What most forms of Consequentialism cannot do is require us to act in such a way as to make the world worse, yet many of the objections to Consequentialism purport to show that Consequentialism requires us to make the world a stinking, bloody mess. The ubiquity of these kinds of arguments shows you just how unseriously many of the critics take Consequentialism.
Dale JamiesonPhilosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.
Dale JamiesonWhen I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.
Dale JamiesonPeople who go around saying that it is wrong to fly and to eat meat are not so much making appeals to us from within our shared morality, but engaging in something more like "persuasive definition." They want us to look at the world and ourselves in a different way. Someday these prohibitions against flying and eating meat may be written into our moral psychology, but it will only be after there are viable, widely shared alternatives that are beginning to be widely adopted.
Dale Jamieson