 In so characterizing consequentialism I am defining it as applying directly to the evaluation of an agent’s actions. (It should be pointed out that this still leaves it open whether or not an agent should be motivated by explicit thoughts about consequentialist requirements. It might be that an agent will perform better in terms of consequentialist standards if she is most often moved by other sorts of considerations—a point that is important to the sort of ‘sophisticated’ consequentialism advanced by Peter Railton, Frank Jackson, and others, and briefly discussed below.) One might instead adhere to a theory according to which first-order moral rules should be chosen in accordance with their tendency to promote the overall good, impartially (and impersonally) conceived. Such theories typically go by the name ‘rule consequentialism’, though there has been some debate as to whether they constitute genuinely consequentialist theories at all (Howard-Snyder 1993). For the purposes of understanding impartiality, at any rate, it is most useful to group rule consequentialist theories not with act consequentialist theories but with deontological theories, which are more similar in terms of their underlying normative structure.