Alienation, consequentialism, and the demands of morality
Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 13, no. 2, 1984, pp. 134–71
Abstract
Living up to the demands of morality, or adopting a peculiarly moral perspective, may bring with it alienation from one’s personal commitments and even from morality itself. This has been held to show that some moral theories are self-defeating. I argue that a proper understanding of the structure of consequentialist theories reveals that they need not be self-defeating in this way. I then advance some general claims about how to conceptualize morality’s relation to the self.
Quotes from this work
I doubt […] that any fundamental ethical dispute between consequentialists and deontologists can be resolved by appeal to the idea of respect for persons. The deontologist has his notion of respect—e.g., that we not use people in certain ways—and the consequentialist has /his—/e.g., that the good of every person has an equal claim upon us, a claim unmediated by any notion of right or contract, so that we should do the most possible to bring about outcomes that actually advance the good of persons. For every consequentially justified act of manipulation to which the deontologist can point with alarm there is a deontologically justified act that fails to promote the well-being of some person(s) as fully as possible to which the consequentialist can point, appalled.