Ryan Darr's "The Best Effect"

Ryan Darr is a postdoctoral research associate in religion, ecology, and expressive culture at the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music and a lecturer in the Yale Divinity School.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Best Effect: Theology and the Origins of Consequentialism, and reported the following:

On page 99, the reader will find me in summary mode, drawing together the insights of Part I. Fortunately, these insights are among the most important of the book. I have just compared the ethical visions of the two central characters of Part I, Henry More and Richard Cumberland. Halfway down the page, I make a transition from treating More and Cumberland as distinct intellectual figures to grouping them togethes representatives of a new ethical vision. “Moving forward,” I write, “I will largely set aside More and Cumberland’s differences and focus on the shared moral vision, the consequentialist moral cosmology.”

The consequentialist moral cosmology is perhaps the most important idea of the book. It’s my name for an innovative moral vision, which is embedded in a theological cosmology, that emerges in the seventeenth century. As I explain in the final paragraph of page 99, the following three elements define the consequentialist moral cosmology:

(1) A consequentialist view of morality according to which the right action is the one that contributes most to a maximally good state of the world. (2) A view of divine morality according to which God acts according to the same consequentialist principles as rational creatures. (3) An account of divine authority over rational creatures grounded in the fact that God shares the same end as rational creatures and is best able to direct them on how to pursue it.

The dominant approach to theological ethics in the seventeenth century is one in which God and all rational creatures ought to act for the sake of the final end, which is God. I call this a theocentric moral cosmology. The innovative twist offered by the consequentialist moral cosmology is that God and all rational creatures ought to act for the sake of the best outcome – or, as Richard Cumberland terms it, the “best effect” – which is a world of maximal perfection and happiness. Here we find the first articulation of consequentialism, a view that, contrary to the popular narrative, does not begin with Jeremy Bentham but has a long theological history prior to the eighteenth-century secular variant.

So what happens to the consequentialist moral cosmology? Notice the second element above: God must also be a consequentialist. If God is morally perfect, then God must maximize the goodness of the world. And here lies the central problem. God is, after all, usually considered omnipotent. So how could the world contain so much evil and suffering? Reading ahead from page 99, the reader will find the consequentialist moral cosmology stumbling over a new and particularly pernicious version of the problem of evil.

The Page 99 Test, then, offers a genuine glimpse into the central ideas of the book. The one thing it completely misses is the more constructive ambitions of the book. Most of the book consists of a historical narrative of the rise and fall of theological consequentialism. In the conclusion, however, I shift from historian to ethicist, arguing that the history outlined in the book demonstrates both the ongoing weaknesses of a consequentialist approach to ethics and the possibility of a better way of understanding what it means to act for the sake of what is good and best.

Learn more about The Best Effect at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue