Good and Bad Actions

Should consequentialism simply equate rightness with goodness? It is usually assumed to be possible, and sometimes even desirable, for consequentialists to make judgments about the goodness of actions, in addition to states of affairs. Whether a particular action is good or bad, and how good or bad it is, are two such judgments. However, consequentialism cannot provide a satisfactory account of the goodness of actions, on the most natural approach to the question. Strictly speaking, a consequentialist cannot judge one action to be better or worse than another action performed at a different time or by a different person. Consequentialism is actually strengthened by the realization that actions can only be judged as better or worse than possible alternatives.

The Scalar Approach to Consequentialism

According to maximizing consequentialism, rightness is an all-or-nothing property, rather than one that admits of degrees. This demands much of agents, and leaves no conceptual room for supererogation. While a retreat to satisficing consequentialism mitigates this problem, any choice of a threshold for rightness, even maximization, is arbitrary, and the difference between right and wrong has no more significance than other differences in net goodness. Consequentialist theories, such as utilitarianism, are thus best conceived, in scalar fashion, as, at the fundamental level, theories of the good, that judge actions to be better or worse than possible alternatives, and provide reasons for actions corresponding in strength to differences in net goodness. Such theories are no less capable of action-guidance than theories that incorporate rightness and wrongness at the fundamental level.

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.

Harm

The standard consequentialist account of harm is given by the following principle: HARM An act A harms a person P just in case P is worse off, as a consequence of A, than she would have been if A hadn’t been performed. An act A benefits a person P just in case P is better off, as a consequence of A, than she would have been if A hadn’t been performed. In most cases, there are multiple different alternatives, and no context-free method of determining which is the appropriate one with which to compare A. Judgments of harm are thus always implicitly relative to alternatives. There is no fundamental fact of the form: A really harms (or benefits) P.

Introduction

Consequentialist theories share the motivation that we have reason to care about how good or bad the world is, and reason to make a positive difference to net goodness. Core Consequentialism (CC) states that an action is morally better or worse than available alternatives, and thus there is greater or lesser reason to opt for it, entirely to the extent that the world containing it is overall better or worse (contains more or less net intrinsic value) than the worlds containing the alternatives. Although CC doesn’t say anything about right or wrong, or morality’s demands, popular consequentialist theories, such as utilitarianism, are usually presented in maximizing form, with the demand to do the best we can. Such theories are often criticized as being too demanding.

Contextualism

The threat of determinism suggests that every action, including the action of holding morally responsible, is both the best and worst of all possible alternatives. This seems to pose a problem for consequentialist approaches to determinism, and moral responsibility. The solution is to appeal to the conversational context of praising, blaming, judging right and wrong, holding responsible, and the like. Even if, strictly speaking, an agent couldn’t have done otherwise, conversational context may select certain counterpossible alternatives as the relevant ones with which to compare the action. The non-identity “problem,” popularized by Parfit, suggests that the existential dependence of people on our actions creates puzzles, problems even, for some common approaches to ethics. A scalar version of consequentialism, combined with a contextualist semantics for some moral terms, dissolves the apparent problem. The scalar contextualist approach has practical implications for our moral discourse.