Contrary to most other days, I found myself agreeing with Hurka at the beginning of this chapter; after some thought I realized it’s because he expressed anti-consequentialist belief. Found early in the chapter, Hurka makes the claim that belief in false knowledge is not worse than having true knowledge as long as the “beliefs did not result from self-deception or thoughtlessness.” The distinction from consequentialism is that he is adding intent into his scale of values. This is non-consequentialist in nature because it entails that we can be committed to something that brings about negative consequences and not be worse morally than someone bringing about better consequences. As long as we are not acting on beliefs that are self-deceptive AND would be willing to change our beliefs when sufficient evidence shows us we believe in something wrong, we are morally equivalent to someone acting on knowledge which is by chance more true than ours.
I will now offer an alternative concrete example so we can see an entailment of this belief. Suppose that I have been told that eating some specific food will be good for me, so I alter my diet to focus largely around that food. It turns out that getting too much of the good produced by the food is detrimental to my health, as well as possibly neglecting other foods (which is also detrimental to my health). Once I notice that bad things are happening because of my limited knowledge, I should notice something is wrong and stop my bad (but good intentioned) eating habits.
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I'm not sure that this view is necessarily consequentialist. For instance, Hurka uses the example of Aristotle, who, though a great scientist, also came to many conclusions that were simply false. Aristotle's belief in false knowledge has value in that he takes value from the pleasure in having the knowledge. Although Hurka would argue that the value of this would be even greater if the knowledge were real knowledge rather than fake, he still doles out points for the pleasure involved. Hurka here seems concerned entirely with giving out points for base goods and recursive relations to base goods, and not with intents. I believe that Hurka's aversion to self-deception is largely because of the harm that lying to ourselves can cause.
Hurka might also argue that, because of the recursive account, intents are already related to base goods, and are good in themself. This might seem non-consequentialist, yet, ultimately, Hurka seems to be concerned with the good of the situation itself, rather than with a good that never happened, as someone wholly concerned with intent might be.
I think this is a very interesting point. I take it that to preserve consequentialism someone will have to say moral goodness comes apart from maximizing base goods. So loving the goods (desiring, pursuing, or taking pleasure in) does not necessarily mean maximizing consequences. This makes sense because we can be virtuous and have moral goodness to some extent through loving goods without trying to bring about any consequences at all. So loving goods and hating evils often brings about good consequences, but it is not necessary for it to do so. I can't remember exactly what Hurka says about this in Chapter 1 but I suspect this is an option for a consequentialist who thinks virtue is intrinsically good.
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