Consequentialism vs. Non-consequentialism

I believe that having clearly defined and established rules is not necessary to having a moral and good society. Rules always exist in societies but for thousands of years those rules were not written down, instead they were passed from generation to generation by tradition and custom. Even today outside of the world of academia there are very few people who define their own rules guiding their morals. Laws may exist but just as the book said: if laws did not exist people would not immediately go around killing people and stealing from one another. We are guided by some strong ideas that do not need to be written down to know what is right and what is wrong; those ideas have been established over the thousands of years where the human race has lived together in a social setting.

I think that the morality or immorality of an action does depend on the situation that we find ourselves in. For example, there are some situations where I believe that lying to someone may be appropriate. I know that it is an extremely dangerous precedent to set but if the person being lied will only make the situation worse if they are told the truth or if they are unable to handle the truth at that time it may be not be immoral to lie to the person or at least delay revealing the truth. What about killing another person, it may be wrong in almost all situations but what if someone is trying to kill you. In that situation I would argue that if you must kill the attacker in order to protect yourself it is not an immoral act.

A non-consequentialist would argue with this idea. For them there would be no exceptions to their own established rules. They would expect people to follow the rules them regardless of the situation and regardless of the outcome. There are very few true non-consequentialists in practice although it is a very interesting idea. Most people have at least some consequentialist thought and the impracticality of non-consequentialism was evident even in the non-consequentialist theories which usually made some sort of concession such as the reversibility criterion in Kant’s duty ethics.