Joseph Mendola , Goodness and Justice : A Consequentialist Moral

Joseph Mendola’s ambitious goal in this philosophically rich book is to provide a comprehensive account of goodness and justice which coheres with our intuitions and which is also thoroughly justified by independent metaphysical arguments. The project has three distinct parts. The first part develops a new form of act-consequentialism, which focuses on group agents and their acts, called Multiple-Act-Consequentialism or MAC. The second part defends a hedonist theory of the good, and the third part defends a very riskaverse maximin principle. The second and third parts together give us his Hedonic Maximin Principle or HMP. MAC is a promising new approach to consequentialism, even if it does not deliver the degree of coherence between consequentialism and common sense that Mendola promises. HMP, on the other hand, is wildly implausible. It would be interesting to see MAC developed without HMP. Only the committed reader will discover the deeply counter-intuitive nature of Mendola’s HMP, which is not revealed until near the end of the book. Mendola explains: