How to be a consequentialist about everything

Abstract

This article shows how several themes of classical utilitarianism can be integrated into global consequentialism – the view that we should evaluate motives, rules, characters, institutions, and entire lives in terms of the goodness of their consequences. It surveys various proposals by four prominent philosophers and then identifies the central issues: evaluative focal points, the nature of normative rightness, possibility, ownership of obligations, and ontology. After working through these issues, this article concludes that global consequentialism is a promising approach to consequentialism, especially when it is developed using an actualist rather than a possibilist account of possibility. – AI-generated abstract.