Consequentialism

The family of normative ethical theories holding that the moral worth of an action is determined entirely by its consequences. Consequentialists are willing to override intuitions and rules when doing so produces better outcomes, which is both the view's main appeal and its main source of controversy. The best-known variant is utilitarianism — the doctrine, systematised by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century and refined by John Stuart Mill, that an action is right insofar as it produces the greatest aggregate happiness (or "utility") and wrong insofar as it produces the opposite. The standing objection is that the spreadsheet can license individually monstrous acts whenever the numbers come out positive — the exact trap Raskolnikov walks into in Crime and Punishment, when he convinces himself that murdering a despicable pawnbroker will free up money to lift many others out of poverty.

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