This book aims at transcending the dichotomy between deontology and consequentialism by accounting for reasons, obligation, and value in an integrated normative framework. In that framework, the consequences of our actions include more than what we caused by acting, and the main focus of deliberation is conduct. Deliberation should take account of the moral value our conduct realizes. That in turn may have intrinsic value or intrinsic disvalue. The importance of moral value is illustrated and shown to be central for deontological ethics but also of major importance for the view – consequencism – that the overall consequences of our conduct, organically understood, provides the widest and deepest moral standard. Consequencism is neither purely deontological nor purely consequentialist; it is pluralistic and accommodates all three dimensions of value; it incorporates the virtue-theoretic requirement on moral motivation; and its normative demand is a preferential standard stronger than satisficing but weaker than maximization.

Moral rationalists have claimed a priori status for moral principles, including the commonsense principles described in Chapter 4. Intuitionists – prominently including Ross – have even claimed self-evidence for such principles. How can this claim be justified? Central to the case is the idea that normative properties are a priori grounded in certain non-normative natural properties. This chapter explains such grounding. In doing so, it distinguishes two kinds of normativity: a kind belonging to a priori grounds of obligation, e.g. promising – normativity in upshot – and another belonging to propositions, such as moral judgments, that employ normative concepts: this is normativity in content. The chapter shows how the commonsense principles control critical discourse in the constitutive ways appropriate to entrenched a priori generalizations. It also shows how their apriority squares with the empiricality of singular moral judgments and how, even where obligations conflict, singular judgments of overall obligation may be justified and known.

The discovery of the McMurdo Dry Valleys was an accidental result of the desire in polar exploration to find the South Magnetic Pole and the South Geographic Pole. James Clark Ross was astonished in 1841, after pushing his way through a thick collar of pack ice, to suddenly sail into an open body of water, McMurdo Sound, finding a large island (Ross Island) like Hawaii formed by a series of several large volcanoes, one of which was smoking and ready to erupt. He came here to find the South Magnetic Pole, which was too far inland to the west to reach easily on foot, as he had done years earlier in reaching the North Magnetic Pole. This opened the way for Robert Falcon Scott to come here in 1902–1904 with his Discovery expedition to make and attempt on the Pole. He set up camp on Ross Island and stayed for two years exploring various ways to reach the Pole. Albert Armitage, one his men, pushed a route directly west to see what was there and was astonished to find large valleys fully free of ice and snow, the McMurdo Dry Valleys.