It is a common experience that there are certain philosophical issues where differences of view are accompanied by perplexity as to how one’s opponents imagine that what they maintain is, or even could be, satisfactory. One such issue is weakness of will; another is consequentialism in ethics; a third is free will and determinism.
(J. J. Haldane, "Reply to Smart," chap. 4 in Atheism and Theism, 2d ed., by J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Great Debates in Philosophy, ed. Ernest Sosa [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003], 171-93, at 180)
Note from KBJ: Consequentialism is the doctrine (in ethics) that the rightness of an act is a function solely of its consequences. Nothing else—e.g., the type of act it is, its motive, whether it is universalizable or universally prescribable—has any bearing on its rightness. To deny consequentialism is not to assert that consequences are irrelevant, but only that something other than consequences is relevant. I don't know that anyone can be argued into or out of consequentialism. Some people are attracted to it and some are repelled by it. I'm repelled by it.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 