Consequentialism: Core and Expansion

This paper seeks to address two key questions: (1) What is core to consequentialism? and (2) How might consequentialism best be expanded beyond its core commitments? A dizzying variety of consequentialist theories have been proposed in recent years—maximizing, satisficing, or scalar; restrictive, sophisticated, or subjective; global or local; agent-neutral or agent-relative; welfarist, recursive, or violation-minimizing. Through critically exploring these various options, I will dispute two dogmas of contemporary consequentialism: that there’s nothing more to blameworthiness than the question whether it would promote value to express blame, and that the only normative question that arises regarding one’s character (or motive, or decision procedure) is whether it promotes value. One may be a consequentialist—a utilitarian, even—about action, while taking other normative resources to be essential for explaining our moral lives more broadly. I thus argue for a new expanded view, Fitting Consequentialism, that is richer than the extant views on offer.