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[58] He argues that one of the main reasons for introducing rule utilitarianism was to do justice to the general rules that people need for moral education and character development and he proposes that "a difference between act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism can be introduced by limiting the specificity of the rules, i.e., by ...
Act utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics that states that a person's act is morally right if and only if it produces the best possible results in that specific situation. Classical utilitarians, including Jeremy Bentham , John Stuart Mill , and Henry Sidgwick , define happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain.
Preference utilitarianism (also known as preferentialism) is a form of utilitarianism in contemporary philosophy. [1] Unlike value monist forms of utilitarianism, preferentialism values actions that fulfill the most personal interests for the entire circle of people affected by said action.
Weak rule utilitarianism (WRU) attempts to handle SRU counterexamples as legitimate exceptions. One such response is two-level utilitarianism; more systematic WRUs attempt to create sub-rules to handle the exceptions. But as David Lyons [4] and others have argued, this will necessarily tend to collapse into act utilitarianism. Rules will ...
This is an incomplete list of advocates of utilitarianism and/or consequentialism This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources .
Centred on individual utility and welfare, utilitarianism builds on the notion that any action which increases the overall welfare in society is good, and any action that decreases welfare is bad. By this notion, utilitarianism's focus lies with its outcomes and pays little attention to how these outcomes are shaped. [10]
The hazards of average utilitarianism are potentially avoided if it is applied more pragmatically. [citation needed] For instance, the practical application of rule utilitarianism (or else two-level utilitarianism) may temper the aforementioned undesirable conclusions. That is, actually practicing a rule that we must "kill anyone who is less ...
Utilitarian bioethics is based on the premise that the distribution of resources is a zero-sum game, and therefore medical decisions should logically be made on the basis of each person's total future productive value and happiness, their chance of survival from the present, and the resources required for treatment.