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Obedience to Rules and Berkeley's Theological Utilitarianism*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
Extract
According to what one might call ‘indirect” forms of utilitarian thinking, the proper end of all human action is the greatest happiness of the greatest number of individuals, but due to the fallibility of moral agents this end cannot, and must not, be directly pursued. Instead, according to at least one version of the indirect theory, moral agents have a duty to act in conformity with a set of general rules which, in their turn, have been designed to promote the greatest happiness of humankind. But acts which conform to such general rules can under exceptional circumstances occasion more suffering than happiness. This is clearly problematical to indirect utilitarians. If they follow the rules regardless of the evil consequences, it can be argued that they have abandoned the basic principles of utilitarianism. If, on the other hand, they refuse to follow the rules which normally promote the general good, their view can be seen to collapse into the direct form of the creed.
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Footnotes
Our thanks are due to Mark Shackleton, Lecturer in English, University of Helsinki, for revising the language of the paper, and to Professor D. D. Raphael, and an anonymous referee of Utilitas, whose critical comments improved our arguments considerably.
References
1 This, in essence, is the argument David Lyons presented against the then-popular theory of rule-utilitarianism in his Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism, Oxford, 1965.Google Scholar
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8 As Professor Raphael has pointed out to us, Berkeley's rule-utilitarianism is in fact limited to negative rules, or negative laws of nature, (Works of Berkeley, vi. 18 § 3Google Scholar). His position would, subsequently, enable him to evade the criticism that rule-utilitarianism cannot cope with a conflict of duties: he could simply state that conflicts can be avoided by doing nothing. Since utilitarians have, however, traditionally held the view that acts and omissions are morally symmetrical, this defence would make Berkeley a non-utilitarian, and, from our present viewpoint, uninteresting. We have, therefore, ignored this (otherwise important) distinction in the name of utilitarian consistency.
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34 A clarification is required here. As Professor Raphael pointed out to us, ‘from the fact that we cannot assess with certainty the consequences of a particular action, it does not follow that we cannot infer, using Berkeley's theological argument, his general conclusion about the consequences of universal adherence to the laws of nature”. But while this is true, it is also true that we cannot identify the laws of nature by using Berkeley's methods, and this can be inferred from the fact that we cannot assess with certainty even the consequences of one particular action.
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38 See e.g., Lyons and Brandt. Our thanks are due to our anonymous referee for drawing our attention to this point.
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