ABSTRACT
In cases such as Derek Parfit’s Miners case and Frank Jackson’s case of Dr. Jill, the action with the highest expected value is the intuitively right action. Moreover, in the mentioned cases, this action is right according to subjective consequentialism and wrong according to objective consequentialism. The chapter discusses objective consequentialists’ licensing strategies, i.e. attempts to guide the agent towards performing the intuitively right action even though the action is wrong according to objective consequentialism. The chapter claims that objective consequentialism is faced with the Licensing Dilemma: Either the licensing is too weak, that is, the agent is not successfully guided towards the act with the highest expected value; or the guidance is, in some respect or other, ad hoc. The licensing strategies discussed are based on the distinction between what one ought to do and what one ought to decide, the distinction between criterion of rightness and decision procedure, the idea of blameless wrongdoing, the idea of avoiding blameworthiness, the distinction between rightness and obligatoriness, the distinction between rightness and subjective rightness, and the distinction between rightness and rationality.
