PHILOS 2YY3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Act Utilitarianism
16 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
PHILOS 2YY3 – Feb 8 2018
Rule Utilitarianism
4 Examples, 2 Difficulties
• A. The undeserving student
o If you increase my grade, not anyone elses I will be greatly benefitted
• B. The petty thief
o They didt do much, and they shouldt be put in jail because it was not that
big of a deal
o Dot have to enforce the law in this case, they have a family → taking away
father from this case
• C. The district attorney and the innocent scoundrel
o Someone who is innocent of one crime and guilty of those others
o In this one case, there ist enough evidence, you have access to but if you do
so, it will increase public confidence
o Problematic about putting an innocent person away
• D. The indolent democrat
o Know that you should vote, but your vote ot make a difference
o It wont do anything, so you dot do it
• Problems for Utilitarianism:
o 1. There appear to be some acts that we ought not perform even though their
consequences would seem to increase utility
▪ Your utility would increase if I increased your grade, but I should not do
that
o 2. There appear to be some acts that we ought to perform even though doing
them will seemingly not increase utility
▪ Both of those things seem repugnant to utilitarianism
Acts, Practices, Rules
• Repetitions of certain acts create general patterns that we may recognize as general,
utility-increasing practices:
o Why do we have a notion of grading at all?
▪ Is it because people who are in a position of evaluating want to be
cruel, or make others feel small?
▪ Why have a criteria? Or standard of evaluation
• Its a practice that says there is a standard of quality, and we
may want to lay out those things for particular practices
• If you are going to do this well, this is what well looks like
• You have approximated to the standard with more or less
degree
• If this is the practice, lets establish some ground rules of how
this will work so the professor cant do whatever they want
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Document Summary
It wont do anything, so you do(cid:374)(cid:859)t do it: problems for utilitarianism, 1. There appear to be some acts that we ought not perform even though their consequences would seem to increase utility: your utility would increase if i increased your grade, but i should not do that, 2. There appear to be some acts that we ought to perform even though doing them will seemingly not increase utility: both of those things seem repugnant to utilitarianism. It(cid:859)s a practice that says there is a standard of quality, and we may want to lay out those things for particular practices. If you are going to do this well, this is what well looks like: you have approximated to the standard with more or less degree. If we think that there(cid:859)s something wrong about imprisoning, why: rule; such mistrust if that was found out that an innocent person was imprisoned.
