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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
The evaluation of character has taken on new significance in moral theory, and, indeed, some advocate a shift in focus away from evaluating action to evaluating character. This has been taken to pose special challenges for utilitarian and consequentialist moral theory. Utilitarianism's commitment to impartiality and its seeming failure to accommodate virtue evaluation have led to problems, some of which are developed in the essays in this volume.
1 SeeBadhwar, Neera, ‘Why it is Wrong to Always be Guided by the Best: Consequentialism and Friendship’, Ethics ci (1991)Google Scholar.
2 Williams, Bernard, ‘Consequentialism and Integrity’, Consequentialism and its Critics, ed. Scheffler, Samuel, New York, 1988Google Scholar.
3 Railton, Peter, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality’ Philosophy and Public Affairs, xiii (1984)Google Scholar.
4 Brink, 156.
5 This can, in turn, be spelled out in a variety of ways. For example, Richard Brandt and Brad Hooker opt for a view which holds that the right action is the one performed in accordance with a set of rules which would maximize utility in an ideal world – the world in which most people accept the rules. In the real world, most people don't. So this view is less demanding than one which holds that the right action is the one performed in accordance with the set of rules which maximize utility in the real world – since few are living up to the utilitarian ideal in the real world, individual moral demands become more severe. See Brandt, Richard, ‘Some Merits of One Form of Rule-Utilitarianism’, in his Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights, New York, 1992Google Scholar. Also, Hooker, Brad, Ideal Code, Real World, Oxford, 2000Google Scholar.
6 Sen has spelled this option out in a variety of contexts. See, for example, ‘Rights and Agency’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, xi (1982)Google Scholar.
7 Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking, Oxford, 1982Google Scholar.
8 On Hare's view, the archangel level will be objective – the archangel does see the actual consequences, though we ordinary humans cannot always see them. Thus, there is overlap here between a two-level strategy and the objective consequentialist strategy. But one could adopt a different sort of two-level view, in which the level determining actual Tightness wasn't objective.
9 Jackson, Frank, ‘Decision-theoretic Consequentialism and the Nearest and Dearest Objection’, Ethics, ci (1991)Google Scholar.
10 Moral Thinking, pp. 138 f. The case Hare discusses was originally presented by Bernard Williams.
