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Rule utilitarianism is a form of utilitarianism that says an action is right as it conforms to a rule that leads to the greatest good, or that "the rightness or wrongness of a particular action is a function of the correctness of the rule of which it is an instance". [1]
philosophy portal; Brad Hooker (born 13 September 1957) [1] is a British-American philosopher who specialises in moral philosophy.He is a professor at the University of Reading and is best known for his work defending rule consequentialism (often treated as being synonymous with rule utilitarianism).
However, it is not clear that this distinction is made in the academic literature. It has been argued that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism, because for any given rule, in the case where breaking the rule produces more utility, the rule can be refined by the addition of a sub-rule that handles cases like the exception. [56]
The utilitarian rule then allocates the wood in a way that maximizes the number of buildings. Consider a problem of allocating a rare medication among patients. The utility functions may represent their chance of recovery – u i ( y i ) {\displaystyle u_{i}(y_{i})} is the probability of agent i {\displaystyle i} to recover by getting y i ...
"The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end." ~ John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863) [79] The canonical statement of Mill's utilitarianism can be found in his book, Utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham's student John Stuart Mill, who sharply criticised Bentham's view of human nature, which failed to recognise conscience as a human motive. Mill considered Bentham's view "to have done and to be doing very serious evil."
In ethics, Smart was a defender of utilitarianism. Specifically, he defended "extreme", or act utilitarianism, as opposed to "restricted", or rule utilitarianism. The distinction between these two types of ethical theory is explained in his essay Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism. [14] Smart gave two arguments against rule utilitarianism.
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 .