How do act and rule utilitarianism differ

She will have to weigh the possible consequences each and every time she acts. Therefore, rule utilitarianism is considered to be more practicable , countering the anti-utilitarian argument that weighing each and every possible outcome each and every time is just not the way we want to or can spend our time. On the other hand, act utilitarians consider rule utilitarians somewhat dull-witted, for a smart person might think of herself to be able to decide what to do without just applying rules time and time again.

Also, blindly applying rules to specific situations can have unforeseen negative consequences that might have been averted by somebody who paid more attention instead of executing a programme. At the same time, act utilitarians are criticised for their double standards, for they think it is useful if everybody follows "good" rules while they take for themselves the right to decide whether or not it is clever to stick to those rules in a specific situation. An example: A rule utilitarian drives at night and sees a red intersection light.

Thinking "it would have good consequences if people would stick to the rule and not cross red lights, so everyone is safe while waiting for a short while", she would apply that rule to herself and wait for it to turn green.

Meanwhile, the act utilitarian might think "well, I certainly hope that people, who aren't me, in general follow that rule and stay put, but as there's no one around who might get influenced by my act, since there's no police around to fine me, and since I would see an approaching car as it's dark, I might as well cross right now.

Sources: There is a paper by Smart which you can find here ; I'm pretty sure that's what we read in the seminar where I learned what I wrote. Smart's the act utilitarian. Originally, I was going to comment on iphigenie's answer, but I decided there were enough parts I wanted to comment on that it's worth supplying a second answer -- even though the other one is good as it is.

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism seeks to maximize happiness something he inherits from Jeremy Bentham and his father. Contemporary versions are usually a bit more nuanced in what they are trying to do and are probably better called consequentialism. There are several flaws in Mill's original idea for utilitarianism which center on two pairs of epistemic concerns.

First, there's a question about whether we are to do what we expect would maximize happiness or whether we are to in fact maximize happiness. If we are expected to really maximize happiness, we face an impossible task, because we can get it completely wrong maybe the cake I baked for your birthday contains an allergen that kills you and depresseds thousands of people.

But then if we are just maximizing what we expect will make people happy, then we need to have some rules in place to balance how hard we need to be learning about this or else its just as good to cut off your hand if I mistakenly believe this will make you happy as it is to sing you a song.

To some extent, rule utilitarians and act utilitarians disagree about the degree to which we need rules to overcome this problem with Mill's approach. Second, there's a worry about how adaptive our ethical theory should be. Do we adopt principles that would maximize happiness e. Hare or do we adjust continuously towards what will maximize happiness?

If you answer the former, then it is rule utilitarianism. Otherwise, it is act utilitarianism. I take it the two worries that need to be balanced here are this.

On the one hand, if you wind up with rules and complex considerations of when you can amend them, you sound a lot like like a deontologist -- something other than utility by itself is guiding you. On the other hand is the worry you raise about the concerns of calculation joined with an anti-theory position and a haphazard reality.

A teleological approach is one which is based on consequences, and deontological approach is based on a set of rules or absolutes. Act utilitarianism is linked to Jeremy Bentham, moral decisions are decisions that are based upon consequences of each individual situation in relation to the total amount of happiness that they produce.

Rule utilitarianism is associated with Mill, example can be roads rules, you must drive on the left hand side of the road, this applies to everyone that drives and it is the rules and it must be or should be followed in all situation, even if we were stuck in traffic jam.

This is because the rule is to keep order on the road. The main differences between act and rule utilitarianism is the fact that one is teleological and the other is mainly deontological. The society expects us to act in a such a way that will conform to these rules in order to live happy.

Act utilitarianism beliefs that an action becomes morally right when it produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people, while Rule utilitarianism beliefs that the moral correctness of an action depends on the correctness of the rules that allows it to achieve the greatest good.

Act utilitarianism is the belief that it is alright to break a rule as long as it brings greater good. Rule utilitarianism is a more general form. It's main question is "what general rule would this action follow, and would it maximize happiness if generally followed? Such as lying; lying, under certain conditions, could be justifiable. Rule utilitarianism looks at the consequences of actions on society, rather than the effects on just a subset.

Consider the following scenario. A surgeon has the option of saving one persons life, or the option of letting them die and saving the lives of seven people who all need organ transplants.

By sacrificing one person, seven can live. Act utilitarianism says that you should do the action that leads to the most amount of good. The surgeon should sacrifice his patient. Murder is acceptable, as long as the outcome is positive for a greater number of people. Hence, the theory of utilitarianism highlights the idea that morality or goodness is centered on useful actions or rules that benefit humanity on the whole. Utilitarianism is also noted as a form of consequentialism; here, the right action is defined entirely in terms of consequences produced.

Utilitarianism is also based on the pleasure principle concept and hedonism. Moreover, utilitarianism aims to increase the total amount of satisfaction or happiness for the greatest number of people.

Therefore, the morally good thing to do under utilitarianism, is whatever promotes the greatest utility to the majority of people, even if the individual acting will not prosper or be satisfied at all times. Likewise, the ultimate goal of utilitarianism is upliftment and betterment of humanity by increasing the level of happiness in the majority.

The pioneering figures in introducing utilitarianism theory are Jeremy Bentham introduced the classical utilitarianism , John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and, G. E Moore. Act utilitarianism refers to the theory that the morality of an action is determined by its usefulness to the people. Hence, if such a right act has an outcome that is beneficial to most people, then it is considered morally right mainly because it brings greater happiness or good to the majority of the people.

Thus, act utilitarianism believes that it is the right action that results in a greater advantage or good to the people. Hence, an action, if it has greater benefits to most people, is considered morally right and ethical under act utilitarianism. Hence, act utilitarianism is directly related to classical utilitarianism.

For instance, act utilitarianism views doing charity works and punishing crimes are morally right since they produce greater happiness and good to the people. More importantly, the act utilitarianism evaluates an act by its actual consequences, unlike rule utilitarianism. In a famous article, Peter Singer defends the view that people living in affluent countries should not purchase luxury items for themselves when the world is full of impoverished people.

According to Singer, a person should keep donating money to people in dire need until the donor reaches the point where giving to others generates more harm to the donor than the good that is generated for the recipients.

Critics claim that the argument for using our money to help impoverished strangers rather than benefiting ourselves and people we care about only proves one thing—that act utilitarianism is false.

There are two reasons that show why it is false. First, it fails to recognize the moral legitimacy of giving special preferences to ourselves and people that we know and care about. Second, since pretty much everyone is strongly motivated to act on behalf of themselves and people they care about, a morality that forbids this and requires equal consideration of strangers is much too demanding.

It asks more than can reasonably be expected of people. There are two ways in which act utilitarians can defend their view against these criticisms. First, they can argue that critics misinterpret act utilitarianism and mistakenly claim that it is committed to supporting the wrong answer to various moral questions. Because they do not maximize utility, these wrong answers would not be supported by act utilitarians and therefore, do nothing to weaken their theory.

Unless critics can prove that common sense moral beliefs are correct the criticisms have no force. Act utilitarians claim that their theory provides good reasons to reject many ordinary moral claims and to replace them with moral views that are based on the effects of actions. People who are convinced by the criticisms of act utilitarianism may decide to reject utilitarianism entirely and adopt a different type of moral theory. This judgment, however, would be sound only if act utilitarianism were the only type of utilitarian theory.

This is what defenders of rule utilitarianism claim. They argue that rule utilitarianism retains the virtues of a utilitarian moral theory but without the flaws of the act utilitarian version. Unlike act utilitarians, who try to maximize overall utility by applying the utilitarian principle to individual acts, rule utilitarians believe that we can maximize utility only by setting up a moral code that contains rules.

The correct moral rules are those whose inclusion in our moral code will produce better results more well-being than other possible rules. Once we determine what these rules are, we can then judge individual actions by seeing if they conform to these rules. The principle of utility, then, is used to evaluate rules and is not applied directly to individual actions. Once the rules are determined, compliance with these rules provides the standard for evaluating individual actions.

Rule utilitarianism sounds paradoxical. It says that we can produce more beneficial results by following rules than by always performing individual actions whose results are as beneficial as possible. This suggests that we should not always perform individual actions that maximize utility. How could this be something that a utilitarian would support? In spite of this paradox, rule utilitarianism possesses its own appeal, and its focus on moral rules can sound quite plausible.

The rule utilitarian approach to morality can be illustrated by considering the rules of the road. More specific rules that require stopping at lights, forbid going faster than 30 miles per hour, or prohibit driving while drunk do not give drivers the discretion to judge what is best to do.

They simply tell drivers what to do or not do while driving. The reason why a more rigid rule-based system leads to greater overall utility is that people are notoriously bad at judging what is the best thing to do when they are driving a car.

A rule utilitarian can illustrate this by considering the difference between stop signs and yield signs. Stop signs forbid drivers to go through an intersection without stopping, even if the driver sees that there are no cars approaching and thus no danger in not stopping. A yield sign permits drivers to go through without stopping unless they judge that approaching cars make it dangerous to drive through the intersection.

The key difference between these signs is the amount of discretion that they give to the driver. The stop sign is like the rule utilitarian approach. It tells drivers to stop and does not allow them to calculate whether it would be better to stop or not.

The yield sign is like act utilitarianism. It permits drivers to decide whether there is a need to stop. Act utilitarians see the stop sign as too rigid because it requires drivers to stop even when nothing bad will be prevented. The result, they say, is a loss of utility each time a driver stops at a stop sign when there is no danger from oncoming cars.

Rule utilitarians will reply that they would reject the stop sign method a if people could be counted on to drive carefully and b if traffic accidents only caused limited amounts of harm. But, they say, neither of these is true. Because people often drive too fast and are inattentive while driving because they are, for example, talking, texting, listening to music, or tired , we cannot count on people to make good utilitarian judgments about how to drive safely.

In addition, the costs i. Accident victims including drivers may be killed, injured, or disabled for life. For these reasons, rule utilitarians support the use of stop signs and other non-discretionary rules under some circumstances. Rule utilitarians generalize from this type of case and claim that our knowledge of human behavior shows that there are many cases in which general rules or practices are more likely to promote good effects than simply telling people to do whatever they think is best in each individual case.

This does not mean that rule utilitarians always support rigid rules without exceptions. Some rules can identify types of situations in which the prohibition is over-ridden. The rules of the road do not tell drivers when to drive or what their destination should be for example. Overall then, rule utilitarian can allow departures from rules and will leave many choices up to individuals. In such cases, people may act in the manner that looks like the approach supported by act utilitarians.

Nonetheless, these discretionary actions are permitted because having a rule in these cases does not maximize utility or because the best rule may impose some constraints on how people act while still permitting a lot of discretion in deciding what to do. As discussed earlier, critics of act utilitarianism raise three strong objections against it. According to these critics, act utilitarianism a approves of actions that are clearly wrong; b undermines trust among people, and c is too demanding because it requires people to make excessive levels of sacrifice.

Rule utilitarians tend to agree with these criticisms of act utilitarianism and try to explain why rule utilitarianism is not open to any of these objections. Critics of act utilitarianism claim that it allows judges to sentence innocent people to severe punishments when doing so will maximize utility, allows doctors to kill healthy patients if by doing so, they can use the organs of one person to save more lives, and allows people to break promises if that will create slightly more benefits than keeping the promise.

Rule utilitarians say that they can avoid all these charges because they do not evaluate individual actions separately but instead support rules whose acceptance maximizes utility. To see the difference that their focus on rules makes, consider which rule would maximize utility: a a rule that allows medical doctors to kill healthy patients so that they can use their organs for transplants that will save a larger number of patients who would die without these organs; or b a rule that forbids doctors to remove the organs of healthy patients in order to benefit other patients.

Although more good may be done by killing the healthy patient in an individual case, it is unlikely that more overall good will be done by having a rule that allows this practice. If a rule were adopted that allows doctors to kill healthy patients when this will save more lives, the result would be that many people would not go to doctors at all.

A rule utilitarian evaluation will take account of the fact that the benefits of medical treatment would be greatly diminished because people would no longer trust doctors. People who seek medical treatment must have a high degree of trust in doctors.

If they had to worry that doctors might use their organs to help other patients, they would not, for example, allow doctors to anesthetize them for surgery because the resulting loss of consciousness would make them completely vulnerable and unable to defend themselves. Thus, the rule that allows doctors to kill one patient to save five would not maximize utility. The same reasoning applies equally to the case of the judge.

In order to have a criminal justice system that protects people from being harmed by others, we authorize judges and other officials to impose serious punishments on people who are convicted of crimes.

The purpose of this is to provide overall security to people in their jurisdiction, but this requires that criminal justice officials only have the authority to impose arrest and imprisonment on people who are actually believed to be guilty. They do not have the authority to do whatever they think will lead to the best results in particular cases.

Whatever they do must be constrained by rules that limit their power. Act utilitarians may sometimes support the intentional punishment of innocent people, but rule utilitarians will understand the risks involved and will oppose a practice that allows it.

Rule utilitarians offer a similar analysis of the promise keeping case. They explain that in general, we want people to keep their promises even in some cases in which doing so may lead to less utility than breaking the promise. The reason for this is that the practice of promise-keeping is a very valuable. It enables people to have a wide range of cooperative relationships by generating confidence that other people will do what they promise to do.

If we knew that people would fail to keep promises whenever some option arises that leads to more utility, then we could not trust people who make promises to us to carry them through. In each of these cases then, rule utilitarians can agree with the critics of act utilitarianism that it is wrong for doctors, judges, and promise-makers to do case by case evaluations of whether they should harm their patients, convict and punish innocent people, and break promises.

The rule utilitarian approach stresses the value of general rules and practices, and shows why compliance with rules often maximizes overall utility even if in some individual cases, it requires doing what produces less utility. Rule utilitarians see the social impact of a rule-based morality as one of the key virtues of their theory. The three cases just discussed show why act utilitarianism undermines trust but rule utilitarianism does not. Fundamentally, in the cases of doctors, judges, and promise-keepers, it is trust that is at stake.

Being able to trust other people is extremely important to our well-being. As a result, people would be less likely to see other people as reliable and trustworthy. While rule utilitarians do not deny that there are people who are not trustworthy, they can claim that their moral code generally condemns violations of trust as wrongful acts. The problem with act utilitarians is that they support a moral view that has the effect of undermining trust and that sacrifices the good effects of a moral code that supports and encourages trustworthiness.

Rule utilitarians believe that their view is also immune to the criticism that act utilitarianism is too demanding. In addition, while the act utilitarian commitment to impartiality undermines the moral relevance of personal relations, rule utilitarians claim that their view is not open to this criticism.

They claim that rule utilitarianism allows for partiality toward ourselves and others with whom we share personal relationships. Moreover, they say, rule utilitarianism can recognize justifiable partiality to some people without rejecting the commitment to impartiality that is central to the utilitarian tradition.

How can rule utilitarianism do this? In his defense of rule utilitarianism, Brad Hooker distinguishes two different contexts in which partiality and impartiality play a role.

One involves the justification of moral rules and the other concerns the application of moral rules. Justifications of moral rules, he claims, must be strictly impartial. When we ask whether a rule should be adopted, it is essential to consider the impact of the rule on all people and to weigh the interests of everyone equally.

The second context concerns the content of the rules and how they are applied in actual cases. Rule utilitarians argue that a rule utilitarian moral code will allow partiality to play a role in determining what morality requires, forbids, or allows us to do. As an example, consider a moral rule parents have a special duty to care for their own children.

See Parental Rights and Obligations. This is a partialist rule because it not only allows but actually requires parents to devote more time, energy, and other resources to their own children than to others. While the content of this rule is not impartial, rule utilitarians believe it can be impartially justified. Partiality toward children can be justified for several reasons. Caring for children is a demanding activity. Children need the special attention of adults to develop physically, emotionally, and cognitively.

It is not possible for absentee parents or strangers to provide individual children with all that they need. Therefore, we can maximize the overall well-being of children as a class by designating certain people as the caretakers for specific children. For these reasons, partiality toward specific children can be impartially justified.

Teachers, for example have special duties to students in their own classes and have no duty to educate all students. Similarly, public officials can and should be partial to people in the jurisdiction in which they work. If the overall aim is to maximize the well-being of all people in all cities, for example, then we are likely to get better results by having individuals who know and understand particular cities focus on them while other people focus on other cities. Based on examples like these, rule utilitarians claim that their view, unlike act utilitarianism, avoids the problems raised about demandingness and partiality.

Being committed to impartialist justifications of moral rules does not commit them to rejecting moral rules that allow or require people to give specific others priority. While rule utilitarians can defend partiality, their commitment to maximizing overall utility also allows them to justify limits on the degree of partiality that is morally permissible.

It would be wrong, for example, for a parent to injure children who are running in a school race in order to increase the chances that their own children will win. The key point is that while rule utilitarianism permits partiality toward some people, it can also generate rules that limit the ways in which people may act partially and it might even support a positive duty for well off people to provide assistance to strangers when the needs and interests of people to whom we are partial are fully met, when they have surplus resources that could be used to assist strangers in dire conditions, and when there are ways to channel these resources effectively to people in dire need.

Act utilitarians criticize rule utilitarians for irrationally supporting rule-based actions in cases where more good could be done by violating the rule than obeying it. Act utilitarians say that they recognize that rules can have value. For example, rules can provide a basis for acting when there is no time to deliberate. In addition, rules can define a default position, a justification for doing or refraining from a type of action as long as there is no reason for not doing it.

But when people know that more good can be done by violating the rule then the default position should be over-ridden. In their view, whatever defects act utilitarianism may have, rule utilitarianism will have the same defects. According to this criticism, although rule utilitarianism looks different from act utilitarianism, a careful examination shows that it collapses into or, as David Lyons claimed, is extensionally equivalent to act utilitarianism.

To understand this criticism, it is worth focusing on a distinction between rule utilitarianism and other non-utilitarian theories. Many people see this view as too rigid and claim that it fails to take into account the circumstances in which a lie is being told.

Suppose that a rule utilitarian adopts this approach and advocates a moral code that consists of a list of rules of this form. If rule utilitarianism is to be distinct from act utilitarianism, its supporters must find a way to formulate rules that allow exceptions to a general requirement or prohibition while not collapsing into act utilitarianism.

One way to do this is to identify specific conditions under which violating a general moral requirement would be justified. In cases of lesser harms or deceitful acts that will benefit the liar, lying would still be prohibited, even if lying might maximize overall utility.

It also suggests, however, that rule utilitarians face difficult challenges in formulating utility-based rules that have a reasonable degree of flexibility built into them but are not so flexible that they collapse into act utilitarianism. In addition, although the rules that make up a moral code should be flexible enough to account for the complexities of life, they cannot be so complex that they are too difficult for people to learn and understand.

Although rule utilitarians try to avoid the weaknesses attributed to act utilitarianism, critics argue that they cannot avoid these weaknesses because they do not take seriously many of our central moral concepts.

As a result, they cannot support the right answers to crucial moral problems. Three prominent concepts in moral thought that critics cite are justice, rights, and desert. These moral ideas are often invoked in reasoning about morality, but critics claim that neither rule nor act utilitarianism acknowledge their importance. Instead, they focus only on the amounts of utility that actions or rules generate.

In considering the case, for example, of punishing innocent people, the best that rule utilitarians can do is to say that a rule that permits this would lead to worse results overall than a rule that permitted it. This prediction, however, is precarious.