Reblog: The Laws of Unintended Consequences
Lately, I’ve been interested in innocent evil, the evil that results from perfectly innocent choices people make. Moral philosophers generally fall into one of two camps, intentionalist, and consequentialist. Intentionalists argue that you have to judge moral behaviour based on intentions because we can’t predict the consequences of our actions. Consequentialists argue that you have to judge moral behaviour based on consequences because they’re what matters.
Innocent evil is, therefore, moral philosophy’s hardest problem. People with the moral intentions yielding immoral consequences.
A friend asks, isn’t innocent evil just another name for unintended consequences? That got me thinking that the innocent evil that interests me is typically the result of people not paying attention to the potential for unintended consequences, which got me thinking about compiling a list of laws of unintended consequences.