Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Consequentialism, I find,is typically espoused by people who like to see themselves as "hard-headed," practical, empirical sorts of folks. So, faced with something like the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan at the end of WWII, they say, "Unlike starry-eyed idealists, I am a realist: I consider the consequences. The US won the war; therefore, dropping the bombs was worth it." (Note: I am not saying all consequentialists would approve of dropping those atomic bombs. I am just presenting a typical sort of consequentialist argument.) They actually convince themselves that people subscribing to other ethical systems don't think of the consequences of actions! I guess it shows how easy it is too willfully blind oneself, because it ought to be rather obvious that the US winning the war was not quite the only consequences of dropping the bombs: there is also the minor consequence of a quarter of a million dead Japanese, and many more maimed and injured. The peop...

Consequentialism tells us it is good to do something if the consequences of doing it are good. But how do we judge if the consequences are good? If we do so by looking to their consequences, obviously we have entered an infinite regress. Therefore, we need non-consequentialist criteria for judging a consequence good or bad. In that case, consequentialism turns out to be not a complete system of morality, but merely the idea that we ought to pay attention to the consequences of our actions. But what moral theory says we should not pay attention to those consequences?! Every moral thinker of whom I am aware would differentiate between cutting a person with a knife to kill them from cutting them with a knife to save their life in an operation, which is judging the action by its (likely) consequence. (Yes, intentions are involved, but the intentions just are aiming at a certain outcome, right?) So consequentialism is either impossible or trivially true.