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MENDOLA, Joseph. Goodness and Justice: A Consequentialist Moral Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 326 pp. Cloth, $80.00-As novel as it is unfashionable, Goodness and Justice seeks to evade certain intuitive objections to classical utilitarianism through the unlikely marriage of a hedonic conception of the good and an egalitarian conception of distributive justice. With a nod to two often-divergent approaches in contemporary analytic ethics, Mendola structures his ambitious project around meeting two tests: provide a "direct argument" that gives a "transcendental vindication" of his moral claims and show how such a position is consonant with our "commonsense intuitions" about certain concrete cases.
Part one develops Mendola's unique form of consequentialism, Multiple-Act Consequentialism, or MAC. A distinctive feature of MAC is its view that the basic units of consideration are "atomic agents" or brief periods of enduring persons' lives. According to this theory, each of us is part of a multiplicity of overlapping group agents (p. 43). Thus the task of MAC is the direct consequentialist evaluation of the options of the group agents of which we are constituents. When there are conflicts between different group acts, we should "defect" from group acts with good consequences only if we can achieve better consequences on our own. Though more...