I still haven’t got around to writing my intended post on consequentialism (a follow up to John Quiggin’s post attacking Walter Sinnott-Armstrong’s entry on consequentialism in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). But I was interested to see that some of the issues at issue here came up in an online debate about the virtues of a trade the Red Sox made yesterday. (Sending over-rated third baseman Shea Hillenbrand to Arizona in exchange for vastly under-rated sidearmer Byung-Hyun Kim.) One of the issues that arose in the on-line discussion of the trade here was what we should conclude about the merits of the respective General Managers involved in the trade if, contrary to everyone’s expectations, Hillenbrand outperforms Kim over the next few years. The consensus was for an anti-consequentialist (antecedentalist?) position – what matters for assessing the quality of the decision the two GMs made is the reasonable expectation of their performance, and that if Hillenbrand does outperform Kim, it will be more plausible to conclude that this was due to dumb luck than skill on their part. Of course, it’s an internet based discussion board, so the level of discourse soon degenerated to somewhere below the bleachers at Wrigley, but I thought it was cute that philosophical issues could arise so quickly in a baseball discussion. (And I just wanted a chance to gloat about the Red Sox making such a great acquisition.)