 An initial response, however, is that one should not read too much into the formal concepts of decision theory. The utility measure over acts and outcomes is simply a convenient way to represent an ordering, and leaves much scope for different ways of identifying and evaluating outcomes. Just as an agent’s utility function need not be insensitive to ethical considerations in general (a common misconception due to the prevalence of selfish preferences in economic models; see, for instance, Sen 1977), nor need it be insensitive to specifically nonconsequentialist or deontological ethical considerations. It all depends on how acts and their outcomes are distinguished and evaluated. For starters, the character of an act may feature as a property of all its possible outcomes. Moreover, whether some event befalls or is perpetrated by the deciding agent or rather someone else may be relevant. That an act involves lying, say, can be referenced in all possible outcomes of the act, and furthermore this lying on the part of the deciding agent can be distinguished from the lying of others. In general, acts and their outcomes can be distinguished according to whatever matters morally, be it a complex relational property to do with how and when the act is chosen, by whom, and/or in what way some state of affairs results from the act. For early discussions on how a wide range of ethical properties can be accommodated in the description of acts and outcomes, see, for instance, Sen (1982), Vallentyne (1988), Broome (1991b) and Dreier (1993). This idea has since been embraced by others associated with the so-called “consequentializing” program, including Louise (2004) and Portmore (2007). The idea is that the normative advice of putatively nonconsequentialist ethical theories can be represented in terms of a ranking of acts/outcomes corresponding to some value function, as per consequentialist ethical theories (see too Colyvan et al. 2010).