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For rule utilitarians, the correctness of a rule is determined by the amount of good it brings about when followed. In contrast, act utilitarians judge an act in terms of the consequences of that act alone (such as stopping at a red light), rather than judging whether it faithfully adhered to the rule of which it was an instance (such as ...
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 .
Rosen (2003) warns that descriptions of utilitarianism can bear "little resemblance historically to utilitarians like Bentham and J. S. Mill" and can be more "a crude version of act utilitarianism conceived in the twentieth century as a straw man to be attacked and rejected." [25] It is a mistake to think that Bentham is not concerned with ...
Brandt believed that moral rules should be considered in sets which he called moral codes. A moral code is justified when it is the optimal code that, if adopted and followed, would maximise the public good more than any alternative code would. The codes may be society-wide standards or special codes for a profession like engineering. [11]
The book contains several of Bentham's most best-known quotations. In Chapter 1, "Of the Principle of Utility," Bentham describes how actions are motivated by the desire for pleasure and are right insofar as they create utility or happiness: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.
His meta-ethical theories were influential during the second half of the twentieth century. Hare is best known for his development of prescriptivism as a meta-ethical theory, which he argues is supported by analysis of formal features of moral discourse, and for his defence of preference utilitarianism based on his prescriptivism.
Two-level utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics according to which a person's moral decisions should be based on a set of moral rules, except in certain rare situations where it is more appropriate to engage in a 'critical' level of moral reasoning.
Though earlier utilitarians like William Paley, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill had sketched versions of utilitarian ethics, Sidgwick was the first theorist to develop the theory in detail and to investigate how it relates both to other popular ethical theories and to conventional morality. His efforts to show that utilitarianism is ...