One thought to have about this case is that you have the wrong motivation in visiting your friend. Plausibly, your motive should be something like ‘my friend is suffering; I want to help them feel better!’ and not ‘helping my friend has better consequences than anything else I could have done.’ Imagine what it would be like to frankly admit to your friend, “I’m only here because being here had the best consequences. If painting a landscape would have led to better consequences, I would have stayed home and painted instead.” Your friend would probably experience this remark as cold, or at least overly abstract and aloof. They might have hoped that you’d visit them because you care about them and about your relationship with them, not because their plight happened to offer you your best opportunity for doing good that afternoon. To put things another way, we might say that your motivation alienates you from your friend.
Can’t this example be generalized and used against any ethical theory that values more than just that one friend and their wellbeing, which is basically every plausible ethical theory? You have to weigh reasons against one another, so all theories could be framed to respond like “I’m only here because I had the most all-things-considered reason to be here. If I had more all-things-considered reason to paint a landscape, I would have stayed home and painted instead.”
Impartial consequentialist theories weigh reasons in particular ways, and, as you point out, don’t recognize certain ideals like friendship terminally that we perhaps should, which is what alienation is about (although your friend’s welfare is a consideration!).
I guess this is more of a response to that particular example and its framing, not to say that impartial consequentialism isn’t more alienating than other theories.
Can’t this example be generalized and used against any ethical theory that values more than just that one friend and their wellbeing, which is basically every plausible ethical theory? You have to weigh reasons against one another, so all theories could be framed to respond like “I’m only here because I had the most all-things-considered reason to be here. If I had more all-things-considered reason to paint a landscape, I would have stayed home and painted instead.”
Impartial consequentialist theories weigh reasons in particular ways, and, as you point out, don’t recognize certain ideals like friendship terminally that we perhaps should, which is what alienation is about (although your friend’s welfare is a consideration!).
I guess this is more of a response to that particular example and its framing, not to say that impartial consequentialism isn’t more alienating than other theories.