Utilitarianism

The Act Utilitarian Use of Rules.

Act utilitarianism teaches that an act is right if it maximises happiness. Rule utilitarianism teaches than act is right if it conforms to a rule which is in place because having that rule maximises happiness even if on this particular occasion happiness isn’t maximised. In other words act and rule utilitarianism are theories that tell you why something is right. It is important to distinguish this from any decision making procedure that a utilitarian might use. It is important to remember that act utilitarians nearly always advocate the use of rules as way of helping people to do the right thing.

Act-consequentialism is best conceived of as maintaining merely the following:

Act-consequentialist criterion of wrongness: An act is wrong if and only if it results in less good than would have resulted from some available alternative act.

When confronted with that criterion of moral wrongness, many people naturally assume that the way to decide what to do is to apply the criterion, i.e.,

Act-consequentialist moral decision procedure: On each occasion, an agent should decide what to do by calculating which act would produce the most good.

However, consequentialists nearly never defend this act-consequentialist decision procedure as a general and typical way of making moral decisions…

There are a number of compelling consequentialist reasons why the act-consequentialist decision procedure would be counter-productive…

…most philosophers accept that, for all four of the reasons above, using an act-consequentialist decision procedure would not maximize the good. Hence even philosophers who espouse the act-consequentialist criterion of moral wrongness reject the act-consequentialist moral decision procedure…

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism-rule/

 

Bentham, having explained the hedonic calculus, finishes off by saying,

It is not to be expected that this process should be strictly pursued previously to every moral judgment, or to every legislative or judicial operation. It may, however, be always kept in view: and as near as the process actually pursued on these occasions approaches to it, so near will such process approach to the character of an exact one.

Even Bentham doesn’t expect the calculation to be carried out every time. What is important is doing the right thing not the specifics of how you make your decision. It is noteworthy that here Bentham specifically links the hedonic calculus to legislative procedures, i.e. to the formulation of rules, and Bentham will certainly have expected people to follow the law, but this doesn’t make Bentham a rule utilitarian.

Assuming that Mill is best described as an act utilitarian who is advocating the use of rules, he says,

It is truly a whimsical supposition that, if mankind were agreed in considering utility to be the test of morality, they would remain without any agreement as to what is useful, and would take no measures for having their notions on the subject taught to the young, and enforced by law and opinion… to consider the rules of morality as improvable, is one thing; to pass over the intermediate generalisations entirely, and endeavour to test each individual action directly by the first principle, is another… The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal… Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong.

Act utilitarianism is a living philosophy and different (act) utilitarians will take different positions on when and under what circumstances these rules should be broken.