According to Act Consequentialism, an act is right if and only if its outcome is not worse than the outcome of any alternative to that act. This view, however, leads to deontic paradoxes if the alternatives to an act are all other acts that can be done in the situation. A typical response is to only apply this rightness criterion to maximally specific acts and to take the alternatives to a maximally specific act to be the other maximally specific acts that can be done in the situation. (This view can then be supplanted by a separate account for the rightness of acts that are not maximally specific.) This paper defends a rival view, Binary Act Consequentialism, where, for any voluntary act, that act is right if and only if its outcome is not worse than the outcome of not doing that act. Binary Act Consequentialism, which dates back to Jeremy Bentham, has few supporters. A number of seemingly powerful objections have been considered fatal. In this paper, I rebut these objections and put forward a positive argument for the view.

根据行为结果主义，当且仅当一个行为的结果不比该行为的任何替代方案的结果更差时，该行为才是正确的。然而，如果某种行为的替代方案是在该情况下可以采取的所有其他行为，这种观点就会导致道义悖论。典型的反应是仅将此正确性标准应用于最大特定行为，并将最大特定行为的替代方案视为在该情况下可以完成的其他最大特定行为。 （这种观点可以被对不具有最大具体性的行为的正确性的单独解释所取代。）本文捍卫了一种相反的观点，即二元行为后果论，其中，对于任何自愿行为，该行为是正确的，当且仅当其结果并不比不采取该行动的结果更糟糕。二元行动结果主义可以追溯到杰里米·边沁 (Jeremy Bentham)，但支持者寥寥无几。许多看似有力的反对意见被认为是致命的。在本文中，我反驳了这些反对意见，并为这一观点提出了积极的论据。