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Lexical threshold" negative utilitarianism says that there is some disutility, for instance some extreme suffering, such that no positive utility can counterbalance it. [24] 'Consent-based' negative utilitarianism is a specification of lexical threshold negative utilitarianism, which specifies where the threshold should be located.
According to the utilitarian, justice is the maximization of the total or average welfare across all relevant individuals. Utilitarianism fights crime in three ways: [153] Deterrence. The credible threat of punishment might lead people to make different choices; well-designed threats might lead people to make choices that maximize welfare.
In social choice, a tyranny-of-the-majority scenario can be formally defined as a situation where the candidate or decision preferred by a majority is greatly inferior (hence "tyranny") to the socially optimal candidate or decision according to some measure of excellence such as total utilitarianism or the egalitarian rule.
The demandingness objection is a common [1] [2] argument raised against utilitarianism and other consequentialist ethical theories. The consequentialist requirement that we maximize the good impartially seems to this objection to require us to perform acts that we would normally consider optional.
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 ...
Two-level utilitarianism is virtually a synthesis of the opposing doctrines of act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism states that in all cases the morally right action is the one which produces the most well-being, whereas rule utilitarianism states that the morally right action is the one that is in accordance with a ...
A Theory of Justice is a 1971 work of political philosophy and ethics by the philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) in which the author attempts to provide a moral theory alternative to utilitarianism and that addresses the problem of distributive justice (the socially just distribution of goods in a society).
The bad man cares nothing for legal theorizing and concerns himself only with practical consequences. In the spirit of pragmatism, Holmes suggests that this is a useful way of laying bare the true meaning of legal concepts. The utilitarian or instrumentalist flavor of "The Path of the Law" also found favor with the realists.