Each Sunday night, I “mentor” a group of college students from a local college as part of a campus ministry program which works to instill good spiritual habits in college-age kids. We meet as a large group after evening Mass, then split into small groups, each headed by a mentor. I am one such mentor, and have 5 men in my group.

The conversations are often difficult to get started - my students have much on their minds (midterms, sports, hormones, hormones, hormones). So, last night, rather than trying the “let’s all talk about whatever) approach (which generates interesting conversations about how this professor is vs. this other one), I elected to ask a direct question - namely, “How do we analyze any act as to whether it is bad or good?” (I like to begin with light questions.)

This question shook a couple of the five out of their torpor, and one gave the interesting response, “It depends on what happens,”  to which the others generally agreed and sank back into lethargy. I asked him to clairify, in that he meant whether an action was good or bad depended on the outcome after the action, to which he assented.

I found this quick response curious. After a moment, I then asked him whether he thought there were any actions that might be wrong independent of the outcome? He responded equally quickly, “Sin” (as a good Catholic ought). I mentioned that “sin” was a rather broad category. But, then asked if it would be wrong for me to throw a mustard bottle at him, even though I missed entirely, and he was not injured. He thought that it might indeed be wrong. We did not get a chance to proceed farther, as there was a reflection talk coming up, and we stopped with those thoughts. However, I do not expect that many of the other students will feel too differently than this one.

Philosopher John Haldane said in essence that we live in an age of hedonistic consequentialism, or something like it in the utilitarian mode. In essence, this is the combination of the view above, that the good or evil of an act lies in it’s outcome (consequentialism), and the view that view that whether an outcome is good or bad depends upon some formulation or variant of whether it makes the viewer or recipient of the action happier, or causes them pain, or reduces their pain, etc. (hedonism). This hedonistic consequentialism involves a closely-related individualism, at least in the United States, which states that no person can judge another person’s pleasure or pain, such that there is no objective standard for pleasure or pain (a utilitarian calculus, as it has been called).

This plays out in interesting and potentially frightening ways. I take as my example two instances in the academic world this past year. One at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, the other more recently at Brandeis University. At IU-PUI, a janitor was reading a book on his lunch break entitled, ”Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan.” He was accused first of reading something like pornography at work, then the school itself accused him of racial insensitivity, based on an anonymous complaint. In a letter, a school official noted, “‘You used extremely poor judgment by insisting on openly reading the book related to a historically and racially abhorrent subject in the presence of your black co-workers.” The janitors pleas that the book was about defeating prejudice went unheard, and it wasn’t until the Wall Street Journal picked up the story that the school apologized. The second matter is still ongoing at Brandeis University, where a professor of fifty years used the term “wetback” in class to describe derogatory ways in which Mexican-Americans were treated. Someone complained, and Brandeis said that they believed the professor was guilty of racial harassment, and placed a monitor in his classes.

I think these two incidents illustrate the more visible results of hedonistic consequentialism, but I think this reasoning underlies many of the decisions made personally and governmentally in our world. Examples are not to difficult to come by (as I have illustrated above), and I think they would be easily reached by any person reading the daily news.