Sentence examples for consequentialist justification from inspiring English sources

The first problem is that the consequentialist justification seems to under-generate reasons for punishment, if we remember that punishment involves the deliberate bringing about of a harm.

And to recognize, that at least prima facie the consequentialist justification seems both to under-generate and over-generate things that look like punishment in cases where, at least as encoded in our inherited legal statutes, it violates the norms to which people feel themselves intuitively drawn.

The consequentialist justification for an agent's giving greater attention to the well-being of her intimates is that her doing so will best promote intrinsic value.

The second strategy admits that there are cases in which unjust actions can be given a consequentialist justification, but holds that when so much as it stake, justice must give way to consequentialism's demands (Smart 1973; Kagan 1989; Pettit 1997).

This offers a pragmatic (and consequentialist) justification for a presumption that all human beings have full moral status: not merely because of the terrible costs of mistakenly denying that status, but because treating fellow human beings as capable of joining our moral community makes it more likely that they will be able to do so.

Indeed, a prince who presented purely consequentialist justifications for apparently immoral actions would be a very dangerous kind of ruler.

Now it should be clear to all of you, because we went through the mirror image of this in the positive case, that thinking merely in terms of consequentialist justifications for punishment seems to carry with it two kinds of problems.

It disallows consequentialist justifications whenever: we foresee the death of an innocent; we omit to save, where our saving would have made a difference and we knew it; where we remove a life-saving device, knowing the patient will die.

This is in deep conflict with the spirit of approaches (such as Strawson's) that have dismissed such consequentialist sorts of justifications of free will as unable to capture the intimate connection between an agent and her responsibility for what she has done.

Alternatively, the more optimistic of the consequentialists cast their justifications in the language of what we would now call 'Pareto-improvement'. Maybe the privatization of previously common land does not benefit everybody: but it benefits some and it leaves others no worse off than they were before.

The tenth doctrine, "Heaven's intent," elucidates the justification for the consequentialist theory itself.