Talk:Rule utilitarianism

Merge
(Suggested by --Thorsen 13:59, 3 January 2006 (UTC))

I think there is enough content to keep act and rule utilitarianism separate, but I do think they could be merged into each other. The utilitarianism article used to have a larger section on the distinction between the two, but that was cut out because it got too long. That might be added to a newly merged article to give it sufficient length.--Catquas 14:56, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
 * My objections to the proposed merger of Act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism can be seen at Talk:Act_utilitarianism. It seems, though, that Thorsen was suggesting a merger with the main Utilitarianism article.  That seems equally ill-advised, especially given the current length of the Utilitarianism article. Postmodern Beatnik 19:16, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I removed the merge tag, since it has been six months and the consensus seems to be against the merger. Postmodern Beatnik 13:53, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

From the article...
"Some Rule-utilitarians dispute this claim of "collapse" by arguing that rules may be enumerated very specifically in order to avoid this problem, yet to do so would lead to an impossibly large number of specific rules and situations to be aware of and abide by."

This sounds a lot like act utilitarianism, except that the word "acts" is replaced by "rules". —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.23.51.27 (talk) 23:01, 8 March 2007 (UTC).

I'm new to the wikipedia business so please forgive any discussion board faux pas.

As far as the argument for Mill's subscription to rule-utilitarianism goes, it seems to have less to do with his treatment of rights within the utilitarian framework and more to do with the actual formulation of the General Happiness Principle (Principle of Utility) itself. Indeed, in a very famous passage in the second chapter of Utilitarianism Mill renders the principle, effectively thus: actions are proprietous insofar as the TEND to promote the appropriate balance of pleasure over pain (that is, tend to maximize happiness or minimize the opposite or reverse of happiness). The passage I believe is in 2.2 if you're at all curious...

What is of critical import, here, is that in order for actions to tend towards anything they must be a part of a larger group of actions, not merely isolated on their own. Such a formulation of the principle would suggest, then, that in order for actions to be right or wrong they must fall within in a class of actions which tend to promote happiness over pain in a generally optimal fashion. Invoking a specific class of actions in the formulation of the General Happiness Principle seems to imply for some the presence of some rule or another which validates the actions morally. The class of actions which tend to promote happiness are precisely those actions which accord with moral rules sanctioned by the General Happiness Principle.65.27.46.240 05:45, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Bentham?
Was Bentham a rule or an act utilitarianist? I think this page should give the answer to this (even if it is given elsewhere in Wikipedia already). After all, along with Mill, he is arguably the most important and famous utilitarianist thinker. In my view, he was a rule one, because he tried to invent the Pannomion, or complete utilitarian code of law. But if someone disagrees, I'd like them to tell me, as I haven't actually read any of his books and am not 100% sure. Anyway, in my opinion, this page would be improved if this information was put on it.Fledgeaaron (talk) 17:03, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
 * This is a bit of a difficult question to answer. Bentham's moral philosophy is completely tied-in to his social and political philosophy, and is often primarily concerned with how to make proper legislative decisions.  This could be seen as evidence for his endorsement of rule utilitarianism, yet many of his contentions&mdash;for example his argument that pushpin is the perfect equal of opera in terms of being a proper source of enjoyment&mdash;suggest that he is an act utilitarian who is simply trying to instruct governments on how to create rules while still respecting people's moral autonomy.  Indeed, his belief that laws should allow the governed as many possibilities as feasible while still maintaining social cohesion (a necessary concern for government) further suggests that he is an act utilitarian concerned with how to make laws given such a highly individualistic moral framework. Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 14:47, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

What RU is
I see repeated in this article a common confusion over what RU is as distinct from AU. I believe the distinction was originally based on some 1950's article in economic theory, the exact source escaping me at the moment, and essentially defined RU as the view that we should follow those rules which are such that, if everyone followed them, utility would be at least as high as they would be under any alternative set of rules. This is a form of ideal ethical theory, and is certainly distinct from AU. As such it is subject to the severe objection that, when not everyone else is following such rules (as is usually the case), any one individual's following such rules may lead to utter disaster, decreasing utility in ways absolute unacceptable to AU. For example, "never use violence" might work very well if everyone followed it; if most people aren't at time t, though, your choice to follow it at time t might make things far worse than if you followed some other rule which was more defensive, or aimed at encouraging others to be less violent through threats or retaliation, etc.

Now some people consider RU to mean "utilitarianism which uses rules." But that's silly. All utilitarians use rules; Mill made it very clear that you have to make judgments based on general principles, based on features of situations that resemble other situations you've encountered before, which help you determine what the probable outcome of this or that action will be based on assumptions about the uniformity of nature, etc. You couldn't possibly make such judgments without at least implicitly using rules of this sort; if you just looked at situations and made moral judgments without reference to any general features of the situation you'd simply be an intuitionist with no claim to utilitarianism. So such a "rule utilitarianism" collapses into act utilitarianism, as argued by many authors such as David Lyons and JJC Smart. The only form of it which is distinct is very implausible as a moral system. I fear that rule utilitarianism persists as a category largely due to confusion between these two definitions, one trivial and the other monstrously wrong; not that we should be trying to force a view on the reader, but just in the name of accuracy and clarity this article should explain these two ways of thinking about RU and cite the literature supporting it. Comments?--ScottForschler (talk) 13:44, 3 May 2008 (UTC)


 * You are certainly correct that the article should discuss the various ways of developing a rule utilitarianism, but I'm not sure your judgment on the category as a whole is accurate. Rule utilitarians (or at least, some rule utilitarians) argue, pace act utilitarians, that when one is faced with a decision between maximizing utility and following a rule that has been put in place due to its tendency to maximize utility, you follow the rule.  To give the stock example, even if a student could convince me that by giving him a better grade I would be maximizing utility, rule utilitarianism says I am not to change his grade.  This is supposed to protect against another stock example, this time a stock criticism, of the act utilitarian's commitment to executing an innocent man if it would maximize utility (the typical scenario being one in the citizens of a village demand the criminal be punished, causing the sheriff&mdash;who knows the criminal has died, but would not be able to convince the villagers of this&mdash;to offer up an innocent man's life in order to calm the villagers' fears and slake their feelings of vengence).  It would be a more complicated argument to demonstrate that this form of RU still somehow collapses into AU.  The debate over whether or not the one collapses into the other is also a subject for the article, but (as you say) we should be careful not to bias the article. Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 03:03, 5 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Good point. So it seems to me there are perhaps three different ideas that go under the RU name; the one I described in my first paragraph, the trivial (but, sadly, oft-repeated in various forms) one of my second paragraph, and the one PB describes above. And my second one may be only a sloppily-described version of the last. We should note and document the different uses. And true, the argument that this last one too collapses into AU is more complicated than the one I described, though I think it too has been made. Anybody have references handy? I can't tackle this one anytime soon.--ScottForschler (talk) 16:53, 5 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, all three should be documented and noted. And you are quite right that even the version of RU I described has been argued to collapse into AU.  I'll try and find some sources for type 3 and the argument for collapse against it. This will have to take a back seat to our changes on meta-ethics, however.  Postmodern Beatnik (talk) 14:59, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Haven't looked at this in a while; the SRU/WRU distinction is not very well described, nor is it documented. Whoever wrote this seems to be making a distinction between simple/simplistic rules (e.g., "never lie") and complex ones with built-in exceptions ("don't lie unless to save a life, etc.") But "strong/weak" are bad terms for capturing this, and I don't think are used in the literature this way.

The main distinctions generally discussed are still not very well captured in this article. I've come to realize that there are two distinct forms of moral universalizability tests. What is sometimes called "ideal rule consequentialism" (which evaluates rules in terms of the consequences which would occur if everyone followed them together) uses one, while other forms of consequentialism, including subjective consequentialism (which evaluates rules followed by individual persons in terms of their expected consequences in any context, including both contexts where everyone else does the same, and the more usual ones where they don't) more often use the other. I attempt to describe this general distinction at moral universalizability). To great confusion, the unqualified term "rule consequentialism" is sometimes used to mean the first or the second, or indifferently between the two--just as "moral universalizability" is--both equivocations are, at root, based on the same conceptual confusion.ScottForschler (talk) 15:31, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

rules and precedents
Is a slippery slope argument – making approval of an act depend in part on the precedent that it may set – an example of rule utilitarianism? —Tamfang (talk) 11:05, 24 December 2022 (UTC)