8 - A Code

Summary

The conjunction of Multiple-Act Consequentialism and the Hedonic Maximin Principle modulates a traditional utilitarian concern about hedonic good through a focus on two sorts of justice: distributive justice and the avoidance of unjust means such as murder. I will refer to this marriage as the just good theory, or JGT.

JGT has been directly vindicated on the basis of ordinal hedonic value, and we have seen that each of its elements is intuitively appropriate at an abstract level, subject to some reservations about how the details work. We face one more argumentative burden. This chapter argues that, in the world we inhabit, the just good theory supports a moral code that I will call the Proposed Code, or PC for short, and that PC is a properly intuitive detailed morality.

PC is a relatively concrete set of normative directions. I will argue that it is within the range of contemporary reflective normative intuition of the same level of detail. You easily may have forgotten how JGT, which is a form of direct act-based consequentialism, can support a fixed moral code at all. The answer is that it supports such a code in the context of the actual group acts in which we participate. It is a code for us in those somewhat contingent circumstances.

PC has two major components, which reflect major components of the just good theory and also of contemporary reconstructions of commonsense morality.