How Being a Consequentialist Ethicist Was the Ruin of Dr. Jekyll

I remember the first time I came across the story of Jekyll and Hyde. It was my first day at Governor’s School for the Arts freshman year of high school and I was reveling in the excitement of spending my next four years in the musical theater department. What I find most fascinating about musicals is that their stories can range in capturing almost every essence of human life, including the battle between good and evil. There, on that first day of school, we watched Jekyll and Hyde the Musical, and it was then that I was introduced to the story that I am now encountering again, but this time in a different light. The question that stems from the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—which also happens to be the question we have been observing these past few weeks—is this: “Who’s to say what’s right?” In other words, “How do we decide what is right or what is wrong?” Throughout this time, I will interpret the classic tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and speak of the ways it gives light to the issue of moral decision-making.

As soon as the novel begins, it doesn’t take long for the reader to gather the wicked character of Mr. Hyde. On just the second page, Mr. Enfield begins telling the tale of Mr. Hyde trampling over the young girl as he remembers it. Just from this short story, one can gather that Mr. Hyde is not the most pleasant man to be around, both in his behavior and outer appearance. It seems to those who encounter him that they are staring directly at the face of pure evil, and in a way, they are. As the story progresses, we start to make question of who exactly this Hyde character is. We know that he has a personal relationship with Dr. Jekyll, but as to why, we do not. In fact many people, including Mr. Utterson, are baffled to understand why a man of honor like Dr. Jekyll would associate himself with Hyde, let alone mention him in his will. We later discover that their relationship goes much deeper than a man and his desired successor. In fact, it becomes much more complex than that.

Dr. Jekyll, for the sake of preserving his moral character, set out on a series of experiments, which ultimately lead to the creation of his absolute immoral alter ego, Mr. Hyde. As this relates to normative ethics, we could say that Dr. Jekyll embarked on this journey as a consequentialist ethicist—someone who evaluates their actions based on how well they will benefit. In this particular case, the creation and existence of Mr. Hyde was rooted in Dr. Jekyll’s desire to completely separate the good and evil that lived in him into two physical entities. And while that seemed like something that would benefit Dr. Jekyll at the time, it only gave rise to his demise. The more time Dr. Jekyll spent embodied in his evil double, Mr. Hyde, the more power he gave to his immoral desires. As he fed his pleasures secretively thinking he could get away with having the best of both worlds, his own experiment started to fail him. It wasn’t long before Mr. Hyde took full control over the mind that once housed Dr. Jekyll.

What this story tells us, although fictional, is that there are extreme consequences in living a double life. One may successfully get away with it for some time, but after a while, those secrets will come back to haunt you. This novel captures one of the downsides to consequentialist ethics by showing us how dangerous it can be to crave final results. With that said, had Dr. Jekyll taken a virtue ethics approach and focused more on understanding his personal habits of character, as opposed to disguising them, this tragic story could have been prevented. But for many of us, it takes trial and error to understand how we thrive as moral beings. Unfortunately for Jekyll, his lesson came a little too late.