Talk:Rule utilitarianism

message: (Suggested by --Thorsen 13:59, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title: Merge

message: "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)
thread_title:  From the article... 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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—for example his argument that pushpin is the perfect equal of opera in terms of being a proper source of enjoyment—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)
thread_title:  Bentham? 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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—who knows the criminal has died, but would not be able to convince the villagers of this—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)
replies: text: 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)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  What RU is 

message: 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)
thread_title:  rules and precedents