Toward a more adequate consequentialism

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2010

To consequentialise a moral theory means to account for moral phenomena usually described in nonconsequentialist terms, such as rights, duties, and virtues, in a consequentialist framework. This paper seeks to show that all moral theories can be consequentialised. The paper distinguishes between different interpretations of the consequentialiser's thesis, and emphasises the need for a cardinal ranking of acts. The paper also offers a new answer as to why consequentialising moral theories is important: This yields crucial methodological insights about how to pursue ethical inquires.

Journal of Philosophy

Philosophy, 2003

International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities

Beyond Consequentialism, 2009

The focus of this book is consequentialism, the moral theory upon which an action is morally right just in case its performance leads to the best state of affairs. The theory can with some plausibility claim a status as the default alternative in contemporary moral philosophy; moreover, its pervasive deployment in spheres such as economics, public policy, and jurisprudence is one of the striking developments of the last 150 years. It is the thesis of this book that debates concerning the challenge of consequentialism tend to overlook a fundamental challenge to consequentialism, an unresolved tension between the theory and many of its most fundamental presuppositions. An appreciation of the nature of this tension grounds the articulation of a fundamental challenge to the theory from within. This challenge is developed and sharpened through the first 4 chapters of the book. Development of this challenge to consequentialism in turn reveals that the apparent force of the challenge of consequentialism is largely illusory. Chapter 5 demonstrates that many traditional rationales offered in its support draw upon systematic misappropriations of intuitions linking rightness of actions and goodness of actions, treating them as intuitions concerning rightness of actions and goodness of overall states of affairs. Chapters 6 and 7 demonstrate that one remaining rationale, a rationale grounded in the appeal to the impartiality of morality, does not provide support for the theory; indeed, that attempts to respond to the tension within consequentialism suggest a fundamental role for an alternative to the consequentialist’s impersonal conception of impartiality, an interpersonal rather than an impersonal conception of equal concern. Unlike the consequentialist’s impersonal conception, such interpersonal impartiality can allow for the ordinary moral convictions that actions that do not promote about the best overall state of affairs are often morally permitted, and sometimes morally required.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews , 2020

In this fine collection, Christian Seidel has brought together innovative new work on consequentialism, with a special focus on the theoretical strategy of "consequentializing" agent-centered (deontological) moral theories. It is an excellent resource for anyone seeking to better understand and evaluate the conceptual foundations of consequentialism.

Theoria, 2008

there is no separate entry for "consequentialism"; the reader is referred to "utilitarianism", and this is in turn explained as "the moral theory that an action is morally right if and only if it produces at least as much good (utility) for all people affected by the action as any alternative action the person could do instead". 2 This is a sufficient starting point for my purposes in this paper. It indicates, for example, that the kind of theory I have in mind is "act consequentialism", rather than "rule consequentialism". A well-known consequentialist theory would be the hedonistic utilitarianism described in the first two chapters of G.E. Moore's Ethics; another example would be Moore's own nonhedonistic "ideal" utilitarianism proposed in the same book. 3 Moore takes (hedonistic) utilitarianism to contain the "principle" that "a voluntary action is right, whenever and only when the agent could not, even if he had chosen, have done any other action instead, which would have caused more pleasure than the one he did do". 4 Notice, however, that, for Moore, utilitarianism does not only say "that the producing of a maximum of pleasure is a characteristic, which did and will belong, as a matter of fact, to all right voluntary actions (actual or possible)", it also says that "it is because they possess this characteristic that such actions are right". 5 I follow Moore here. I take consequentialism to be an explanatory theory of moral rightness; it is neither a statement of a mere correlation between rightness and a certain empirical and/or evaluative property, nor a decision procedure to be followed in actual situations of choice. The distinction between theories of rightness and practical decision procedures is probably quite old. It appears to go back at least to Henry Sidgwick. 6 It is quite clearly

Journal of Value Inquiry, 2014

An influential objection to act-consequentialism holds that the theory is unduly demanding. This paper is an attempt to approach this critique of act-consequentialism – the Overdemandingness Objection – from a different, so far undiscussed, angle. First, the paper argues that the most convincing form of the Objection claims that consequentialism is overdemanding because it requires us, with decisive force, to do things that, intuitively, we do not have decisive reason to perform. Second, in order to investigate the existence of the intuition, the paper reports empirical evidence of how people see the normative significance of consequentialist requirements.. In a scenario study that recruited a sample which is representative of the German population in key characteristics, it finds that there is no widely shared intuition as to the excessive demandingness of consequentialist requirements, although people do find higher demands less reasonable. This is true irrespective of people’s level of formal education despite the fact that lower levels of formal education are associated with an increased likelihood of having intuitions that are consistent with the Objection. Apart from contributing in this way to the debate concerning the Overdemandingness Objection, the paper also more directly speaks to the basic discussion concerning the status and role of intuitions in moral philosophy. It discusses methodological questions relevant to the role of intuitions and ends with proposing an improved methodology to investigate intuitions that connects them to emotions in a particular way and also proposes a role for virtue.

The aim of Paul Hurley's sophisticated monograph is to ground deontological ethics on a second-personal conception of normativity. That conception has been much explored in recent work; the distinctive value of Hurley's book is not the destination, but how he gets there. His central argument is a sustained attack on consequentialism and its claim to be able to model any plausible ethical view from within its own set of assumptions. The consequentialist claims that her act utilitarianism (Hurley critiques this basic form of the view while later demonstrating that his critique generalizes to other forms of consequentialism) is grounded on common sense truisms-such as the claim that it is always right to act for the best.