Consequentialism and coordination: How traditional consequentialism has an attitude problem

Sometimes, whether your X-ing will have good consequences depends on whether you or someone else is going to Y. This chapter argues that in such instances, what’s important in determining whether you should X is whether you have control over Y’s occurrence, and that in the relevant sense of ‘control’, agents have just as much control over whether they will nonvoluntarily form various attitudes (e.g., beliefs, desires, and intentions) as they do over whether they will voluntarily perform various actions. Therefore, consequentialists should be concerned not only with an agent’s voluntary actions but also with her nonvoluntary attitudes. Indeed, consequentialists should hold that whether an agent ought to perform some future act depends on whether she would perform that future act if she were now to form and perform all the acts and attitudes that she is required to form and perform.