Rule utilitarians offer a similar analysis of the case of keeping promises. They explain that we generally want people to keep their promises, even in some cases where it may result in fewer benefits than breaking the promise. The reason is that the practice of keeping one`s promises is very valuable. This allows people to have a wide range of cooperative relationships by creating trust that other people will do what they promise. If we knew that people would not keep their promises, if an option arises that leads to more benefits, then we could not believe that the people who make promises to us will implement them. We should always fear that a better option (the one that acting utilitarians would prefer) might emerge, which could lead to the breaking of the person`s promise to us. The utilitarianism of rules seems paradoxical. He says that we can achieve more useful results if we follow rules than if we always perform individual actions whose results are as beneficial as possible. This suggests that we shouldn`t always perform individual actions that maximize benefits. How could this be something a utility would support? When faced with a situation and a choice or dilemma, and when he thinks about what would be right, what would be right, what would be good, the utilitarian would do it: The debate between actutilitarian utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism raises many important questions about how we should make moral judgments.
Act utilitarianism emphasizes the specific context and many individual characteristics of situations that raise moral problems, and provides a unique method for dealing with these individual cases. Rules utilitarianism emphasizes the recurring characteristics of human life and how similar needs and problems arise over and over again. From this point of view, we need rules that deal with the types or categories of actions: killing, stealing, lying, cheating, taking care of our friends or family, punishing people for crimes, helping people in need, etc. However, both perspectives agree that the main determinant of what is right or wrong is the relationship between what we do or the form our moral code takes and the impact of our moral perspective on people`s well-being. While rule utilitarians don`t deny that there are people who aren`t trustworthy, they may claim that their moral code generally condemns breaches of trust as illegal acts. The problem with acting utilitarians is that they support a moral vision that undermines trust and sacrifices the good effects of a moral code that supports and promotes reliability. Situation: Pregnant woman in the back seat. Shortly before delivery. The water is broken. Contractions are spaced 2 minutes apart.
It`s 4 a.m. The vehicle is 2 miles from the hospital. There are no other cars nearby. RE would think that if you habitually broke the law and ran that red light, there would be more benefit than not doing so, and would therefore be the morally right thing to do. So the RU rule would be to run red lights when it`s 4am and there`s a pregnant woman in the back seat who is about to give birth and you go to the hospital. If rule utilitarianism is to be distinguished from actutilitarianism, its proponents must find a way to formulate rules that allow exceptions to a general requirement or prohibition without falling into actutilitarianism. One way to achieve this is to identify the specific conditions under which the violation of a general moral requirement would be justified. Instead of saying that we can violate a general rule every time it maximizes benefits, the rule`s utilitarian code could say things like, «Don`t lie, except to prevent serious harm to people that doesn`t unjustifiably threaten others with serious harm.» This type of rule would completely prohibit lying, but it would allow lying to a murderer to avoid harming the intended victims, even if the lie caused harm to the murderer. In the event of lesser harm or fraudulent acts that benefit the liar, lying would still be prohibited, even though lying could maximize the overall benefit. NOTHING in itself is good or bad for a utility. NOTHING! It all depends on the consequences of the action, it is the results that count, not the action. Another way to describe the actual dispute versus the foreseeable consecutive dispute is to contrast two thoughts.
One (the real-life consequences view) is that to do the right thing is to do what has the best consequences. The second view indicates that a person is acting correctly by performing the action that has the highest level of «expected benefit». The expected benefit is a combination of the good (or bad) effects that result from an action and the likelihood that these effects will occur. In the case of the rescuer, the expected positive benefit is high, as the probability that rescuing a drowning person will result in the death of millions of other people is extremely low and can therefore be ignored when it comes to saving the drowning person. One of the reasons for adopting utilitarianism with predictable consequences is that it seems unfair to say that the rescuer acted badly because he could not foresee the future negative effects of rescuing the drowning person. In response, utilitarians respond to the real consequence that there is a difference between the evaluation of an action and the evaluation of the person who performed the action. In their view, even if the Savior`s action was wrong, it would be a mistake to blame or criticize the Savior because the bad results of His act were unpredictable. They emphasize the difference between evaluating actions and evaluating the people who carry them out. But Mill also argues that it is sometimes right to violate general ethical rules: Weak Rules Utilitarianism (WRU) seeks to treat SRU counterexamples as legitimate exceptions. One such answer is two-tier utilitarianism; More systematic WRUs attempt to create subrules to handle exceptions.
But, as David Lyons[4] and others have argued, this will necessarily tend to collapse into the utilitarianism of the act. Rules require as many subrules as there are exceptions, so many exceptions make the most demanding rule mathematically unsolvable. Rational agents will then satisfy this tenacity by seeking results that produce the maximum benefit. [5] Suppose a utilitarian adopts this approach and advocates a moral code consisting of a list of rules of this form. The rules would say something like «do x except when not doing x maximizes utility» and «don`t do x except when doing x maximizes utility.» While this may seem plausible, it`s easy to see that this version of rule utilitarianism is actually identical to actutilitarianism. Regardless of action x, the moral requirement and moral prohibition expressed in these rules fall under the utilitarian rules of action «do x only if x does not maximize utility» or «do not do x unless x maximizes utility». These rules say exactly the same thing as the open utilitarian rule «Do anything that maximizes action.» Some utilitarians have accepted the power of the counterexample argument. They responded by developing a utilitarianism of rules, so that instead of evaluating certain cases of slavery or punishing innocent people, the rules regarding those things should be evaluated. The individual case is not judged: it is too impractical and too susceptible to counter-examples.
By evaluating common problems, the rule utilitarian believes that both problems, impracticality and counterexamples, can be solved. The Act-Utilitarian rejects this approach. If happiness is considered the primary value, it is an immoral cult of the rule to accept a less happy outcome on a case-by-case basis simply because the general application of a rule leads to greater happiness. In addition, utility calculations for a rule can be even more difficult than utility calculations for a particular action. After all, we are closer to the current circumstances than to actions carried out in the future or in distant places under a rule.