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What makes an action right or wrong?

It is stated at the beginning that an action It produces the best possible


consequences. Whether an action is right or wrong depends on a
comparison of all the consequences of all the other actions.
What is wrong with saying this?

People wo say we could not have chosen differently would say you cannot
decide if an action is right or wrong because there is no way you could
compare it to other actions because you could not possibly have done
anything differently.
The author states that you cannot say that we could not have chosen differently
and also say that we have freewill. Although the fact that we could have chosen
differently does not necessarily mean that we have free will.
Using the term could not have happened becomes problematic:

It is problematic to say that something could not have happened at all only
because it did not happen at that given time.

The word could is ambiguous:

It is used differently on different occasions

To say (1.) what didnt happen could never have happened


and (2.) whatdid happen is the only thing that could have
happened are two different things
Causation

People who say we do not have free will say that everything is caused

People who say we do have free will say there is a sense of free choose
and not everything is always caused

So we must ask if the sense of could is the same or different in each view
Instead of saying what could we have done differently we must say what should
we have done differently if we willed differently

You must not judge someone the same way on the same action if person
did it willing and the other did it unwillingly.

This is consistent with the belief that everything is caused and also still
shows that we have free will
In conclusion 3 things are certain:

We often should have acted differently if we had chosen to

We often should have chosen differently if we had chosen to

It is almost always possible that we should have chosen differently in the


sense that no man could know for certain that we should not so choose
So instead of saying that

1. an action is right only when it produces better consequences from any


other action

we should say that:

2. an action is right when person could not have chosen anything which
would have produced better consequences

This could not have done is not equivalent to, but should be understood
as, would not have done, if they had chosen to

Moore concludes that this is enough to entitle us to the fact that we do


have free will

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