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Topic: Consequentialism

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	Consequentialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The term "consequentialism" was coined by G.E.M. Anscombe in her essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958, and has since become common throughout English-language moral theory.
		Closely related is eudaimonic consequentialism, according to which a full, flourishing life, which may or may not be the same as enjoying a great deal of pleasure, is the ultimate aim.
		Rule consequentialism is a theory that is sometimes seen as an attempt to reconcile deontology and consequentialism.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Consequentialism (2697 words)

	Consequentialism Info - Encyclopedia WikiWhat.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Consequentialism is sometimes conflated with utilitarianism, which is a mistake, as utilitarianism is but one kind of consequentialism.
		Individualist consequentialism may license actions which are good for the agent, but are deleterious to general welfare.
		Consequentialism can also be contrasted with aretaic moral theories such as virtue ethics.
	www.wikiwhat.com /encyclopedia/c/co/consequentialism_1.html (783 words)

	Consequentialism
		Narrower uses of the term ‘consequentialism’ are also common, as we shall see, but it is useful analytically to construe the essence of consequentialism as this exclusive focus on consequences.
		According to satisficing consequentialism, it is not morally wrong to fail to contribute to a charity if one contributes enough to other charities and if the money or time that one could contribute does create enough good, so it is not just wasted.
		In actual usage, the term ’consequentialism‘ seems to be used as a family resemblance term to refer to any descendant of classic utilitarianism that remains close enough to its ancestor in the important respects.
	www.seop.leeds.ac.uk /archives/fall2004/entries/consequentialism (8244 words)

	Reflections on Consequentialism
		I take consequentialism to be an explanatory theory of moral rightness; it is neither a statement of a mere correlation between rightness and a certain empirical and/or evaluative property, nor a decision procedure to be followed in actual situations of choice.
		For example, consequentialism seems to imply that, under certain conditions, you ought to kill an innocent person in order to save several others, people should be punished for crimes they have not committed, organs for transplantation should be taken from healthy people against their will, and so on.
		Rather, if objective consequentialism is a theory of rightness, but the conjunction of moral rules is not, it is probably because objective consequentialism identifies an certain right-making property which is (taken to be) common and specific to all morally right actions.
	www.philosophy.su.se /texter/consequentialism.htm (6490 words)

	Consequentialism
		Consequentialism = whether an act is morally right depends only on consequences (as opposed to the circumstances or the intrinsic nature of the act or anything that happens before the act).
		This agent-relative consequentialism, plus the claim that the world with the transplant is worse from the perspective of the doctor, could justify the doctor's judgment that it would be morally wrong for him to perform the transplant.
		Another indirect version is virtue consequentialism, which holds that whether an act is morally right depends on whether it stems from or expresses a state of character that maximizes good consequences and, hence, is a virtue.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/consequentialism (9983 words)

	Consequentialism [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		Consequentialism is the view that morality is all about producing the right kinds of overall consequences.
		For consequentialism, the simplest way to conceive of the goodness of consequences is in terms of how much they contain of something that is considered good, such as happiness or personal well-being, regardless of who gets it.
		Rule Consequentialism suggests that we should evaluate rules of behavior by asking what the consequences would be if everyone accepted this or that rule, but does not say that the rightness of actions has anything to do with the consequences of those actions themselves.
	www.utm.edu /research/iep/c/conseque.htm (8642 words)

	Consequentialism and Hiroshima (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		She correctly noted that consequentialism involves calculations of a sort that run contrary to commonsense morality.
		In this context, consequentialism might be derivative from instinctive sides of human beings to conserve the human race.
		For that reason, consequentialism would probably require the leaders of wealthy countries to do much more for other countries, and much less for their own, than they do now.
	humanities.uchicago.edu /faculty/mgreen/GlobalJusticeW00/Notes/eConsequentialismHiroshima.html (1176 words)

	PEA Soup: Consequentialism and the Priority of the Good over the Right
		Empty Consequentialism: Come to some fixed judgment about the rightness of actions that is entirely independent of any judgments we have about the desirability of outcomes, and then define the desirability of outcomes in terms of the rightness of actions.
		Foundational Consequentialism: Come to some fixed judgment about the desirability of outcomes that is completely independent of any pre-theoretical judgments that we have about the rightness of actions, and then define rightness in terms of the desirability of outcomes.
		My unhappiness with the consequentializing strategy of incorporating what seem to be non-consequentialist views is that it hides the non-consequentialists's reasons for wanting to reject consequentialism of the traditional sort.
	peasoup.typepad.com /peasoup/2005/10/consequentialis.html (5545 words)

	Artificial Intelligence and Consequentialism
		Consequentialism is concerned with the outcomes of a certain action.
		Consequentialism can also be said to be teleological.
		By stating this, it should be understood that consequentialism is concerned with the study of the probability of certain "ends".
	www.mind.ilstu.edu /misc/morality/zydek/consequence.html (517 words)

	Consequentialism and Deontology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Consequentialism and deontology are the two dominant theories in contemporary normative ethics.
		For example, where consequentialism might require sacrificing one innocent for the greater good, deontology might forbid such an act on the grounds that it violates the innocent person’s rights, or violates some other moral constraint.
		Consequentialism and its Critics, Samuel Scheffler, editor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).
	publish.uwo.ca /~tisaacs/641B00.html (425 words)

	Consequentialism, Group Acts, and Trolleys (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		One classic objection is that the various indirect forms, for example rule consequentialism, have the same implications as, are extensionally equivalent to, act-consequentialism.
		While indirect forms of consequentialism are not extensionally equivalent to familiar direct forms, this characteristic intuitive advantage is apparently bought at the price of an incoherent rationale.
		But there is. Multiple-Act Consequentialism enjoys at once the intuitive general advantage of indirect forms suggested by Gibbard’s counterexample, which rest on the coordinating effects of cooperating activity, and also has a coherent and straightforward consequentialist rationale.
	www.unl.edu /philosop/people/faculty/mendola/consequentialism.htm (10410 words)

	Deontological Objections to Consequentialism
		The rule-of-thumb-utilitarian has no grand moral calculator to churn out a spreadsheet commanding him to a certain course of action, nor does he have a set of inflexible rules to constrain him to a single course of action, as the deontologist does.
		It is especially simple to see that consequentialism does not imply a sacrifice of responsibility when one considers rule-of-thumb-utilitarians once again.
		It has been established that devotion to a consequentialist system of ethics does not necessarily entail a shunting of personal responsibility onto a moral calculus of utility.
	www.infidels.org /library/modern/mark_vuletic/objection_to_consequentialism.html (1207 words)

	20th WCP: Trading Lives: Consequentialism, Deontology, and Inevitable Trade-offs
		This defense of consequentialism may be a tu quoque, but it does challenge nonconsequentialists to adequately justify a multitude of social decisions.
		The criticism which holds "the end justifies the means" philosophy inherent in consequentialism to be a source of great immorality is expressed, for example, in the famous scene from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
		Norcross's strategy, which he executes very ably in my opinion, is to seize upon an example of a particular trade-off that many of us are comfortable with, specifically that an increase in convenience due to speedier travel may be traded for a predictable increase in highway fatalities.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/OApp/OAppFair.htm (2210 words)

	Rule Consequentialism
		Kagan (2000) pictures it as multi-dimensional direct consequentialism, in that each thing is assessed directly in terms of whether its own consequences are as good as the consequences of alternatives.
		One devastating objection to global consequentialism is that simultaneously applying a consequentialist criterion to acts, decision procedures, and the imposition of sanctions leads to apparent paradoxes (Crisp 1992; Streumer 2003; Lang 2004).
		So one problem with global consequentialism is that it creates potential gaps between what acts it claims to be required and what decision procedures it tells agents to use, and between each of these and blamelessness.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/consequentialism-rule (11799 words)

	Reference.com/Encyclopedia/Consequentialism
		Ethical / Moral Egoism can be understood as individualist consequentialism according to which the consequences for the agent herself are taken to matter most.
		Utilitarianism, on the other hand, can be understood as collectivist consequentialism according to which the consequences for some large group (humanity perhaps, or all sentient beings) are of the greatest moment.
		A conciliatory approach is to acknowledge the tension between an agent's interests as an individual and as a member of various groups, seeking to optimize among all of them.
	www.reference.com /browse/wiki/Consequentialism (847 words)

	Kai Nielsen's Support of Consequentialism and Rejection of Deontology
		To show that consequentialism squares with the commonsense moral rules used by deontology or moral absolutism,” Nielsen assumes, as many do, that outside of cases where one may has to choose the lesser of two evils, consequentialists generally make the same moral decisions as deontologists.
		Consequentialism can satisfy what many believe are two important requirements of a moral theory since it can be universalized and generally match agents’ intuitions.
		A common objection to consequentialism, that agents are burdened with duties to help others at the expense of their own happiness, was not even addressed.
	www.arches.uga.edu /~pritchea/phil3200paper1.htm (1329 words)

	Consequentialism and Related Concepts (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Consequentialism is a set of ethical strategies that share the following feature: they tell us to maximize the sum of good consequences and minimize the sum of bad ones, or if some are good and some are bad, maximizing the net consequences, i.e., the good ones minus the bad ones.
		Two subtypes of consequentialism are (ethical) egoism and what we may call "social consequentialism," the best known versions of which are called utilitarianism.
		Ethical egoism is the type of consequentialism that instructs every moral agent or person to choose the act or policy (out of the available set of acts or policies) that would produce the best over-all outcome for the person doing the choosing.
	www.wku.edu /~jan.garrett/ethics/conseqsm.htm (449 words)

	PEA Soup: Avoiding Consequentialism's Demands
		Indeed, consequentialism’s severe demandingness is often claimed to be its chief flaw.
		The usual worry is that the consequentialist can't handle it, to wit, that consequentialism requires that agents exercise a degree of altruism or impartiality that they are in fact unable to exercise.
		It's that the demandingness objection relies on other objections to consequentialism, whether the objection is based in its failure of it to recognize the moral importance of causing vs. allowing, intending vs. foreseeing, OR some such objection, say, an objection to C's requirement that we be impartial about whose good is being promoted.
	peasoup.typepad.com /peasoup/2005/06/avoiding_conseq.html (4440 words)

	Against Satisficing Consequentialism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Satisficing consequentialism is the view that an act is morally right iff its consequences are “good enough.” But this is too vague to be helpful.
		The sorts of examples Slote takes to provide support for satisficing consequentialism are examples in which someone fails to bring about a better outcome because they bring about an outcome that is “good enough.” In order for these examples to be persuasive, it is essential that they involve omissions, or allowings.
		There is, however, an entirely different sort of satisficing consequentialism that might seem to be untouched by the sorts of examples discussed so far.
	web.syr.edu /~wbradley/Satisficing.htm (3992 words)

	An Abstract: "Can consequentialism be reconciled with our common-sense moral intuitions?" (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		As they see it then, consequentialism can go so far as to accommodate our intuition that it is, for instance, wrong to commit murder even in order to prevent numerous deaths (from say natural causes).
		They assume that consequentialism must necessarily give everyone the same aim, whereas, in order to accommodate I, it would have to give different agents different aims -- it would, for instance, have to give me the aim that I not violate anyone's rights but you the aim that you not violate anyone's rights.
		So, as we have just seen, it is possible for consequentialism to accommodate our intuition that it is wrong to commit a rights violation even in order to prevent a number of others from committing comparable rights violations.
	www.cofc.edu /~portmord/philstud.htm (990 words)

	consequentialism from FOLDOC (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		pragmatism and utilitarianism are common forms of consequentialism.
		Consequentialist theories in ethics tend to be varieties of altruism, although haedonism can be represented as a coherent form of consequentialism.
		"Consequentialism" is a technical term in philosophy and is not used in popular discourse, where pragmatism and utilitarianism are more common.
	lgxserver.uniba.it /lei/foldop/foldoc.cgi?consequentialism (133 words)

	Is Objective Consequentialism Self-Defeating?
		The point is not to show that objective consequentialist theories are somehow uniquely liable to produce worse consequences, but rather that the optimal consequences are not achievable in all circumstances by any theory, even given its perfect satisfaction.
		Consider the example of decision-theoretic consequentialism given above; the doctor following DTC will prescribe the less-than-optimal drug A, even though optimizing the consequences in the same way as AC is obviously among the theory's substantive aims (on this new understanding of "substantive").
		The obvious response, then, might be to create a number of rules that identify the best arrangement in every case for which AC is indeterminate, and then require individuals to pursue that outcome to the exclusion of the others.
	www.stevesachs.com /papers/paper_conseq.html (6826 words)

	E.G.: More on consequentialism and the desire for wrong.
		But then, given ODS consequentialism, Augustine ought not steal the pears, because stealing the pears would frustrate the owner's (very slight) desire to keep his pears, without satisfying Augustine's desires.
		I'm not sure Richard is still as concerned with the problem for ODS consequentialism as I (still) am; I think Richard may be concerned with a slightly wider class of problems.
		I think that your MDS consequentialism will not be as defensible as ODS consequentialism is often taken to be.
	eg.typepad.com /eg/2005/03/more_on_consequ.html (2585 words)

	OUP: The Demands of Consequentialism: Mulgan (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		Consequentialism seems unreasonably demanding, as it leaves the agent no room for her own projects or interests.
		A variety of previous consequentialist solutions are considered and found wanting, including rule consequentialism, the extremism of Shelly Kagan and Peter Singer, Michael Slote's satisficing consequentialism, and Samuel Scheffler's hybrid moral theory.
		This original and highly readable account of the limits of consequentialism will be useful to anyone interested in understanding morality.
	www.oup.co.uk /isbn/0-19-825093-2 (566 words)

	Ethics 10 - Consequentialism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-07)
		These materials are copyrighted (c) 1998 by Harry J. Gensler; but they may be distributed freely.
		Consequentialism says that we ought to do whatever maximizes good consequences.
		One popular kind of consequentialism is classical (hedonistic) utilitarianism.
	www.jcu.edu /Philosophy/gensler/et/et-10-00.htm (228 words)

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