It might be said that consequentialist assessment is justified because promoting the impartial good has an obvious intuitive appeal. But that won’t do, since there are alternatives to consequentialist assessment that also have obvious intuitive appeal. This is true, for example, of “act on the code that no one could reasonably reject”. In fact, no one very abstract moral idea is so clearly superior to its rivals that it can triumph without the aid of further justification.  What we need is a way of arguing for a moral theory that does not start by begging the question which kind of theory is most plausible.