Consequentialist Ethical Systems

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 [Page 413]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.

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 ruleconsequentialism. According to act-consequentialism, each person is morally required on every occasion to act in such a way as to make the greatest possible net contribution to the overall good. The rightness or wrongness of actions is determined not by moral rules, but instead by the net values of the consequences of the actions themselves. In contrast, ruleconsequentialism holds that rules are indispensable as determinants of the moral status of actions, for the very function of morality requires that it provide a public system of rules. Moral right and wrong are determined by the most beneficial rules—either by the most beneficial individual rules (according to some forms of rule-consequentialism) or by the most beneficial code of rules (according to others). For example, the most beneficial rules may require every business to control its pollution even if that pollution, considered in itself, is negligible. For the cumulative effects of businesses' controlling their individually negligible pollution could be a great public benefit. A code of rules can be considered to be the most beneficial if the expected overall net value that would result from the general internalization of that code exceeds the expected overall net value that would result from the general internalization of any rival code of rules. It is sometimes further specified that an assessment of the overall value of the consequences should give some priority to the well-being of the worst off.

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