St Thomas Aquinas wrote to the effect that no good consequences could make a bad action good, and that no bad consequences could make a good action bad. John Stuart Mill, following a utilitarian tradition, put forward exactly the contradictory hypothesis that, as a necessary condition for rationality, actions should be judged entirely by their consequences. In ethics, this way of judging actions has come to be known as “consequentialism”, following Anscombe’s (1958) critical discussion. Some of the history of consequentialism is considered further in Hammond (1986).