urged against non-consequentialism, but the worry seems difficult to avoid if non-consequentialism is just a reflection of your ignorance, of the narrow slice of reality your mind inhabits.

There is a version of non-consequentialism that seems particularly well structured to survive these concerns, that of Bernard Williams. Non-consequentialism is conceived of as part of an ethics deeply embedded in personal and contingent projects. Williams writes:

"[Philosophers] repeatedly urge us to view the world sub specie aeternitatis, but for most human purposes that is not a good species to view it under".

Given that ethics is already deeply psychological and contingent in the particular way Williams understands these things, that a being outside time and space would see it differently matters little. For we see it this way.

For me though, although ethics is human in origin it aspires to eternity. Its ability to connect us with eternity, even as it is self-destructive at times, is what affirms our character as beings longing for the infinite- with projects beyond the particular.

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