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Act vs. Rule (Act (Direct moral theory: principle of utility applied…
Act vs. Rule
Act
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Smart: ‘Act-utilitarianism is the view that the rightness or wrongness of an action is to be judged by the consequences, good or bad, of the action itself.'
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Can be compared to a car going over a give way line - at every instance, the driver must decide when to go based on the circumstances
Lends itself towards all the strengths of relativism, but also the weaknesses
Criticism: is it incompatible with the ideas of justice and duty, because it only allows for the one main principle of utility?
Rawls' concept of rules
Works logically, but does not apply to practical implementation of the theory
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Two justifications for punishment - retributive and future-facing - one is based on the idea that wrongdoing should be punished and the other on the idea that further wrongdoing should be prevented
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Rawls interprets Mill as Urmson did, as a rule utilitarian and therefore preserves the idea of promise-keeping, as this would be adhered to as a rule
Summary view of rules - people make the same decisions and judgements and are often in agreement - caters to a society that is unsure of how to use utilitarian reasoning
Practice conception of rules - rules define a practice e.g. a baseball game contains actions that have no meaning if not played within the context of the game - therefore we must create the right practices along with moral rules
Rule
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Urmson
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an action is justified by showing it is in accordance with a moral rule and wrong in that it transgresses a moral rule
Both intuitive and inductive schools agree that morality of action is applying a law to particular case
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Tendency of action - 'drinking alcohol may tend to promote exhilaration, but my drinking this particular glass either does or does not produce it'
Smart: Rule-utilitarianism is the view that the rightness or wrongness of an action is to be judged by the goodness and badness of the consequences of a rule that everyone should perform the action in like circumstances.’
Rule utilitarianism seeks to improve on simplicity criticism by providing a means by which not all moral decisions can be reduced to a single principle - allows for a set of moral principles to be adopted
Criticism: even basic moral rules have exceptions, and to create exceptions for exceptions defeats the point of rule utilitarianism
Can be compared to a stop sign - the agent still judges for themselves, but uses rules as guidance
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Impartiality criticism:
It is impossible for humans to disengage from natural sentiments that inevitably cloud impartiality.
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