Carritt: Act And Rule Utilitarianism

Due to this distinction, act and rule utilitarians have different responses to the two problems posed by Carritt. In response to the arctic explorers, act utilitarians would have a couple ways to defend utilitarianism. First, they could deny that the alleged consequences, the weakening of promises and justice, are genuine consequences. In order to do this, the act utilitarian would have to claim that an error was made in assessing the consequences. It is possible that not all the relevant consequences were considered, and that a true consideration of all consequences would result in different consequences where Carritt’s criticism would be irrelevant. The second response an act utilitarian would have to this situation is to grant that the weakening …show more content…
First, they would implore that the surviving explorer keep his promise to the dead explorer. The rightness or wrongness of an action is tested by whether it falls under a certain rule, meaning that if keeping promises is a rule, the man needs to keep the promise he made to the explorer who sacrificed himself. This is not a situation in which the action does not fall under a rule or falls under two rules, which makes the course of action clear. In addition, by the hypothetical universalization principle, if everyone broke promises that no one knew about, the result would be bad. Although the breaking of this promise would notn’t affect the future keeping or breaking of promises, the breaking of promises that would occur if everyone broke promises would result in a greatly weakened institution of promises. Second, they would say that the killing of an innocent man is also wrong. If one of the rules in the society states that innocent men should not be punished or killed, then the innocent man cannot be killed, despite the fact that everyone believes he really is the criminal. Furthermore, if every society killed innocent men in order to end violent crime streaks, the institution of justice would be weakened. Innocent men everywhere would be killed, which is unfair and is a negative result. The rule utilitarian …show more content…
Carritt, complains that it ignores promise keeping and honoring the innocence of a man. He illustrates his complaint with examples about a promise made between two explorers stranded in the Arctic and the hanging of an innocent man in order to deter more crime. However, act utilitarians adequately respond by either saying that the consequences for action were not fully examined and therefore incorrect or by accepting the consequences but showing why they are the morally correct option in both these situations. Rule utilitarians are also about to provide a good response by shifting to a theory that would not allow the breaking of a promise or the hanging of an innocent man to occur in the first place. Ultimately, rule utilitarianism would be a plausible moral theory since it avoids the problems and provides for fair judgement, while act utilitarianism is unable to provide a strong enough explanation about why it is ok to break promises or kill innocent people, which creates unfair situations and an unfair standard of