Every action is a consequence of something and a cause of something else. Thus, saying that "an action is right or wrong depending on whether its consequences are right or wrong", which only amounts to shifting the question of whether its right or wrong forward, without ever providing a substantial answer. And the fun thing is, you can do this over and over, since every consequence is itself the cause to further consequences! At the end of the day, this allows consequentialists to defend the morality of basically anything
This is not serious. Who says people should be infinitely forward looking?
So how do you determine which link of the endless causality chain is worthy of moral analysis? Isn't it inherently arbitrary? Doesn't it allow you to pick and choose the so-called "consequence" that most benefits your case?
No. The only consequences that matter are those that result from the action in question. At a personal level one should consider all that one can perceive, not merely a single consequence of one's choice. As I pointed out earlier, the weakness in consequentialism as a guide to what to do is that we don't always perceive all of the consequences of an action. That is where deontology comes in, but even there the validity of deontology depends upon the assumption that the rules one follows, whatever their source may be, are able to provide a better guide to the consequences of an action and how to weigh those consequences than our own limited ability to foresee.
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