Do I Make a Difference?

Let’s start with a story from the “good old days.” Imagine that I used to run a factory, from which I periodically released some of the poisonous waste (by-products of the manufacturing process) into the stream which ran behind the plant. The stream traveled down to the nearby village, where some of the water was drunk by a girl who died from the poison. Obviously enough, this is not at all a good story from the standpoint of morality, nor from the standpoint of the victim. But it is, in its way, a satisfying story from the perspective of consequentialist moral theory, for it is an example which can be straightforwardly handled in familiar consequentialist terms. Had I not released the waste into the stream, the girl would not have drunk poison, and so would not have died prematurely. Which is to say: the results would have been better had I acted differently; so my act was wrong. To be sure, not everyone finds this consequentialist analysis an adequate account of why it was wrong for me to act as I did. But my concern here is not to convince anyone of the general plausibility of this basic consequentialist account of right and wrong. Rather, my goal is to examine a different sort of case, a case where it is typically thought that the standard consequentialist analysis yields what is clearly the wrong answer. We’ll turn to a few examples of the sort of case I have in mind in a moment. But before that, let me clarify a few points.