All else being equal, a murder is better than an accidental death, because a murder at least satisfies someone’s preferences.
I was very tempted to take this as a reductio ad absurdum of consequentialism, to find all the posts where I advocated consequentialism and edit them, saying I’m not a consequentialist anymore, and to rethink my entire object-level ethics from the ground up.
It can’t be a reductio ad absurdium of consequentialism because the quoted claim isn’t even implied by consequentialism. It is implied by some forms of utilitarianism. Consequentialism cares (directly) only about one set of preferences and the fact that the murderer has a preference for successfully murdering doesn’t get a positive weighting unless the specific utility function arbitrarily happens to do so. It is just as easy to have a consequentialist utility function that prefers the accident to the murder as the reverse.
It can’t be a reductio ad absurdium of consequentialism because the quoted claim isn’t even implied by consequentialism. It is implied by some forms of utilitarianism. Consequentialism cares (directly) only about one set of preferences and the fact that the murderer has a preference for successfully murdering doesn’t get a positive weighting unless the specific utility function arbitrarily happens to do so. It is just as easy to have a consequentialist utility function that prefers the accident to the murder as the reverse.