Implications In John Hospers And The Consequences Of Rule-Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism determines the moral status if an action by looking at its consequences and using the utility principle, a good act leads to good consequences for the majority. Act-utilitarianism looks at the consequences of an action at the given moment, and the right act is that which produces the most good at the moment it occurred. However, Hospers makes the argument that “If it is wrong for me to do the act publicly, is it any the less wrong for me to do it secretly?” (165). In other words, if a person lies to a friend and the friend discovers that the person has lied, then his action, under utilitarianism, would be consider morally wrong, because the consequence brought no good to either individual in this scenario. However, if the friend never discovered that the person lied to them, and both continued to live happily and maintain a strong friendship, then Hospers questions is the person’s action still wrong, even though it produced the maximum good. As a result, Hospers does not believe that the moral status of an action should not be determined by the effect of the …show more content…
He gives the scenario of a district attorney who has to prosecute a man for robbery, where the attorney has evidence that the man is innocent of that crime, but has committed crimes in the past where he was not convicted. The attorney has to make the decision of presenting the evidence to prove the man’s innocence or hide the evidence so that the man would be convicted of the crime. According to Hospers, a utilitarian would see hiding the evidence as producing the greater good because the man has a history of committing crimes and, even though he did not commit this particular crime, he would most likely commit another crime if released, meaning convicting the man would be the greater good. However, he