ABSTRACT
In the approach to moral thinking called consequentialism, no action is intrinsically right or wrong: Right and wrong depend on the balance of harm and benefit in the results. Different schools of consequentialism look at different kinds of effects, but all agree that it is the consequences of the action that make it right or wrong. The consequentialist answer depends on weighing the results of various courses of action and picking the choice with the best overall results. For one thing, as rule utilitarian R. M. Hare has argued, the consequences of our actions often fail to produce maximum utility, because of the uncertainties of the world and our own fallibility as decision-makers. In order to illustrate rule utilitarians' argument about the net costs of behaving as an act utilitarian would, the chapter examines a hypothetical coordination problem. Cosmopolitan approaches, whether consequentialist or deontological, share the view that our moral duties are to all individuals.
