Dr Stephen Boulter (Oxford Brookes)
‘Can consequences be right-makers?’

Summary

This paper sets out a novel challenge to consequentialism as a theory in normative ethics. The challenge is rooted in the ontological claim that consequences of actions do not exist at the time required to be that in virtue of which actions are right or wrong, and so consequences cannot play the role attributed to them by consequentialists in ethics. The challenge takes the form of a dilemma. The consequentialist is confronted with a set of propositions she will find individually plausible but incompossible if taken in conjunction with consequentialism. The task is to restore consistency. The most plausible route to this end, I suggest, is to reject consequentialism. There are other ways of restoring consistency, but they come at the cost of endorsing highly implausible and unattractive theses. I begin by setting out the aporia itself, and then canvass the various options available to the consequentialist. What emerges from these reflections is that the cost of remaining faithful to consequentialism is very high indeed. What has hidden these costs from view, however, has been the unwarranted tendency amongst ethicists to leave unexplored the systematic relations between metaphysics and normative theory.