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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 ...
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 ...
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.
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.
In the second chapter, Mill formulates a single ethical principle, the principle of utility or greatest-happiness principle, from which he says all utilitarian ethical principles are derived: "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals utility, or the greatest happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend ...
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.
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Act utilitarianism is a utilitarian theory of ethics that states that a person's act is morally right if and only if it produces the best possible results in that specific situation. Classical utilitarians, including Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, define happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain. [1]