consequentialism

Consequentialism is a set of metaethical views that give importance to the consequence of actions rather than some inherent quality in the action. Examples of consequentialism include egoism and utilitarianism. This is in contrast to frameworks that posit that there is some inherent moral quality to certain things or actions, such as virtue ethics or deontologism. I posit that these non-consequentialist frameworks are special cases of consequentialist calculation, less abstracted versions of the same phenomenon. Of course, to say anything is more or less abstract is itself suspect as anything can be explained in terms of anything else, but it is a useful fiction to assume that one comes from the other, because of heuristics that follow downstream from consequentialism, such as noticing IEEDI syndrome.