 The fact that consequentialist impartiality turns out to have such strict and demanding implications is, for the consequentialist, a double-edged sword. On the plausible and popular assumption that a moral theory must be deeply impartial, consequentialism meets this criterion with flying colors. And consequentialists have typically been adept at exploiting this fact with powerful rhetoric (Godwin’s famous query, ‘what magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’?’ being a noteworthy example.) On the other hand, the impartial demands of consequentialism are so strict and so extreme that many critics have found them unacceptable: consequentialism, they claim, simply demands too much and must therefore be rejected (Scheffler 1982, Slote 1985, Williams 1981).