Consequentialism and Its Demands : A Representative Study

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. The paper breaks with dominant trends in discussing this so-called Overdemandingness Objection. First, it argues that the most convincing form of the Objection claims that consequentialism is overdemanding because it requires us, with decisive force, to do things that, intuitively, we do not have decisive reason to perform. Second, it empirically investigates whether there exists such a widely shared intuition by examining what people think about the normative significance of consequentialist requirements. In a scenario study that recruited a sample which is representative of the German population in key characteristics, it finds that although people are sensitive to consequentialist requirements and, on average, find more extreme demands less reasonable, the level of dissent with consequentialism falls short of qualifying as a widely shared intuition, even when demands are the highest. This is true irrespective of people’s level of formal education despite the fact that lower levels of formal education are associated with an increased likelihood to have intuitions that are consistent with the Objection. Apart from contributing in this way to the debate concerning the overdemandingness objection, the paper also more directly speaks to the basic discussion concerning the status and role of intuitions in moral philosophy. Thus the paper discusses methodological questions and ends with a proposal concerning a new methodology that connects intuitions to emotions in a particular way and also proposes a role for virtue