Results as Guide to Action

The results-based or teleological approach judges ethical worth by an action’s consequences. Because this standard is frequently applied to international affairs, U.S. power on a global scale makes it especially important to understand.

In results-based reasoning’s most familiar form—utilitarianism—ethical action means utility maximization, defined as society’s net benefit over harm. An excessively simplistic formulation would have it that the ends justify the means, but Figure 5.1 sounds the imperative warning against this caricature. More sophisticated formula- tions speak on behalf of impartiality and benefiting all concerned. John Stuart Mill argued, “As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.”

Variations within the results-based approach stem from the good to maximize happiness or pleasure and whether the rule or the act drives the utility calculation. Ac- cording to rule utilitarianism, “Each act, in the moral life, falls under a rule, and we are to judge the rightness or wrongness of the act, not by its consequences, but by the con- sequences of its universalization—that is, by the consequences of the adoption of the rule under which this act falls”. Rule utilitarianism begins with the greatest good but generalizes it as a rule across society and time by developing a rule to balance immediate needs with future needs. However, act utilitarianism looks at an act in terms of its immediate consequences for the greatest good. “An act utilitarian judges the rightness or wrongness of actions by the goodness and badness of their consequences”