Abstract

This is an introductory talk on why I am not a consequentialist. I am not going to go into the details of consequentialist theory, or to compare and contrast different versions of consequentialism. Nor am I going to present all the reasons I am not a consequentialist, let alone all the reasons why you should not be one. All I want to do is focus on some key problems that in my view, and the view of many others, make consequentialism a totally unacceptable moral theory – a theory about what is right, what is good, or obligatory, or forbidden, or permissible, or praiseworthy. So let me begin by giving a basic definition of consequentialism, one all supporters of the view can agree on. Consequentialism is the theory that the fundamental aim of morality is to maximize value. Now I was tempted to say ‘sole aim’, but some consequentialists will disagree with that. They might hold, for instance, that one of the aims of morality is to abide by certain rules, or to cultivate certain virtues. But for them, what gives obedience to a rule or the cultivation of a virtue its point is that, ultimately, such behaviour maximizes value. So although maximizing value might not be the sole aim of morality – the sole answer to the question ‘What should I do to be good?’ and similar questions – still it is the fundamental aim of morality, and all other kinds of decision, action, and so on, derive their justification by reference to it. For my purposes, then, the difference between ‘sole’ and ‘fundamental’ is merely terminological. Now the first thing that might occur to someone is a pair of simple questions. Why should anyone believe that the fundamental aim of morality is to maximize value? What intuitive force does the idea even have in the first place? These are good questions. I was a consequentialist once, and I don’t think I ever posed them to myself. I just took it as understood that since so many philosophers were consequentialists, and since so many of my fellow students were as well, then even if it were ultimately shown not to be true, the maximization thought (as I will call it) was at least the obvious place to start when one did ethics..