Utilitarian evaluation judges expected rather than actual consequences.

Evidence

The issue for the lieutenant colonel and Trifonov, if we are to suppose they are acting from utilitarian morality, is not whether their actions produced good consequences overall but whether they should have expected them to. It seems unlikely that either of them could have made a good case for the generally good consequences of their dealings with each other, either before or after the fact. After the fact, although Trifonov may have done quite well, the lieutenant colonel’s family suffered grievous harm in the loss of status in an excessively status-conscious society. Their financial losses eventually played a role in the conviction of Dmitri Karamazov, who was falsely accused of killing his own father. Before the fact, most of the lieutenant colonel’s losses could have been thought to be at least possible risks of his dishonest dealings, although Karamazov’s role and fate would not likely have been imagined. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 223

Categorization

• XREF: Expected-vs-actual utilitarian evaluation maps onto the wife in Saramago: her interventions are rationalized by expected good, not by eventual outcomes. — connects to: Agencies evaluate what is measurable rather than what clients get. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 409