Complexity of Consequences

The plurality of "consequences" is not incidental: an action may, and generally does, have multiple consequences. The act of building a fire may have the consequence of producing heat, but it also produces light, consumes fuel, and emits smoke. On a small scale, the additional consequences may seem irrelevant, but when the scale increases, the consequences become more significant: by building numerous, large fires over a long period of time, the consumption of fuel and emission of smoke can have significant impacts on the environment.

My sense is that, in considering actions, the entirety of the consequences of that action should be taken into consideration. One of the fundamental flaws I have noticed in other sources is that an action is considered to be ethical or unethical due to one specific consequence, ignoring all of the other consequences of that action. It is also my sense that the multiplicity of consequences makes evaluating ethics complex: if some of the consequences are good, and others are bad, assessing the rightness of the action necessitates a great amount of consideration.

To further the complexity, an action is not taken in isolation. To return to the previous example, the act of building a fire requires other actions to be undertaken in advance (one must gather fuel and choose a location) as well as necessitating other actions in arrears (it could reasonably be suggested that an individual who creates a fire must also extinguish it, dispose of the ashes, and restore the site - though whether these are necessary is arguable).

I expect this will require quite a few entries to address these considerations. For the present, the point seems to be that a given action has multiple consequences, and the process of evaluating an action must strive to be comprehensive in consideration of all of these consequences.

However, the evaluation of consequences is not as simple as a checklist. The practice of making "lists" of outcomes, good and bad, and deciding that the longer list "wins" is imprecise, as there is the matter of the degree of impact. One cannot consider any positive impact ("by lighting a fire, I provided warmth") to be the equivalent of any negative impact ("by lighting a fire, I have burned down my neighbor's house"). All consequences are not equal - though the evaluation of the degree of rightness or wrongness of action is dependent on the determination of right and wrong, which is a topic that has been postponed.