The Definition of Good Will Not Hold Still

Suppose you adopt a consequentialist definition of good — the most good for the most people — and consider the hard work done. It is not. Serious problems remain, and they are not the usual objections about trolleys.

Good Changes With Technology

Start with the one that surprised me most.

As lifespans lengthen, what counts as good changes with them. If you live to forty, getting into a car carries a certain risk against a certain benefit, and the trade is reasonable. If you live to two hundred, the same journey risks a hundred and sixty additional years, and the arithmetic is completely different. The same object is sensible for one kind of creature and reckless for another, and the only difference is life expectancy.

Antibiotics work the same way. So does anything that changes what a life is worth in the actuarial sense.

Which means the definition of good is downstream of technology. Not our understanding of good — the thing itself. The correct answer to "should you take this risk" changes when medicine changes, without anybody's values shifting at all.

Good Does Not Aggregate Cleanly

Is it better to do a small good for two people or a large good for one? The consequentialist framing assumes these are commensurable, and in practice nobody can say at what exchange rate.

Does the age of the beneficiary count? Most people's intuitions say yes, and no principled account of why survives examination.

Good Is Context-Dependent

What is good for one society at one moment is not good for another elsewhere. Most goods cause harm in some other context, and there is no neutral vantage from which to weigh the contexts against each other.

This is not relativism, which I do not accept. It is the observation that the same act has different consequences in different settings, and consequences are what we said we were counting.

Good in the Short Run Can Be Harm in the Long Run

This one has real practical weight.

You intervene in a specific society at a specific moment. You implement the right solution — genuinely the right one, by every measure available at the time. And the result is that the society never changes, because the pressure that would have forced it to change has been relieved.

Doing good has forestalled something better. This is not a hypothetical; it is a recurring pattern in development aid, in welfare design, and in foreign policy, and it is nearly impossible to predict in advance.

Good for Whom?

The last problem, and the deepest.

What benefits the individual can damage the collective. Religion is one instance: it plausibly provides real comfort to a person while degrading the epistemic condition of the society. Agriculture is another and stranger case — it supported far larger populations while making the average individual shorter, sicker, and harder-worked than the foragers who preceded them.

So "the most good for the most people" contains an unresolved ambiguity at its centre. Most good for individuals, or most good for the collective? These come apart routinely, and the formula does not say which it means.

What I Take From This

Not that ethics is impossible. That the answer is always more complicated than the philosophical investigations suggest, and that a framework which produces clean answers is probably producing them by ignoring one of the above.

The honest position is that we are estimating, under uncertainty, with a target that moves as our technology moves, in contexts that do not generalise, over timescales where our interventions have effects we cannot predict.

That is not a counsel of despair. It is a description of the actual problem, and it is a better starting point than a formula that pretends the problem is smaller than it is.