What is rule utilitarianism?
Rule utilitarianism is suggested as a “variant” of utilitarianism which differs from act utilitarianism (ie. the original utilitarian system, as described by Jeremy Bentham – “act” is prefixed merely to help distinguish the two) in that it proposes we use rules for determining right and wrong, rather than the felicific calculus, and only the formation of rules being subject to the calculus. (See the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy and also the works of RM Hare – e.g. “Moral Thinking” – for details.) It is now commonly believed that rule utilitarianism and act utilitarianism are not mutually exclusive as they have sometimes been held to be… since rules can be of arbitrary complexity, it would be theoretically possible to design a rule which gave the same results as felicific calculus in any specific situation. The arguments in favour of rule utilitarianism (for example: reducing the time taken to determine the proper course of action; and redu
