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Rule-consequentialism and Internal Consistency: A Reply to Card

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 November 2007

BRAD HOOKER
BRAD HOOKER*
Affiliation:
University of [email protected]
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Abstract

Rule-consequentialism has been accused of either collapsing into act-consequentialism or being internally inconsistent. I have tried to develop a form of rule-consequentialism without these flaws. In this June's issue of Utilitas, Robert Card argued that I have failed. Here I assess his arguments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , December 2007 , pp. 514 - 519
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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References

1 My ‘Rule-consequentialism, Incoherence, Fairness’ was presented in 1993 at many universities and at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. It appeared in print in the autumn of 1994 in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 95. My Ideal Code, Real World: A Rule-consequentialist Theory of Morality (Oxford, 2000) develops the relevant points.

2 Card, ‘Inconsistency and the Theoretical Commitments of Hooker's Rule-consequentialism’, Utilitas 19.2 (2007). My references to this article will be placed in my text.

3 I do explain in my Ideal Code, Real World; in my ‘Reply to Arneson and McIntyre’, Philosophical Issues 15 (2005); and in Hooker, B. and Fletcher, G., ‘Variable versus Fixed-rate Rule-utilitarianism’, Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Systematization for moral convictions and a unifying impartial justification for them are metaethical desiderata, not values at the same level as consequentialist ones.

5 A standing commitment to do good for others and an overarching commitment to maximize the good also differ in aim: the good includes the agent's own good as well as the good of others.

6 Obviously, this rule is vague. But any less vague rule about aid seems unlikely to apply plausibly to a wide enough range of situations.

7 This article was written while I held a Research Readership from the British Academy of Arts and Social Sciences. I thank the British Academy, and Gustaf Arrhenius, Nir Eyal, Peter Kail, Tim Mulgan and John Skorupski, for comments.