Consequentialist moralities share a general moral structure. They all identify some state or states of affairs as intrinsically good, and characterize the right act in terms of the quantity of good it produces.
The most familiar such moralities are maximizing moralities. They characterize the right act as that which produces the most good, or has the best consequences. In these moralities an agent's duty is always to produce the most good possible.
Recently, Michael Slote has defended an alternative that he calls satisficing consequentialism. Less demanding than maximizing, it requires only that agents produce consequences that are "good enough". 1 Satisficing consequentialism selects a threshold of goodness in outcomes that is reasonable or satisfactory. Agents are morally bound to aim at outcomes that reach this threshold, but they are not bound beyond that. Although they may, if they wish, bring about outcomes that are more than satisfactory, they need not do so; and, if they do not, they are in no way at fault. Slote assumes a subjective theory of the good, one on which the good consists in pleasure, the satisfaction of desire --something like happiness. Given this theory, satisficing requires agents to bring about satisfactory happiness. Even with this addition, however, Slote's characterization of satisficing is ambiguous. His general idea that consequences need only be "good enough" admits of two interpretations which Slote does not distinguish, and which, when they are distinguished, appear in a very different light. One is indeed, given a subjective theory of the good, an attractive alternative to maximizing; the other is not. 2
On the first interpretation, satisficing selects its threshold of satisfactory goodness without reference to the alternatives an agent has. It selects some absolute level of goodness in outcomes as satisfactory, and