I propose and defend a novel view called ‘de se consequentialism’, which is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it demonstrates — contra Doug Portmore, Mark Schroeder, Campbell Brown, and Michael Smith, among others — that a consequentialist theory employing agent-neutral value is logically consistent with agent-centered constraints. Second, de se consequentialism clarifies both the nature of agent-centered constraints and why philosophers have found them puzzling, thereby meriting attention from even dedicated non-consequentialists. Scrutiny reveals that moral theories in general, whether consequentialist (...) or not, incorporate constraints by assessing states in a first-personal guise. Consequently, it is no coincidence that de se consequentialism mimics constraints: its distinctive feature is the very feature through which non-consequentialist theories enact them. (shrink)

There is, on a given moral view, a constraint against performing acts of a certain type if that view prohibits agents from performing an instance of that act-type even to prevent two or more others from each performing a morally comparable instance of that act-type. The fact that commonsense morality includes many such constraints has been seen by several philosophers as a decisive objection against consequentialism. Despite this, I argue that constraints are more plausibly accommodated within a consequentialist framework than (...) within the more standard side-constraint framework. For I argue that when we combine agent-relative consequentialism with a Kantian theory of value, we arrive at a version of consequentialism, which I call 'Kantsequentialism', that has several advantages over the standard side-constraint approach to accommodating constraints. What’s more, I argue that Kantsequentialism doesn’t have any of the disadvantages that critics of consequentializing have presumed that such a theory must have. (shrink)

Many contemporary act consequentialists define facts about what we should do in terms of facts about what we should prefer. They claim that we should perform an action if and only if we should prefer its outcome to the outcome of any available alternative. Some of these theorists claim they can accommodate deontic constraints, such as a constraint against killing the innocent. I argue that they can’t. If there’s a constraint against killing, then when we can prevent five killings only (...) by killing one, we shouldn’t kill—but we should prefer the outcome where we do. (shrink)

Deontologists believe in two key exceptions to the duty to promote the good: restrictions forbid us from harming others, and prerogatives permit us not to harm ourselves. How are restrictions and prerogatives related? A promising answer is that they share a source in rights. I argue that prerogatives cannot be grounded in familiar kinds of rights, only in something much stranger: waivable rights against oneself.

In traditional consequentialism the good is position-neutral. A single evaluative ranking of states of affairs is correct for everyone, everywhere regardless of their positions. Recently, position-relative forms of consequentialism have been developed. These allow for the correct rankings of states to depend on connections that hold between the state being evaluated and the position of the evaluator. For example, perhaps being an agent who acts in a certain state requires me to rank that state differently from someone else who lacks (...) this connection. In this chapter several different kinds of position-relative rankings related to agents, times, physical locations, and possible worlds are explored. Arguments for and against adopting a position-relative axiology are examined, and it is suggested that position-relative consequentialism is a promising moral theory that has been underestimated. (shrink)