 As Campbell Brown (2011) has noted, arguing with an act-consequentialist can be frustrating. You describe some action—say, your killing one innocent person to prevent the mafia from killing five other innocent people. And then you claim that although your doing this would clearly be wrong, the outcome in which you do this is one that you should prefer to (and, thus, one that outranks) the outcome in which you don’t do this. You conclude, therefore, that act-consequentialism is false: an act can be wrong even though its outcome is not outranked by that of any available alternative. But the act-consequentialist retorts that, to reach this conclusion, you had to presuppose a particular account of how outcomes rank, one that the act-consequentialist needn’t accept. So, you were wrong to conclude that act-consequentialism is false. All that you’ve shown is that a certain version of act-consequentialism is false. But we already knew that act-consequentialism yields counterintuitive deontic verdicts when combined with certain assumptions about how outcomes rank. We learned that long ago by studying the implications of utilitarianism.