Contextualism

Although consequentialism is not fundamentally concerned with such staples of moral theory as rightness, duty, obligation, goodness of actions, and harm, such notions may nonetheless be of practical significance. A contextualist approach to all these notions makes room for them in ordinary moral discourse, but also illustrates why there is no room for them at the level of fundamental moral theory. Roughly, to say that an act is right is to say that it is at least as good as the appropriate alternative, to say an act is good is to say that it is better than the appropriate alternative, to say an act harms someone is to say that it makes them worse off than they would have been on the appropriate alternative. In each case, “appropriate” is an indexical, whose referent is fixed by the context of utterance. This approach also makes room for an account of supererogation.