A corrupt mind

Elizabeth Anscombe coined the word "consequentialism" in a 1958 paper, and she coined it as an accusation. In "Modern Moral Philosophy" (Philosophy 33, no. 124) she argues that a tradition running from Sidgwick onward had made one move older ethics never made: it treated every action, including the killing of an innocent person, as something to be weighed against outcomes. Her example is the judicial execution of someone known to be innocent to avert a disaster. Anyone who thinks it is even an open question whether that should be considered, she writes, "shows a corrupt mind."

That is a hard sentence, and it is aimed at the crash calculation directly. The utilitarian rule enters the passenger as a line item before anything has happened, written on an ordinary Tuesday by people who will never be in the car. Anscombe's claim is that a person of good character does not have a number for that. There are things they will not do, and the refusal is not squeamishness or a failure to think it through. It is what having a character consists of.

Notice what the objection does not say. It offers no rival calculation. It says the calculation was the mistake. A utilitarian answering it has to explain why a person willing to compute this is not worse for being willing, and "the numbers favour it" is exactly what Anscombe says a corrupt mind would reply.