Agency, Character and the Real Failure of Consequentialism

Consequentialism continues to make ethicists nervous. There is widespread agreement even among its critics that consequentialism has come to play a dominant role in ethical theory. Ironically, the more this is perceived to be the case, the greater the anxiety becomes to "escape" from its "spell". 1 Proposed escape routes come in many varieties. However, there is a common core to the main arguments against consequent ia l i sm: the charge that consequentialism either demands too much of people or demands the wrong things of them. This charge is motivated by consideration of cases involving (what are usually taken to be) agent-relative reasons, including, on one hand, the pursuit of one's own projects, interests, commitments and personal relationships, and on the other, rights and deontological constraints. These cases are understood in very different ways by the different critics, but the conclusion is the same: consequentialism must be wrong because it cannot accommodate our strong moral intuitions about these sorts of cases. Consequentialism is indeed a powerful moral theory. I find nothing surprising nor scandalous about its dominant role in contemporary ethics. However, I agree in the end that it must be rejected, though for very different reasons. Nevertheless, the reasons for my rejection can be appreciated by cons ider ing a consequential ist reply to these criticisms. The core of the reply is that consequentialism can accommodate the intuitions lying behind the troubling cases by suggesting that while we can certainly imagine cases in which acting on one's projects or on constraints will fail to maximize value, it also maximizes value for individuals to develop dispositions and habits to act with these things as motivations, and so people who act on such dispositions even in prob-