Doing no more harm than good

Given all the consequences of an act and the value of each of them, how can we find their value ‘on the whole’? In ‘Utilitarianisms: Simple and General’, Inquiry 13, 394–449, J. Howard Sobel offers two alternative suggestions. Here one of Sobel's suggestions is attacked and the other given new support. Where the number of consequences is finite, it is argued, their value is the sum of their basic intrinsic values: the basic intrinsic value of a state of affairs is the value it has on its own account, and not in virtue of other states of affairs it entails.