CONSEQUENTIALISM

Consequentialism

Consequentialism

Introduction

Consequentialist ethical systems are ethical theories that take the moral status of all actions to depend somehow on the value of their consequences. For example, if a particular action of keeping one's promise is morally obligatory, it is made obligatory by its good consequences, or by the hypothetical good consequences of people accepting a rule that requires it (such as a rule requiring promise keeping). It is not made obligatory by God's having commanded us to keep promises, by a self-evident right-making factor that simply inheres in promise keeping, by the fact that we could not consistently will promise breaking to be universalized, or by the fact that a person of good moral character would characteristically keep the promise.

Most philosophers count a theory as consequentialist only if it holds that the rightness of actions depends on the impartially reckoned overall goodness of their consequences. An example of a business decision that is influenced by consequentialist thinking would be the decision to control a plant's hazardous emissions for the purpose of preserving people's health and quality of life, not just to get good publicity or to be safe from lawsuits.

Discussion

Some philosophers use the terms consequentialism and utilitarianism interchangeably, while others define utilitarianism as that species of consequentialism that takes good consequences to be limited to happiness or welfare. (Complicating this terminological choice is the fact that the influential early 20thcentury utilitarian G. E. Moore explicitly contends that knowledge, among other things, has value over and above its value as a means to happiness or welfare.) Consequentialist theories are widely agreed to constitute one of the three most influential branches of normative ethics, the other two being deontological theories and virtue ethics.

Contemporary consequentialist theories are mainly divided between act-consequentialism and rule consequentialism. According to act-consequentialism, each person is morally required on every ...