Overdemanding Consequentialism? An Experimental Approach

Abstract

According to act-consequentialism the right action is the one that produces the best results as judged from an impersonal perspective. Some claim that this requirement is unreasonably demanding and therefore consequentialism is unacceptable as a moral theory. The article breaks with dominant trends in discussing this so-called Overdemandingness Objection. Instead of focusing on theoretical responses, it empirically investigates whether there exists a widely shared intuition that consequentialist demands are unreasonable. This discussion takes the form of examining what people think about the normative significance of consequentialist requirements. In two experiments, the article finds that although people are sensitive to consequentialist requirements and, on average, find more extreme demands less reasonable, the level of disagreement with consequentialism falls short of qualifying as a widely shared intuition, even when demands are the highest. The article then ends with a general discussion of possible objections to its methods and its findings.

Moral Demands and Ethical Theory: The Case of Consequentialism

“…But we should note that these theories only deal with a subset of all the "missing" reasons and hence cannot be taken as providing a complete response, even if they do not fail otherwise. 40 With Martin Bruder, I have been carrying out research along these lines with promising results that show that the majority of people regard consequentialist reasons as overriding other considerations See, for example, Bruder and Tanyi (2014). 41 Sobel (2007: 14-15) appears to be in agreement with this.…”