Encoding without Grounding: Why Portmore’s Consequentializing Programme Fails

Douglas Portmore claims that any plausible deontological constraint can be encoded within a consequentialist outcome-ranking. This paper argues that the programme faces five modal pressures which, taken together, no available version of consequentializing we know how to construct without sacrificing either the agent-relative content or the consequentialist structure has resolved. Those pressures are developed through three recurring cases: a pair of killings with structurally distinct victims, the procrastinating professor, and a conflict of parental obligations. The five pressures document a single structural error: the programme encodes moral structure without explaining it, and a ranking constructed to match a set of verdicts cannot be the explanation of those verdicts. Four repair strategies and three technical objections from centered-worlds semantics, hybrid theories, and constructivist grounding are examined; each either relocates the problem or converges on the modal account of persons the paper defends in its final section. That account treats persons as accessibility structures across possible worlds, defines character as the shape of the accessible region, and provides a worked moral judgement and an explicit contrast with both consequentialist and deontological frameworks. The account is developed in sufficient detail to show that it discharges the specification the critique generates.