The Pros And Cons Of Consequentialism

I believe that Williams provides an interesting and important issue found in consequentialism, and while Railton makes a few good points, I believe he creates as many problems as he solves. By defending consequentialism by dividing it into subjective and objective, I believe that he leaves the realm of true consequentialism. By being objectively consequentialist, you are no longer necessarily concerned with what your actions will cause. You are now concerned with what your actions did cause, and in turn use consequentialism as an evaluation tool for past actions. In theory, Railton believes that we will overtime learn from evaluating our decisions and then in the future be able to make better decisions. However, humans typically want to justify

I also believe that since consequentialism is not being used as a decision procedure, it is not very helpful in allowing us to make decisions. Railton did briefly discuss an argument against this belief in which he provides the question, “Which modes of decision making should be employed and when.” This question to me is just as vague of guidance as objective consequentialism is. Also, you must know all the types of decision making and know when they are best used. Through Railton’s objective consequentialism, you would learn these things through experience, but that could take years, which could mean years of undesired and unwanted consequences for years before truly figuring it

While he does seem to lessen the alienation of hedonism and reduce the paradox to a problem, however, the problem he creates is not much easier to solve than the paradox he just solved. In fact, it might even be a paradox in itself. By questioning how one should act in order to achieve maximum happiness even when you do not have to use the pursuit of happiness as a goal, you are simply trying to figure out how to achieve maximum happiness even when maximum happiness is not your goal. By wanting to achieve maximum happiness, without having the goal of happiness, happiness become your goal no matter what and leads to the alienation problem of other goals becoming tools. Objective hedonism is concern for one’s own happiness even if it minimizes overall happiness. This is a completely different view than the one he is attempting to defend in Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality. Instead, this begins to look like egoism, a theory in which all of your interests are selfish. This view of hedonism could also lead to minimizing happiness. If someone believed that world domination would make them happy and did not have to make hedonistic deliberations, they would probably pursue world domination. This would minimize overall happiness. Railton also believed that by using a multifaceted approach, alienation would be removed. This to me is