Against the Non-Ethical Tyranny of Outcomes

Abstract

Abstract The argument here demonstrates that the same two mistakes undergirding the intuitive and ethical arguments for consequentialism, the conflation of senses of bringing about and the unwarranted imposition of an Outcome-Centered Constraint on Value, account for the illusory appeal of the outcome-centered accounts of attitudes, actions, and reasons grounding the non-ethical argument for consequentialism. Just as attempts to consequentialize target ethical theories fail, altering and mischaracterizing the target theories in the attempt, so too strategies of propositionalizing target desires fail, altering and mischaracterizing the aims and objects of, rationales provided by, and evaluative outlooks partially constitutive of these target desires. Propositionalizing typical desires captures neither the objects of such desires, nor the rationales for action they provide, nor the guise under which their objects are taken to be good; it captures only the constitutive consequent of realizing the desire’s object. With the failure of the outcome-centered account of desires, the non-ethical argument for consequentialism is undermined.