In defense of consequentializing1
According to common wisdom in moral theory, some moral views are consequentialist and some are not. Since ‘consequentialism’ is a term of art, there is no correct way to define it, but this paper assumes that a view is consequentialist iff the deontic status it assigns an act is an increasing function of the goodness it assigns the consequences. The main point of the paper is to defend an equivalence thesis: each plausible moral view has a consequentialist equivalent. The paper is in effect a defense of an equivalence thesis against some recent objections. The thesis has two parts: Extensional Equivalence says that each plausible moral view has a consequentialist counterpart that agrees with it on the deontic status of every act; Extensionality says that nothing but extension matters in a moral view. Together these entail that every plausible moral view is a mere notational variant of a consequentialist view.
Keywords: consequentialist, consequentializing, teleology, deontology
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