ABSTRACT
Some standards of evaluation are more authoritative than others. For example, it’s often said that moral standards, and the standard of all-things-considered practical normativity, are more authoritative than those of etiquette or law. This chapter offers an account of what authoritativeness amounts to and argues that there is a standard of evaluation that is even more authoritative than that of morality or all-things-considered practical normativity. It is the standard that assimilates the evaluation of actions to the evaluation of events generally, rather than assessing them qua actions. I then argue that consequentialism is the correct theory of what meets this most authoritative standard.
