The Four-Square Model

Understanding all of our choices is not always easy.

We'll be developing tools for doing so over the course of this blog, and the Four-Square Model is the very simplest one. It's used often in terms of religion, on the subject of Heaven. To eliminate the problem of determining whether God exists or not, it examines all possibilities and compares them. A lengthy but simple method.

	Heaven does not exist	Heaven does exist
You pray	Consequence: wasted time.	Consequence: ultimate bliss.
You do not pray	Consequence: nothing.	Consequence: ultimate suffering.

After ranking the consequences in terms of importance, it becomes obvious that prayer is the preferable action; wasting your time is preferable to enduring ultimate suffering, after all. 

This does not mean you should adhere to prayer. This method has its own problems, and fails to adequately summarize the real issues at work here. Being a simple tool, it has its flaws. 

It is, however, good enough for our purposes.

Now, we're going to use it to evaluate our premise of morality.

	Your action fosters happiness	Your action does not foster happiness
You take action	Happiness.	Unhappiness.
You do not take action	Nothing.	Nothing.

We can thus call taking action when it fosters happiness "good" and taking action when it does not "evil," though this only applies if you know with some certainty the outcome.

	You believe it's a good action	You believe it's not a good action
You succeed	Happiness.	Unhappiness.
You do not succeed	Nothing.	Nothing.

Fairly simple.
However, it's more complicated than that. The bottom row could be rewritten as "No happiness" and "No unhappiness," respectively. Or, by our moral standard, "evil" and "good." But we know intuitively that not succeeding in a task--if we don't intentionally choose the outcome--is neither good nor evil, despite whatever outcome may result. It's simply lucky. And luck does not an entrance into heaven make.
Thankfully, our moral definition manages to account for this.The more rigorous definition states
"Any action that is begun under the reasonable assumption it will cause more happiness than harm for all beings, including the possibility of its outcome from failure to success..."
The key phrases being "begun" and "possibility of its outcome."
If you begin an immoral action but fail to succeed in it, that is still immoral. This is something that we also know intuitively.

More complicated tests are, of course, on the way. But this is the first tool in our logical arsenal and as such should be a fairly simple one. We'll see other ways it fails to perform, soon.