Consequentialism

The right action is the one that produces the best outcome. Consequentialism judges acts (or rules, or character) by their consequences — not by intent, duty, or intrinsic rightness. What matters is what happens: welfare, harm, preference satisfaction, or some other measure of the good. The most developed form is utilitarianism: maximise total well-being (or the balance of benefit over harm). But any view that makes consequences the sole or primary criterion counts as consequentialist. The opposite is deontology: some acts are right or wrong regardless of outcome (e.g. don't lie, don't kill). Consequentialism says: look at the results.

The strength of the view is its clarity. You have a goal (e.g. welfare); you choose the act that best achieves it. No appeal to mysterious duties or ineffable rights — just cause and effect. The weakness is that consequences are hard to measure, predict, and compare across people and time. Do we count only direct effects or also indirect? How do we weigh one person's gain against another's loss? Consequentialism doesn't answer these by itself; it says that whatever answers we give, they should be about consequences.

In practice, consequentialist reasoning is ubiquitous. Cost-benefit analysis, ROI, impact evaluation — all ask "what happens if we do this?" The discipline is to make the criterion explicit (what good are we maximising?), to consider second-order effects (what happens next?), and to avoid the trap of judging only by intent when the outcome was bad. The strategic question is always: what outcome do we want, and which action actually gets us there?