In the Horus Heresy series, the Edict of Nikaea looms large as one of the setting’s most pivotal narrative events. With the Edict, the Emperor proscribed the use of Warp-derived psyker powers by the Legiones Astartes and nominally disbanded the psychically-gifted Librarius orders—at great cost both to the individual Astartes of the Librarius and to the warfighting capabilities of the Imperium as a whole.
Nevertheless, the Edict was plausibly well-motivated. Despite the Emperor’s reticence to communicate his reasons, the reader is well-informed that the widespread use of psyker gifts amongst the Astartes would have posed a grave risk of providing a beachhead for pervasive corruption of the Imperium’s elite warriors by the forces of Chaos. Assuming, then, that the Edict indeed was in accord with the consequentialist good of the Imperium, one might expect the reader to find the decision to comply with the Edict intuitively praiseworthy and the decision to defy it intuitively blameworthy. A recurring plot device in the Horus Heresy novels, though, involves a psychically gifted Astartes making the painful choice to draw on his forbidden gifts in order to save his beloved Battle Brothers during a moment of extreme crisis. These scenes generally read as instances not of blameworthy moral weakness but rather of praiseworthy moral heroism.
This poses a puzzle for rule consequentialism. How can violating a good rule ever be praiseworthy? A popular line of response to such challenges has been to argue for the inclusion of a “prevent disaster” metarule in the rule-consequentialist program. In this paper, I will argue that the case of the Edict of Nikaea offers (with epistemological qualifications) some intuitive support for this approach but at the cost of further exposing rule consequentialism to the serious criticism that it simply collapses under pressure into act consequentialism.
Author bio
Dr. Brendan T. Conuel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University in New York. His research interests include Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Physics, Metaphysics, and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Current work explores applications of Whiteheadian event-realist metaphysics to the hard problem of consciousness.
