According to Utilitarian Generalization an act is right or wrong depending on what would happen if everyone were to do acts of that kind. One chief difficulty in applying UG is to determine which acts share the same relevant properties and are therefore acts of the same kind. In focusing on this problem I first examine the criteria of relevance proposed by Jonathan Harrison and by David Lyons. I show that each of their proposals is inadequate because each allows us (...) to designate as relevant some properties we noncontroversially take to be irrelevant. I next propose a criterion which not only allows us to designate as irrelevant every property that we noncontroversially take to be irrelevant, but which also expresses the underlying causal and generalization features of UG. Since the acid test of any such proposal will be its response to the highly controversial issue of whether the behavior of others is relevant for applications of UG, I turn to this important issue. (shrink)

I explore the debate about whether consequentialist theories can adequately accommodate the moral force of promissory obligation. I outline a straightforward act consequentialist account grounded in the value of satisfying expectations, and raise and assess three objections to this account: that it counterintuitively predicts that certain promises should be broken when commonsense morality insists that they should be kept, that the account is circular, and Michael Cholbi’s argument that this account problematically implies that promise-making is frequently obligatory. I then discuss (...) alternative act consequentialist accounts, including Philip Pettit’s suggestion that promise-keeping is an intrinsic good and Michael Smith’s agent-relative account. I outline Brad Hooker’s rule consequentialist account of promissory obligation and raise a challenge for it. I conclude that appeals to intuitions about cases will not settle the dispute, and that consequentialists and their critics must instead engage in substantive debate about the nature and stringency of promissory obligation. (shrink)