caa a22 4500 606237992 CHVBK 20210128101256.0 cr unu---uuuuu 210128e20150801xx s 000 0 eng 10.1007/s10677-015-9602-8 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)springer-10.1007/s10677-015-9602-8 Elgin Samuel Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA aut The Unreliability of Foreseeable Consequences: A Return to the Epistemic Objection [Elektronische Daten] [Samuel Elgin] Consequentialists maintain that an act is morally right just in case it produces the best consequences of any available alternative. Because agents are ignorant about some of their acts' consequences, they cannot be certain about which alternative is best. Kagan (1998) contends that it is reasonable to assume that unforeseen good and bad consequences roughly balance out and can be largely disregarded. A statistical argument demonstrates that Kagan's assumption is almost always false. An act's foreseeable consequences are an extremely poor indicator of the goodness of its overall consequences. Acting based on foreseeable consequences is barely more reliably good than acting completely at random. Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2015 Consequentialism nationallicence Epistemic objection nationallicence Statistics nationallicence Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Springer Netherlands 18/4(2015-08-01), 759-766 1386-2820 18:4<759 2015 18 10677 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9602-8 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 Metadata rights reserved Springer special CC-BY-NC licence nationallicence 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-springer NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-015-9602-8 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Elgin Samuel Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA aut NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Springer Netherlands 18/4(2015-08-01), 759-766 1386-2820 18:4<759 2015 18 10677