Ethical evaluation of outcomes vs actions

Question

Consider two ethical questions:

(1) Is action A more or less ethical than action B?

(2) Is outcome A more or less ethical than outcome B?

Question 1 is the focus of normative ethics. Question 2 seems to be a topic within meta-ethics, but my understanding is that meta-ethics is far broader than just comparing outcomes. Question 2 also seems related to the normative theory of consequentialism, however question 2 is not a normative question.

Is there a field within ethics that focuses on questions along the lines of “question 2”?

Edit:

I realized I need to clarify what I mean by “outcome”. I’m thinking of an “outcome” as a state of the world than can be considered independently of any person’s actions. Using the Trolley problem as an example, I would like to consider the action of the operator who can move the lever (i.e. moving lever to divert train, or not moving lever) as a separate question from the outcome (i.e. lever was moved and 1 person was killed, lever was not moved and 5 people were killed). It seems to me that one can hold an opinion on the ethics of these outcomes independently from how one judges the actions of the operator.

As a more extreme example, we could let outcome A be the state of the world as it is today, and let outcome B be the state of the world after being hit by a meteor that kills all life. Are there approaches to evaluating whether outcome A is more "good" than outcome B?

Answer 1

The terms normative ethics and meta-ethics can be slippery at times. However, in general both 1 and 2 that you have listed would fall more into the normative ethics side of things. To answer your immediate question, topic 2 is called value theory. Value theory concerns the moral value of states-of-affairs (what you have called outcomes). It is worth noting, however, that actions are also a special case of states of affairs when they are considered in an agent-neutral way. That is, if the action of murdering is morally bad (as a state of affairs), then more value is produced by an agent murdering one innocent to prevent the murder of five innocents. However, this may not imply that such an action is morally right from an agent-centric perspective.

To address the background confusion about normative ethics vs meta-ethics. Meta-ethics deals with questions such as what are the nature of moral obligations or moral goods (i.e., as opposed to what is good or what is our duty). Basically you can think of meta-ethics as philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology applied to the subject of morality. Normative ethics is about the actual content of morality.

That said, some philosophers more so that others have attempted to link the two by arguing for normative ethical conclusions from meta-ethical premises. Certainly one's meta-ethics can sometimes influence what kinds of argumentation one finds convincing in normative discussions. To take an obvious example, a philosopher with a meta-ethics that grounds moral truth in God's commandments will tend to use a very different form of argumentation than a philosopher with a meta-ethics that grounds moral truth in human biology (not to say those are the only two options!).

However, often the differences in meta-ethical framework to not line up neatly with differences in normative claims. People have argued for normative positions such as utilitarianism, egalitarianism, contractualism, rights theories, etc. on many different meta-ethical foundations. In my master's thesis, I argued that there is a methodological convergence of all the main plausible meta-ethical frameworks around reflective equilibrium. Thus, in contemporary normative theory, meta-ethics is less important than it was considered to be in the middle of the 20th Century.

Answer 2

Roughly speaking, you describe the demarcation line between deontological and consequentialist ethics.

Deontological ethics roughly evaluate an action by the primary reason the person had to do it according to certain principles. Deontology literally means the study of duties and they generally hold that there are certain actions that are inherently good and others that are inherently bad.

Consequentialist ethics do not evaluate the action itself but only the potential or actual outcomes and ascribe the value to the action accordingly.

Therefore, you basically ask for consequentialist ethics. For starters, you should read the corresponding SEP article to get an overview of the different flavours and authors understood under this umbrella term.

Under the first link, in the first section after the introduction, you can also find valid criticisms of consequentialism, for example that in order to judge the value of any action accurately, we'd basically need to be omniscient: no matter whether we take personal feelings of well-being, overall utility, or more obscure things like biological appropriateness as a criterion for the evaluation of consequences, we always have a hard time to know what exactly the impact of our action compared to its alternatives will actually be.

Answer 3

No what is right and wrong in a UNIVERSAL sense is what MORALITY is about --NOT Ethics. So you are confusing the terminology as most common folk do. Ethics as a practical field always has a committee making the decision yes or no? What qualifies those people in the first place? Secondly are those people chosen from all walks of life or from the upper part of life? It seems practically hard to find low status people on an ethical committee.

You need to STOP thinking what that Ethics is about right & wrong for all people as you do. A distinct committee determines right & wrong for each field like military ethics, medical ethics, business ethics, legal ethics, and so on. If there were such a THING as right and wrong in ETHICS why are there distinct types of Ethics like I just listed above? There is not different types of MORALITY. There is ONE MORALITY. The ethical rules in one location does not necessarily apply everywhere else. A moral theory is supposed to apply everywhere simultaneously. AGAIN I mention abortion: if pro life advocates are correct that abortion is "murder" then they mean no place should allow abortion not just NY or Texas. EVERYWHERE on EARTH the proposition would be true. Ethics does not do that! Ethics =some places Earth the rule may hold & morality = everywhere on Earth.

Yes Morality does fall under a subject named "Normative Ethics" but the Ethics part of the name is not used in the same sense. You also have Meta-Ethics wrong. Meta- Ethics is about the semantics used in moral arguments & not the application of how to use the decisions in reality. So unless your topic is semantic you will not need Meta-Ethics.

If you desire the practical side of what to do when a decision is made you are looking for APPLIED ETHICS.