Supererogation and Consequentialism

The thought that acts of supererogation exist presents a challenge to all normative ethical theories. This chapter will provide an overview of the consequentialist responses to this challenge. I will begin by explaining the problem that supererogation presents for consequentialism. I will then explore consequentialist attempts to deny the existence of acts of supererogation. Next, I will examine a range of act consequentialist attempts to accommodate supererogation, including satisficing consequentialism, dual-ranking act consequentialism, and an anti-rationalist form of consequentialism. Finally, I will explore how indirect consequentialists have responded to this problem. Throughout the chapter, I will argue that in responding to the challenge of supererogation, consequentialists must choose between a more theoretically satisfying version of consequentialism and a form of consequentialism that is better able to accommodate our everyday moral intuitions and concepts.

Consequentialism and Promises

I explore the debate about whether consequentialist theories can adequately accommodate the moral force of promissory obligation. I outline a straightforward act consequentialist account grounded in the value of satisfying expectations, and I raise and assess three objections to this account: that it counterintuitively predicts that certain promises should be broken when common-sense morality insists that they should be kept, that the account is circular, and Michael Cholbi’s argument that this account problematically implies that promise-making is frequently obligatory. I then discuss alternative act consequentialist accounts, including Philip Pettit’s suggestion that promise-keeping is an intrinsic good and Michael Smith’s agent-relative account. I outline Brad Hooker’s rule consequentialist account of promissory obligation and raise a challenge for it. I conclude that appeals to intuitions about cases will not settle the dispute, and that consequentialists and their critics must instead engage in substantive debate about the nature and stringency of promissory obligation.

Act Consequentialism and the No-Difference Challenge

According to act-consequentialism, only actions that make a difference to an outcome can be morally bad. Yet, there are classes of actions that don’t make a difference, but nevertheless seem to be morally bad. Explaining how such non-difference making actions are morally bad presents a challenge for act-consequentialism: the no-difference challenge. In this chapter we go into detail on what the no-difference challenge is, focusing in particular on act consequentialism. We talk about how different theories of causation affect the no-difference challenge; how the challenge shows up in real-world cases, including voting, global labor injustice, global poverty, and climate change; and we work through a number of the solutions to the challenge that have been offered, arguing that many fail to actually meet it. We defend and extend one solution that does, and we present a further solution of our own.

ConsequentIalizing

The strategy of consequentializing features that are intuitively relevant to the deontic evaluation of actions by building them into the telic evaluation of outcomes is almost as old as consequentialism itself. But the recent rejection by many consequentialists of the traditional commitment to an agent-neutral constraint on the relevant evaluation of outcomes has ushered in new consequentializing arguments for consequentialism and new consequentialist arguments for consequentializing. While the former fail, the latter ground the case for consequentializing in deeply entrenched and widely held commitments. These commitments to outcome-centered accounts of reasons, actions, and attitudes dictate that any plausible alternative account of what agents rationally and morally ought to do must be a form of consequentialism and hence must have a consequentialized form. Such outcome-centered commitments, however, all run afoul of common sense in similar ways, and a pervasive strategy for mitigating this counter-intuitiveness trades upon a conflation of two distinct senses in which we speak of actions as bringing about outcomes.

Alternatives

Consequentialists have long debated (as deontologists should) how to define an agent’s alternatives, given that (a) at any particular time an agent performs numerous “versions” of actions, (b) an agent may perform several independent co-temporal actions, and (c) an agent may perform sequences of actions. We need a robust theory of human action to provide an account of alternatives that avoids previously debated problems. After outlining Alvin Goldman’s action theory (which takes a fine-grained approach to act individuation) and showing that the agent’s alternatives must remain invariant across different normative theories, I address issue (a) by arguing that an alternative for an agent at a time is an entire “act tree” performable by her, rather than any individual act token. I argue further that both tokens and trees must possess moral properties, and I suggest principles governing how these are inherited among trees and tokens. These proposals open a path for future work addressing issues (b) and (c).

Consequentialism and Nonhuman Animals

Consequentialism is thought to be in significant conflict with animal rights theory because it does not regard activities such as confinement, killing, and exploitation as in principle morally wrong. Proponents of the “Logic of the Larder” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly pro-exploitation stance, permitting us to eat farmed animals with positive well-being to ensure future such animals exist. Proponents of the “Logic of the Logger” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly anti-conservationist stance, permitting us to exterminate wild animals with negative well-being to ensure future such animals do not exist. We argue that this conflict is overstated. Once we have properly accounted for indirect effects, such as the role that our policies play in shaping moral attitudes and behavior and the importance of accepting policies that are robust against deviation, we can see that consequentialism may converge with animal rights theory significantly, even if not entirely.

Fault Lines in Ethical Theory

The verdicts that standard consequentialism gives about what we are obligated to do crucially depend on what theory of value the consequentialist accepts. This makes it hard to say what separates standard consequentialist theories from nonconsequentialist theories. This article discusses how we can draw sharp lines separating standard consequentialist theories from other theories and what assumptions about goodness we must make in order to draw these lines. The discussion touches on cases of deontic constraints, cases of deontic options, and cases involved in the so-called actualism/possibilism debate. What emerges is that there are various interesting patterns relating the different commitments of consequentialism, different principles about obligation and about goodness, and different rules concerning how facts about values determine facts about obligation.

Understanding the Demandingness Objection

My aim in this article is to help us understand and assess the Demandingness Objection to consequentialism. I first try to motivate the Objection. Then I consider traditional replies that consequentialists have offered in an attempt to undermine the force of the Objection. Next I argue that for the Objection to be successful, it must explain which costs are deemed especially demanding and which costs are not, and why morality should be thought to prioritize the former. I show that the Objection cannot function as a persuasive critique of Consequentialism without prioritizing some costs over others. Finally, I consider reasons to doubt that the Objection can successfully meet this challenge.

The Alienation Objection to Consequentialism

An ethical theory is alienating if accepting the theory inhibits the agent from fitting participation in some normative ideal, such as some ideal of integrity, friendship, or community. Many normative ideals involve nonconsequentialist behavior of some form or another. If such ideals are normatively authoritative, they constitute counterexamples to consequentialism unless their authority can be explained or explained away. We address a range of attempts to avoid such counterexamples and argue that consequentialism cannot by itself account for the normative authority of all plausible such ideals. At best, consequentialism can find a more modest place in an ethical theory that includes nonconsequentialist principles with their own normative authority.

The Love–Hate Relationship between Feminism and Consequentialism

The early utilitarians were strong champions for the equal treatment of women, yet contemporary feminists are some of consequentialism’s biggest critics. Arguing from a more generous account of what counts as consequentialist moral reasoning, this chapter identifies feminist criticisms of consequentialism and sees whether, and to what extent, feminism and consequentialism can be reconciled. It argues that a feminist version of consequentialism is possible and, regardless, that all feminist moral theories contain significant consequentialist elements which it would be a mistake to ignore. Finally, it suggests that all feminist approaches to ethics ought to accord some role to consequences and results, and therefore ought to contribute to debates and discussions within consequentialist ethics.