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date: 06 July 2022

Abstract and Keywords

Many types of things are arguably appropriate objects of deontic moral assessment: not only acts but also decision procedures, character traits, motives, public moral codes, and so on. Global consequentialism recommends, for every type that is an appropriate object of deontic assessment at all, that we assess items of that type in terms of their consequences. This (and not simple act consequentialism alone) seems to be roughly the kind of consequentialist thesis that real-life consequentialists, both past and present, have generally been sympathetic to. In this chapter, I articulate a thesis along these lines and defend the thesis in question against the most common objection it faces (“the inconsistency objection”). I discuss the extent to which “going global” deals satisfactorily with three standard objections to act consequentialism: the incorrect verdicts objection, the self-defeatingness objection, and the silence objection. I conclude that global consequentialism has adequate responses to all of these objections, but that it is unclear whether global consequentialism is superior to an account that simply stresses the importance of global axiological assessment.

Keywords: global consequentialism, axiology, self-defeatingness objection, evaluative focal points, inconsistency objection, actualism, possibilism

Hilary Greaves

Hilary Greaves is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford. Her main research interests concern issues in moral philosophy, decision theory, and economics, with a special focus on issues that arise in the course of considering how an altruistic actor might most cost-effectively do good. Her published work includes articles on moral uncertainty, population ethics, discounting, and theories of well-being and of interpersonal aggregation.

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