Moral uncertainty for consequentialists

Abstract How might an agent's moral uncertainty affect what they ought to do? One approach posits principles independent of all first-order moral theories to provide impartial guidance to those uncertain about which moral theory is true; a popular candidate is the principle of maximizing expected choiceworthiness (MEC). Another approach focuses on what first-order moral theories themselves might say about the moral implications of moral uncertainty. This paper considers the latter question in the context of consequentialism by exploring how two consequentialist strategies for dealing with non-moral uncertainty could be extended to moral uncertainty. My conclusion is that a consequentialist could plausibly adopt maximizing expected goodness as a standard of rightness, but not MEC, and that neither is likely to be part of the best consequentialist decision procedure. This result refutes the common suspicion that MEC represents a distinctively consequentialist approach to moral uncertainty.