Such practices, he argues, are intrinsically wrong regardless of whether or not some better consequences ever flow from them.
It's surprising if you think people ought to prefer alternatives that lead them to better consequences.
Moreover, Glantz and Kelman (2013) emphasized that "Lessons Learned" are those lessons that have better consequences for disaster reduction, provided they are implemented.
Promises also create expectations in their recipients, and the harm of unrealized expectations or hopes needs to be taken into account when we consider whether the breaking of a promise has better consequences than the keeping of a promise.
Such acceptance rule consequentialists then claim that an act is morally wrong if and only if it violates a rule whose acceptance has better consequences than the acceptance of any incompatible rule.
Still, our following a decision procedure that generally rules out such acts will in the long run and on the whole probably produce far better consequences than our trying to run consequentialist calculations on an act-by-act basis.
It starts from a commitment to consequentialist assessment, and then argues that assessing acts indirectly, e.g., by focusing on the consequences of communal acceptance of rules, will in fact produce better consequences than assessing acts directly in terms of their own consequences (Austin 1832; Brandt 1963, 1979; Harsanyi 1982: 58 60; 1993; Riley 2000).
If this claim is correct, then rule utilitarianism implies that it is morally wrong for a particular doctor to use an unwilling donor, even for a particular transplant that would have better consequences than any alternative even from the doctor's own perspective.
Since a promise is designed to secure his trust, and that trust is then likely to be the source of much pain if it's disappointed, it's reasonable to assume that in most cases keeping one's promise will be productive of better consequences than breaking them, given the expectations of the promisee.
Kant used the example of lying as an application of his ethics: because there is a perfect duty to tell the truth, we must never lie, even if it seems that lying would bring about better consequences than telling the truth.
