Paul Hurley

Does Consequentialism Make Too Many Demands, or None at All?*

Consequentialism has, since its inception, faced persistent challenges of excess: it is, critics charge, too demanding, too confining, and too alienating to offer a plausible alternative moral theory. Defenders typically concede that consequentialist moral theory is indeed extremely demanding, confining, and alienating, but they deploy a range of defenses against such charges. Some look for partners in guilt, arguing, for example, that typical alternatives are no less extreme in relevant respects. Others, while conceding that the theory is extreme, argue that it is less extreme than might be thought; indeed, that it is not implausibly extreme. Still others bite the bullet, allowing that the theory is counterintuitively extreme along some or all of these dimensions but maintaining that we are nonetheless driven to embrace these counterintuitive results by theoretical reflection.

Fairness and Beneficence

An unlimited requirement to maximize overall well-being strikes most of us, Liam Murphy included, as absurdly demanding. A plausible moral theory, we think, will limit such demands. One way to avoid the oppressive thumb of such agent-neutral, impersonal principles is to reject a fundamental role for an impersonal moral standpoint. Thus, the excessive demands made by such agent-neutral principles can seem to lend support to approaches, such as contractarianism and virtue ethics, that locate whatever role there is for impersonal considerations within a broader moral framework. But in his Moral Demands in Nonideal Theory, Murphy argues that agent-neutral principles, properly understood, generate their own limits. The excesses of traditional impersonal principles can be curbed from within the impersonal standpoint through appeal to considerations of fairness, considerations that philosophers have mistakenly thought to be available only to those who eschew a fundamental role for the impersonal standpoint. His engaging arguments for these and other related claims are the subject of this essay. Murphy argues that the utilitarian’s optimizing principle of beneficence, upon which agents are required to maximize overall well-being, does indeed make absurd demands. There are limits to what morality demands, and the optimizing principle violates such limits. But his argument for this conclusion is preceded by a repudiation of what he takes to be the standard arguments for these limits. At the center of all such arguments, he contends, is the argument that such a principle is

Whose Problem Is Non-Identity?

Teleological theories of reason and value, which take reasons to be reasons to realize “best” states of affairs, cannot account for the intuition that victims in non-identity cases have been wronged. Deontological accounts, however, recognize second-personal reasons, reflective of the moral significance of each person regardless of outcomes. We argue that such deontological accounts are better positioned to identify the wrong to victims in non-identity cases because a person wrongs another on such accounts if she violates his second-personal claims. Parfit argues that non-identity victims would consent to the acts in question, thereby waiving any such second-personal claims. But his arguments misrepresent the role of consent by articulating it through appeal to the very teleological theory of reasons that deontologists reject. We argue that Parfits conception of consent as retroactive endorsement only determines whether, given that the non-identity victim is second-personally wronged, he is nonetheless better off existing. It becomes clear that non-identity poses a problem for teleology – it cannot account for the intuition that non-identity victims have been wronged – but deontology can.