However, the analysis as presented here is based on a popular error, which is the notion that consequentialist systems are in some way incompatible with duty- or rights- based ones. They are quite compatible, if one has the right meta-ethical account of rights.

Rights arise out of dire social conditions which necessitate some social standard, and they arise specifically when somebody realizes that an improvement in social conditions can arise if and only if certain laws were made. In other words, if we have the right understanding of where rights come from, deontology dissolves into consequentialism proper.

This consequence-based account of rights can be defended even in unfortunate conditions. It can especially be defended in hindsight, where a strong historical imagination allows us to understand just to what extent the fruits of law that we have today are based on the integrity of persons who may have only had the barest intuition of the norms that would follow them.

It may have been rather difficult, though, for those actual persons to believe in this particular story about consequences and rights. The world is turbulent, and can obfuscate the actor’s view of the causes of their moral intuitions. Still, even in the worst of all worlds, certain pearls of worldly wisdom can provide reason to see how virtuous behavior has the hope of leading to good consequences, thus reinforcing their own virtues; for a sense of hope is what a virtue requires to survive.

For example, to invoke Hobbes, there are some of the revelatory facts of human nature that people tend to notice if they turn their mind to the subject: that people a) imitate those they admire; b) that violent escalation, among other things, can and does arise regularly from vulgar consequentialism, thus forcing more mature alternatives; and c) that people are more likely to willingly follow explicit rules with explicit goals than they are to follow unwritten ones. Ideas like these tend to manifest in the virtuous person’s mind even when the virtuous person in question has lost a materialistic sense of reality.

So Utilitarianism doesn’t need saving from the burden of consequentialism, which is really not in any trouble. Utilitarianism does need to address other concerns, but this particular one is not worrisome.