[aragonite]

I prefer your kind of bullet-biting consequentialism to the kind which tries to approximate the intuitively correct (imo) verdict by watering down the concept of consequence (e.g. by going for some version of rule-utilitarianism).

But I disagree with the second point. Consequentialism is a philosophical claim to the effect that an act is morally wrong if and only if such-and-such conditions obtain. If it's possible to imagine a situation, however recherche, involving a morally wrong act but in which "such-and-such conditions" do not obtain, that automatically refutes consequentialism and it either has to be revised or given up altogether.

[cjbprime]

The counter-intuitive finding here -- which is in favor of rule-utilitarianism -- is that everyone trying to optimize every difficult decision does reliably lead to unpredictable consequences that are worse than the "follow a rule that would lead to optimific outcomes if performed by 99% of the population" set of consequences.

That is, you can hold a belief that the optimal "decision criteria" for an act-consequentialist is actually a rule-consequentialist one, and this belief is fairly common.

Restated: being an act-consequentialist doesn't absolve you from having to determine act-consequentialism's best decision criteria, because if it did then you wouldn't be being act-consequentialist about it. It's recursive like that.