The Semantic Equivalence Between the Good and the Right: Its Support for and Challenge to Consequentialism

Viewed from the perspective of meta-ethics, there is some semantic equivalence between the good as desirability and the right as acceptability, so that we can claim that whatever is desirable for a person is also acceptable to and thus right for her or him in terms of its very goodness. In the debate with deontology, then, this equivalence gives consequentialism an advantage, because it could prove that the good on its own is always right, and the evil on its own is always wrong. Meanwhile, it also puts consequentialism at a disadvantage, because consequentialism could hardly answer a tough question: why do we seriously need another criterion of right and wrong besides the one of good and evil in evaluation?