Abstract

A middle road between the two extremes of an unattainable moral ideal and a strict adhesion to common moral practices and actual human behaviour is pursued in this paper. The result is a two-tiered rule-consequentialist ethics, where actions are justified in terms of a code whose internalization by the overwhelming majority of each new generation will produce the best consequences. This model is defended against the objection that it relies too much on contingent claims about the costs of internalization of certain codes, by showing the appropriate role of facts and empirical claims in a human morality. Moreover, the paper shows how a rule-consequentialist framework might be nicely used to deal with the issue of climate change, and how it provides plausible suggestions in this difficult area.