Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy wrote:[Consequentialism] is the view that normative properties depend only on consequences. [...] Consequentialists hold that choices — acts and/or intentions — are to be morally assessed solely by the states of affairs they bring about.

Despite thinking that some variant of utilitarianism is the ethical system which produces the fewest number of counter-intuitive results, I have always found the basic premise of consequentialist theories of morality to be somewhat strange. According to this definition of consequentialism, it looks like moral judgements should be handed out to states of affairs or actions rather than the agents who execute the action that brings about the state of affairs. I think this creates two problems for consequentialism. The first is that actions which accidentally bring about a state of affairs which are worse should seem to be judged as "wrong" actions even if the intent of the person executing the action was to improve the state of affairs. The converse also applies. But this is not the focus of this thread.

The problem that I would to bring attention to is that it is not very clear what is meant by "the consequences of an action". I think it a very good assumption to believe that the universe (at least on the macroscopic scale) is a deterministic one, and I believe that human beings (although they have "free will") are a part of a deterministic causal chain originating in the beginning of space-time and that all future events of the world will be determined by events of the past. Surely, a consequentialist does not want to admit that every action is responsible for all future events after that action takes place; this would be ridiculous. How should a consequentialist reconcile this?

I personally think that consequentialism should consider abandoning placing value on states of affairs and instead focus on the intents of individuals performing those actions, but this is irrelevant and I wanted to know what others thought. Is this a serious problem for consequentialism? Or is it a non-problem and I am just not understanding the language of consequentialism very well?

You have all missed the main point of this thread (which I must take some blame for, as I only mentioned it once briefly in a sentence). I am not questioning whether or not we can be held responsible for our actions in a deterministic world.

Rather, I am saying that is is difficult for us to decide which outcomes should be attributed to which actions.

Right now, I exhaled in a certain direction which disturbed the air molecules of Canada a little bit. Over time, I expect that this will contribute to the formation of a deadly hurricane somewhere on the other side of the world, perhaps causing a lot of suffering. It might happen in a few years, or it might happen in a few millenia. Who knows. The problem is that if consequentialism places value on just the consequences, then I would be responsible for everything that happens in the universe after I was born (or at least achieved sentience)! The fact is, I interact with every other body of matter in the universe in some way however slight, so I am the cause of a lot of things.

ZenosDilemma wrote:This is a little off-topic but it got my attention when you mentioned free-will within a deterministic world view. Is this an compatablist view like Hume's. That's worth it's own discussion.

Yes, it is probably a bit off-topic, but perhaps clarifying my views on this slightly-relevant subject might help prevent further confusions in this discussion. I am a compatibilist, and I use the same reasoning as Hume; when we say that "it is impossible for that rock to tumble down that hill in any other way than it was already going to", we are referring to what is known as "contingent possibility". But when we say that "it is possible that I might tip the waitress 15% rather than 10%", we are referring instead to a different sort of possibility altogether; I use the word "epistemic possibility" to describe this. I think that, as long as we have access to epistemically possible actions, we can say that we have "free will" and that we are responsible for our actions, even though we contingently could not have done any different.

Scott wrote:Normative moral claims seem to claim there is some other mystical objective way in which things actually are valued or matter and that only one of those three forms of such judgement (or some other form of amoral judgement) matters in that mystical objective way.

I am actually rather divided on this issue. I certainly do not think that morality refers to, as you say, "some mystical objective way in which things actually are valued". I think that when we say "when you robbed that store, you did a bad thing", we are really just saying "I experienced a certain emotion called "immorality" when I considered the fact that you robbed that store". This is the emotivism that Ayer advocated, and although I think it is basically true, I still find that as long as we define certain axioms such as "the most ethical action is the one which maximized pleasure in the world" and "an unethical action is one which causes you to feel a certain emotion when you consider that action", we do get rather coherent language that works in its own logical framework. So, I think that the line between amoralism and noncognitivism is not really all that clear.