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2 - Multiple-Act Consequentialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2009

Joseph Mendola
Affiliation:
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
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Summary

Act consequentialism – the view that right acts are those individual acts with best consequences available in the circumstances – has an obvious and intuitive rationale. To make the world as good as possible is a plausible moral goal. But indirect forms of consequentialism promise more intuitive normative implications, though at evident cost of intuitive rationale. This chapter will introduce a new form of consequentialism, Multiple-Act Consequentialism or MAC, which combines the intuitive rationale of act consequentialism and the intuitive normative implications of the best indirect forms.

MAC has four key tenets: (1) There are group agents of which we are constituents. (2) Direct consequentialist evaluation of the options of group agents is appropriate. (3) Sometimes we should follow our roles in a group act even at the cost of the overall good we could achieve by defection from those roles. In particular, one should defect from a group act with good consequences only if one can achieve better consequences by the defecting act alone than the entire group act achieves. (4) When different beneficent group agents of which one is part specify roles that conflict for one, one should follow the role in the group act with more valuable consequences.

MAC is a natural response to three standard objections to familiar forms of act consequentialism. Section I sketches these three objections, the indirect consequentialism that is the standard consequentialist response, and standard objections to indirect consequentialism. We need another approach. The rest of the chapter develops MAC.

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Chapter
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Goodness and Justice
A Consequentialist Moral Theory
, pp. 23 - 63
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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