Fitting Consequentialism

Abstract

According to the Fitting Attitudes analysis of value, we can understand value in terms of desirability or what it is fitting to desire. But we can also raise normative questions about the fittingness of (e.g.) beliefs, emotions, and choices. My dissertation explores the broader significance of such 'fittingness' evaluations from a consequentialist standpoint. This project has both a normative and a metaethical component. The norma tive component develops and assesses the consequentialist's conception of a morally fitting (or virtuous) agent, thereby responding to several traditional character-based objections to the view. Critics have alleged, for example, that a consequentialist agent would see people as mere value receptacles, be cold and calculating, untrustworthy, and disturbingly 'alienated' from themselves and others. I rebut these charges. The metaethical component of my project explores how attention to the possible types of 'fittingness' evaluations can help us to define the scope and limits of normative theorizing, with important implications for how we should formulate consequentialism. In particular, I argue that even if we think that what's right is determined by the value facts, we should not go so far as to think that rightness is conceptually reducible to goodness.