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For non-consequentialists an agent is justified in refusing to breach certain constraints even for the sake of apparently more important, neutral goals: even, indeed, for the sake of maximizing the overall satisfaction of those very constraints. To put the message in a slogan: ‘Not by my hands’. But how can non-consequentialism offer a distinctive evaluation of the social and political arrangements (say, the property conventions) that ethics presupposes? The only plausible answer is: by laying down constraints that we, the community, ought to satisfy in imposing such arrangements on individuals.‘Not by our hands’, as it might be put. But this response is not satisfactory. In this fundamental, political sphere of evaluation, consequentialism is inescapable.

The discussion of obligations to future generations often assumes that though the global poor can be wronged because there are obligations the affluent owe to them, those who will live in the further future can't. They can't be wronged, the thought goes, because though we have obligations with regard to future generations, they aren't obligations owed to them. This chapter argues that the assumption is mistaken. Adopting a Scanlonian contractualist account of what it is for one person to wrong another, it turns out that there is no good reason to think that those who will live in the further future can't be wronged by the choices we make now. This conclusion, it is suggested, has importance for how we understand the normative basis of claims to reparations for past injustice.

Most, if not all, practitioners of welfare economics and social choice theory are presumed to be welfaristic in their conviction. Indeed, they evaluate the goodness of an economic policy and/or economic system in terms of the welfare that people receive at the culmination outcomes thereby generated. Recent years have witnessed a substantial upsurge of interest in the non‐welfaristic bases, or even the non‐consequentialist bases, of welfare economics and social choice theory. Capitalizing on the axiomatic approach explored in the recent past, this chapter tries to provide a coherent analysis of consequentialism vis‐a‐vis non‐consequentialism. To begin with, this chapter develops an abstract framework in which the primitive of the analysis is a preference ordering held by an evaluator over the pairs of culmination outcomes, and opportunity sets from which those culmination outcomes are chosen. As a partial test to see how much relevance can be claimed the axiomatized concepts of consequentialism and non‐consequentialism, two simple applications of this abstract framework are worked out. The first application is to the Arrovian social choice theory, and the second application is to the analysis of ultimatum games.

Part I considered how to determine whether there is a moral difference between killing and letting die per se, but in the two chapters of Part II, the consideration is when it is and when it is not permissible to kill some to save others. Ch. 6 first examines in some detail the arguments John Harris has made for a survival lottery (where we may select from among healthy people the one who will die to save another or who will share a fair risk of death with another), and considers a very limited context in which a curtailed survival lottery might be installed. The rest of the chapter is devoted to consideration of the many attempts to solve the problem of why we may not ordinarily kill one to save more (as in the Transplant Case, where a non‐consequentialist would believe that we may not chop up one innocent non‐threatening person, who would not otherwise die, to transplant his organs into a greater number of people in order to save their lives) but may kill via redirection of threats (as in the Trolley Case, where there is a choice between killing one or killing a greater number by turning/redirecting, or failing to turn/redirect, a runaway trolley). These attempts include the views of Philippa Foot, proponents of the Doctrine of Double Effect (e.g. Michael Costa), Warren Quinn, James Montmarquet, Judith Thomson, and Bruce Russell. A detailed examination is also made of whether the notion of ‘being already involved’ is a moral notion or can be given a non‐moral description.

Many have claimed that sentimentalists in general and Hume in particular cannot accommodate the non-consequentialist aspects of our moral thinking. This criticism can be found in thinkers such as John Balguy, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, and Stephen Darwall. This chapter argues that the criticism is unfounded. An examination of Hume’s account of the motivational influences of pride, love, and approval reveals that Humean sentimentalism implies a moral pluralism that includes not only consequentialist moral ends but non-consequentialist ones as well. For on Hume’s account, self-oriented passions (such as pride and approval of self) have an agent-relative character that distinguishes their motivational influence from other-oriented passions (such as love and approval of others), and that agent-relative character explains well our non-consequentialist concerns.

There are powerful and compelling arguments that seem to show that it is prima facie wrong to harm animals. There are also powerful and compelling arguments that seem to show that it’s possible for someone to consume meat on a regular basis without harming any animals. Can someone who cares about animal welfare eat animals with a clean conscience? This chapter looks at consequentialist and non-consequentialist responses to the potency problem (i.e. the problem that one’s actions don’t seem to have the right causal impact for one to have any responsibility to refrain from eating meat) and argue that non-consequentialists have the resources for addressing this problem.

This chapter discusses consequentialism. There are two broad schools of ethical theory: consequentialism and non-consequentialism. According to consequentialism, the right act is that act which has the best consequences. According to non-consequentialism, the rightness of an action is not solely determined by its consequences. The most famous version of non-consequentialism is deontology, which holds that an individual has an absolute duty to obey certain rules. Medical law exists at the intersection between consequentialism and deontology. Much of medical law is consequentialist in nature. However, having evolved from a set of Christian values and principles, it retains certain deontological characteristics. In particular, it retains a commitment in many jurisdictions to the Sanctity of Life Doctrine, though this is being shed or modified as assisted dying becomes legalized. The chapter finishes with a description of some examples of the influence of consequentialism over current medical law.

Specifying the content of the right against risking falls to an ancillary moral theory, and Chapter 5 takes up the challenge of defending a non-consequentialist approach to justifiably risking that can account for well-settled intuitions about the permissibility of our practices of imposing risk. Rejecting the inevitability of characterizing the permissibility of modernity’s prosaic risks in consequentialist terms, this chapter defends a contractualist account of justifiable risking that turns not on interpersonal aggregation, wherein moral risks imposed on some are justified by virtue of benefitting many more others, but rather on intrapersonal aggregation, wherein permissible risks are permissible because they can be justfied to everyone affected by them as individuals.

Let doing right mean doing what is supported by reasons overall. You are very unlikely to do right in that sense without making a place for giving the goods of attachment, virtue, and respect to others. But that raises a problem as to how you can aim at the right and yet allow yourself to be guided by the corresponding dispositions. The solution is to allow yourself to act spontaneously out of those dispositions except when there are external cues to indicate that doing so in this or that case is likely to run against the requirements of reason overall. This standby strategy has to be endorsed by both consequentialists and non-consequentialists, although the recognition of robustly demanding goods reduces the contrast between those approaches.

In many cases people collectively cause a morally significant outcome but no individual act seems to make a difference, and so no reason can called upon to act. This chapter explores the possibility of solving this problem by appealing to reasons for action that are not concerned with the difference one makes in outcome. It focuses on three such proposals: ‘Weak Participation’, ‘Strong Participation’, and ‘the Fairness Approach’, arguing that they face a shared problem: while they do identify considerations other than the difference one makes, these considerations do not seem to work as reasons for action as long as one’s act won’t make a difference. The problem, then, extends beyond these three proposals, and is a challenge for non-consequentialists, as well as consequentialists. The upshot is a sharper understanding of what the core challenge in these cases really is, and thus what needs to be done to address it.