According to Mill, these are rules that tend to promote happiness, so we. They have been learned through the experience of many generations. But subordinate rules are just that: subordinate. If it is clear that breaking a. Breaking Subordinate Rules.
In some cases it may be necessary to do a direct utility calculation:. When the subordinate rules conflict. When you are deciding which rules to adopt or teach. Objection : Utilitarianism requires that we know what the consequences of our. So, we should. Given the. Specifically, it is wrong to harm certain individuals in order to make. Suppose that Jack is in the hospital for routine tests, and there are people. A doctor has the opportunity to kill.
Jack and make his death look natural. It would maximize happiness to cut. Jack up and give his heart to one patient, his liver to another, his kidneys to. We are supposing that the organs are good matches,.
Utilitarianism seems to. But that would be. Thought Experiments. Scientific Experimentation. Scientists create situations in laboratories in order to. They want to find out what would happen when certain. A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation that we create in our minds in. The hypothetical situation should be. So that we can test the. We can then compare this implication to our. If the implication of the theory agrees. If it does. It is reasonable to stick with our beliefs until the evidence is against them.
If a theory has a false implication about something that could happen,. More examples involving Individual Rights. Exploitation : The ancient Romans used slaves as gladiators, forcing them to. Is it right to force a small number of. Would it be.
Ruthlessness : President Truman ordered atomic bombs to be dropped on. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, knowing that many thousands of non-combatants. Assume that the decision did result in fewer lives lost. Was it morally right? Paternalism : Suppose that banning certain kinds of fast food and snack. Would such a ban be morally justified?
Denial : Examples like The Inhospitable Hospital often involve some error of. For example, what would happen to the ability of that hospital to deliver. Commonsense morality gives us good rules of thumb, but they are. We are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of the choices we. Sometimes we choose to act, and sometimes we choose not to.
Therefore, we are just as responsible for the foreseeable consequences that we fail to prevent as for those that we bring about directly. Hostage Dilemma Thought Experiment :. Terrorists are holding you and fifty other people as hostages inside a building. The only exit has been blocked and three of the hostages have been strapped to. The terrorist leader offers you a choice. You believe and have good reason to believe that the terrorist leader is.
What should you do? Some people would argue that:. I am responsible for my own actions, the terrorist is responsible for. If he kills everyone, then that is his evil, not mine.
But if I activate the. Therefore, I am morally. Rule Utilitarianism is an option for those who believe that there are absolute. According to RU, the principle of utility is a guide for. PU doesn't say that we should promote the "greatest good for the greatest number," although often that is the way to maximize the aggregate amount of happiness. Indeed, Bentham seems to have adopted the principle "greatest good for the greatest number. However, the best action the one we should engage in is that which, among the available options, maximizes general utility.
Consequently: If act X produces much general utility, it doesn't follow that X the moral i. There may be other available options which produce more general utility. If act X produces general disutility, it doesn't follow that X not the moral act. All the available options, including doing nothing, may be bad, and X may be the 'least bad', as it were.
Every other desirable thing is so either for the pleasure it provides or as a means to pleasure. One advantage of act utilitarianism is that it shows how moral questions can have objectively true answers. Act utilitarianism, however, provides a method for showing which moral beliefs are true and which are false. Once we embrace the act utilitarian perspective, then every decision about how we should act will depend on the actual or foreseeable consequences of the available options.
Although some people doubt that we can measure amounts of well-being, we in fact do this all the time. If two people are suffering and we have enough medication for only one, we can often tell that one person is experiencing mild discomfort while the other is in severe pain.
Based on this judgment, we will be confident that we can do more good by giving the medication to the person suffering extreme pain. Although this case is very simple, it shows that we can have objectively true answers to questions about what actions are morally right or wrong. Using this information, Bentham thought, would allow for making correct judgments both in individual cases and in choices about government actions and policies. The most common argument against act utilitarianism is that it gives the wrong answers to moral questions.
Critics say that it permits various actions that everyone knows are morally wrong. The following cases are among the commonly cited examples:. The general form of each of these arguments is the same. In each case, act utilitarianism implies that a certain act is morally permissible or required.
Yet, each of the judgments that flow from act utilitarianism conflicts with widespread, deeply held moral beliefs. Because act utilitarianism approves of actions that most people see as obviously morally wrong, we can know that it is a false moral theory. Although act utilitarians criticize traditional moral rules for being too rigid, critics charge that utilitarians ignore the fact that this alleged rigidity is the basis for trust between people.
If, in cases like the ones described above, judges, doctors, and promise-makers are committed to doing whatever maximizes well-being, then no one will be able to trust that judges will act according to the law, that doctors will not use the organs of one patient to benefit others, and that promise-makers will keep their promises.
More generally, if everyone believed that morality permitted lying, promise-breaking, cheating, and violating the law whenever doing so led to good results, then no one could trust other people to obey these rules.
As a result, in an act utilitarian society, we could not believe what others say, could not rely on them to keep promises, and in general could not count on people to act in accord with important moral rules. An implication of this commitment is that whenever people want to buy something for themselves or for a friend or family member, they must first determine whether they could create more well-being by donating their money to help unknown strangers who are seriously ill or impoverished.
If more good can be done by helping strangers than by purchasing things for oneself or people one personally cares about, then act utilitarianism requires us to use the money to help strangers in need. Almost everyone, however, believes that we have special moral duties to people who are near and dear to us.
As a result, most people would reject the notion that morality requires us to treat people we love and care about no differently from people who are perfect strangers as absurd. This issue is not merely a hypothetical case. In a famous article, Peter Singer defends the view that people living in affluent countries should not purchase luxury items for themselves when the world is full of impoverished people.
According to Singer, a person should keep donating money to people in dire need until the donor reaches the point where giving to others generates more harm to the donor than the good that is generated for the recipients. Critics claim that the argument for using our money to help impoverished strangers rather than benefiting ourselves and people we care about only proves one thing—that act utilitarianism is false. There are two reasons that show why it is false.
First, it fails to recognize the moral legitimacy of giving special preferences to ourselves and people that we know and care about. Second, since pretty much everyone is strongly motivated to act on behalf of themselves and people they care about, a morality that forbids this and requires equal consideration of strangers is much too demanding. It asks more than can reasonably be expected of people.
There are two ways in which act utilitarians can defend their view against these criticisms. First, they can argue that critics misinterpret act utilitarianism and mistakenly claim that it is committed to supporting the wrong answer to various moral questions.
Because they do not maximize utility, these wrong answers would not be supported by act utilitarians and therefore, do nothing to weaken their theory. Unless critics can prove that common sense moral beliefs are correct the criticisms have no force. Act utilitarians claim that their theory provides good reasons to reject many ordinary moral claims and to replace them with moral views that are based on the effects of actions.
People who are convinced by the criticisms of act utilitarianism may decide to reject utilitarianism entirely and adopt a different type of moral theory. This judgment, however, would be sound only if act utilitarianism were the only type of utilitarian theory. This is what defenders of rule utilitarianism claim. They argue that rule utilitarianism retains the virtues of a utilitarian moral theory but without the flaws of the act utilitarian version.
Unlike act utilitarians, who try to maximize overall utility by applying the utilitarian principle to individual acts, rule utilitarians believe that we can maximize utility only by setting up a moral code that contains rules. The correct moral rules are those whose inclusion in our moral code will produce better results more well-being than other possible rules. Once we determine what these rules are, we can then judge individual actions by seeing if they conform to these rules.
The principle of utility, then, is used to evaluate rules and is not applied directly to individual actions. Once the rules are determined, compliance with these rules provides the standard for evaluating individual actions.
Rule utilitarianism sounds paradoxical. It says that we can produce more beneficial results by following rules than by always performing individual actions whose results are as beneficial as possible. This suggests that we should not always perform individual actions that maximize utility.
How could this be something that a utilitarian would support? In spite of this paradox, rule utilitarianism possesses its own appeal, and its focus on moral rules can sound quite plausible. The rule utilitarian approach to morality can be illustrated by considering the rules of the road. More specific rules that require stopping at lights, forbid going faster than 30 miles per hour, or prohibit driving while drunk do not give drivers the discretion to judge what is best to do.
They simply tell drivers what to do or not do while driving. The reason why a more rigid rule-based system leads to greater overall utility is that people are notoriously bad at judging what is the best thing to do when they are driving a car. A rule utilitarian can illustrate this by considering the difference between stop signs and yield signs.
Stop signs forbid drivers to go through an intersection without stopping, even if the driver sees that there are no cars approaching and thus no danger in not stopping. A yield sign permits drivers to go through without stopping unless they judge that approaching cars make it dangerous to drive through the intersection. The key difference between these signs is the amount of discretion that they give to the driver. The stop sign is like the rule utilitarian approach. It tells drivers to stop and does not allow them to calculate whether it would be better to stop or not.
The yield sign is like act utilitarianism. It permits drivers to decide whether there is a need to stop. Act utilitarians see the stop sign as too rigid because it requires drivers to stop even when nothing bad will be prevented. The result, they say, is a loss of utility each time a driver stops at a stop sign when there is no danger from oncoming cars. Rule utilitarians will reply that they would reject the stop sign method a if people could be counted on to drive carefully and b if traffic accidents only caused limited amounts of harm.
But, they say, neither of these is true. Because people often drive too fast and are inattentive while driving because they are, for example, talking, texting, listening to music, or tired , we cannot count on people to make good utilitarian judgments about how to drive safely.
In addition, the costs i. Accident victims including drivers may be killed, injured, or disabled for life. For these reasons, rule utilitarians support the use of stop signs and other non-discretionary rules under some circumstances.
Rule utilitarians generalize from this type of case and claim that our knowledge of human behavior shows that there are many cases in which general rules or practices are more likely to promote good effects than simply telling people to do whatever they think is best in each individual case. This does not mean that rule utilitarians always support rigid rules without exceptions. Some rules can identify types of situations in which the prohibition is over-ridden.
The rules of the road do not tell drivers when to drive or what their destination should be for example. Overall then, rule utilitarian can allow departures from rules and will leave many choices up to individuals. In such cases, people may act in the manner that looks like the approach supported by act utilitarians.
Nonetheless, these discretionary actions are permitted because having a rule in these cases does not maximize utility or because the best rule may impose some constraints on how people act while still permitting a lot of discretion in deciding what to do. As discussed earlier, critics of act utilitarianism raise three strong objections against it.
According to these critics, act utilitarianism a approves of actions that are clearly wrong; b undermines trust among people, and c is too demanding because it requires people to make excessive levels of sacrifice.
Rule utilitarians tend to agree with these criticisms of act utilitarianism and try to explain why rule utilitarianism is not open to any of these objections. Critics of act utilitarianism claim that it allows judges to sentence innocent people to severe punishments when doing so will maximize utility, allows doctors to kill healthy patients if by doing so, they can use the organs of one person to save more lives, and allows people to break promises if that will create slightly more benefits than keeping the promise.
Rule utilitarians say that they can avoid all these charges because they do not evaluate individual actions separately but instead support rules whose acceptance maximizes utility. To see the difference that their focus on rules makes, consider which rule would maximize utility: a a rule that allows medical doctors to kill healthy patients so that they can use their organs for transplants that will save a larger number of patients who would die without these organs; or b a rule that forbids doctors to remove the organs of healthy patients in order to benefit other patients.
Although more good may be done by killing the healthy patient in an individual case, it is unlikely that more overall good will be done by having a rule that allows this practice. If a rule were adopted that allows doctors to kill healthy patients when this will save more lives, the result would be that many people would not go to doctors at all.
A rule utilitarian evaluation will take account of the fact that the benefits of medical treatment would be greatly diminished because people would no longer trust doctors. People who seek medical treatment must have a high degree of trust in doctors.
If they had to worry that doctors might use their organs to help other patients, they would not, for example, allow doctors to anesthetize them for surgery because the resulting loss of consciousness would make them completely vulnerable and unable to defend themselves. Thus, the rule that allows doctors to kill one patient to save five would not maximize utility. The same reasoning applies equally to the case of the judge. In order to have a criminal justice system that protects people from being harmed by others, we authorize judges and other officials to impose serious punishments on people who are convicted of crimes.
The purpose of this is to provide overall security to people in their jurisdiction, but this requires that criminal justice officials only have the authority to impose arrest and imprisonment on people who are actually believed to be guilty. They do not have the authority to do whatever they think will lead to the best results in particular cases. Whatever they do must be constrained by rules that limit their power. Act utilitarians may sometimes support the intentional punishment of innocent people, but rule utilitarians will understand the risks involved and will oppose a practice that allows it.
Rule utilitarians offer a similar analysis of the promise keeping case. They explain that in general, we want people to keep their promises even in some cases in which doing so may lead to less utility than breaking the promise. The reason for this is that the practice of promise-keeping is a very valuable. It enables people to have a wide range of cooperative relationships by generating confidence that other people will do what they promise to do.
If we knew that people would fail to keep promises whenever some option arises that leads to more utility, then we could not trust people who make promises to us to carry them through. In each of these cases then, rule utilitarians can agree with the critics of act utilitarianism that it is wrong for doctors, judges, and promise-makers to do case by case evaluations of whether they should harm their patients, convict and punish innocent people, and break promises.
The rule utilitarian approach stresses the value of general rules and practices, and shows why compliance with rules often maximizes overall utility even if in some individual cases, it requires doing what produces less utility. Rule utilitarians see the social impact of a rule-based morality as one of the key virtues of their theory.
The three cases just discussed show why act utilitarianism undermines trust but rule utilitarianism does not. Fundamentally, in the cases of doctors, judges, and promise-keepers, it is trust that is at stake. Being able to trust other people is extremely important to our well-being. As a result, people would be less likely to see other people as reliable and trustworthy.
While rule utilitarians do not deny that there are people who are not trustworthy, they can claim that their moral code generally condemns violations of trust as wrongful acts.
The problem with act utilitarians is that they support a moral view that has the effect of undermining trust and that sacrifices the good effects of a moral code that supports and encourages trustworthiness. Rule utilitarians believe that their view is also immune to the criticism that act utilitarianism is too demanding. In addition, while the act utilitarian commitment to impartiality undermines the moral relevance of personal relations, rule utilitarians claim that their view is not open to this criticism.
They claim that rule utilitarianism allows for partiality toward ourselves and others with whom we share personal relationships. Moreover, they say, rule utilitarianism can recognize justifiable partiality to some people without rejecting the commitment to impartiality that is central to the utilitarian tradition.
How can rule utilitarianism do this? In his defense of rule utilitarianism, Brad Hooker distinguishes two different contexts in which partiality and impartiality play a role. One involves the justification of moral rules and the other concerns the application of moral rules. Justifications of moral rules, he claims, must be strictly impartial. When we ask whether a rule should be adopted, it is essential to consider the impact of the rule on all people and to weigh the interests of everyone equally.
The second context concerns the content of the rules and how they are applied in actual cases. Rule utilitarians argue that a rule utilitarian moral code will allow partiality to play a role in determining what morality requires, forbids, or allows us to do.
As an example, consider a moral rule parents have a special duty to care for their own children. See Parental Rights and Obligations. This is a partialist rule because it not only allows but actually requires parents to devote more time, energy, and other resources to their own children than to others.
While the content of this rule is not impartial, rule utilitarians believe it can be impartially justified. Partiality toward children can be justified for several reasons. Caring for children is a demanding activity. Children need the special attention of adults to develop physically, emotionally, and cognitively.
It is not possible for absentee parents or strangers to provide individual children with all that they need. Therefore, we can maximize the overall well-being of children as a class by designating certain people as the caretakers for specific children.
For these reasons, partiality toward specific children can be impartially justified. Teachers, for example have special duties to students in their own classes and have no duty to educate all students.
Similarly, public officials can and should be partial to people in the jurisdiction in which they work. If the overall aim is to maximize the well-being of all people in all cities, for example, then we are likely to get better results by having individuals who know and understand particular cities focus on them while other people focus on other cities.
Based on examples like these, rule utilitarians claim that their view, unlike act utilitarianism, avoids the problems raised about demandingness and partiality. Being committed to impartialist justifications of moral rules does not commit them to rejecting moral rules that allow or require people to give specific others priority. While rule utilitarians can defend partiality, their commitment to maximizing overall utility also allows them to justify limits on the degree of partiality that is morally permissible.
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