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  1. Wouldn't it be Nice? Moral Rules and Distant Worlds.Abelard Podgorski - 2018 - Noûs 52 (2):279-294.
    Traditional rule consequentialism faces a problem sometimes called the ideal world objection—the worry that by looking only at the consequences in worlds where rules are universally adhered to, the theory fails to account for problems that arise because adherence to rules in the real world is inevitably imperfect. In response, recent theorists have defended sophisticated versions of rule consequentialism which are sensitive to the consequences in worlds with less utopian levels of adherence. In this paper, I argue that these attempts (...)
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  • How should utilitarians think about the future?Tim Mulgan - 2017 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2-3):290-312.
    Utilitarians must think collectively about the future because many contemporary moral issues require collective responses to avoid possible future harms. But current rule utilitarianism does not accommodate the distant future. Drawing on my recent books Future People and Ethics for a Broken World, I defend a new utilitarianism whose central ethical question is: What moral code should we teach the next generation? This new theory honours utilitarianism’s past and provides the flexibility to adapt to the full range of credible futures (...)
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  • Rule consequentialism at top rates.Teemu Toppinen - 2015 - Philosophical Quarterly:pqv065.
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  • Rule Consequentialism and the Problem of Partial Acceptance.Kevin Tobia - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3):643-652.
    Most plausible moral theories must address problems of partial acceptance or partial compliance. The aim of this paper is to examine some proposed ways of dealing with partial acceptance problems as well as to introduce a new Rule Utilitarian suggestion. Here I survey three forms of Rule Utilitarianism, each of which represents a distinct approach to solving partial acceptance issues. I examine Fixed Rate, Variable Rate, and Optimum Rate Rule Utilitarianism, and argue that a new approach, Maximizing Expectation Rate Rule (...)
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  • Does the Patterned View Avoid the Ideal Worlds Objection?Benedict Rumbold - 2024 - Utilitas 36 (2):130-147.
    Can we formulate a moral theory that captures the moral significance of patterns of group behaviour we cannot affect through our own action while at the same time avoiding the so-called ‘Ideal Worlds’ objection? In a recent article, Caleb Perl has argued that we can. Specifically, Perl claims that one view that does so is his Patterned View: roughly, you ought to act only in accordance with that set of sufficiently general rules that has optimal moral value (Perl 2021: 98). (...)
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  • Internalizing rules.Spencer Paulson - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (2):630-649.
    The aim of this paper is to give an account of what it is to internalize a rule. I claim that internalization is the process of redistributing the burden of instruction from the teacher to the student. The process is complete when instruction is no longer needed, and the rule has reshaped perceptual classification of the circumstances in which it applies. Teaching a rule is the initiation of this process. We internalize rules by simulating instruction coming from someone else. Running (...)
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  • From The Best To The Rest: Idealistic Thinking in a Non-Ideal World.David Wiens - manuscript
    (Updated: September 2024.) From Plato to the present day, political theorists have used models of idealistic societies to think about politics. How can these idealistic models inform our thinking about political life in our non-ideal world? Not, as many political theorists have hoped, by providing normative guidance -- by showing us how things should be or where we should go. Even still, we can use these models to interpret the concepts we depend on to explain and evaluate political behavior and (...)
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  • Act and Rule Consequentialism: A Synthesis.Jussi Suikkanen - forthcoming - Moral Philosophy and Politics.
    As an indirect ethical theory, rule consequentialism first evaluates moral codes in terms of how good the consequences of their general adoption are and then individual actions in terms of whether or not the optimific code authorises them. There are three well-known and powerful objections to rule consequentialism’s indirect structure: the ideal world objection, the rule worship objection, and the incoherence objection. These objections are all based on cases in which following the optimific code has suboptimal consequences in the real (...)
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  • Some Question-Begging Objections to Rule Consequentialism.Caleb Perl - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):904-919.
    This paper defends views like rule consequentialism by distinguishing between two sorts of ideal world objections. It aims to show that one of those sorts of objections is question-begging. Its success would open up a path forward for such views.
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  • Solving the Ideal Worlds Problem.Caleb Perl - 2021 - Ethics 132 (1):89-126.
    I introduce a new formulation of rule consequentialism, defended as an improvement on traditional formulations. My new formulation cleanly avoids what Parfit calls “ideal world” objections. I suggest that those objections arise because traditional formulations incorporate counterfactual comparisons about how things could go differently. My new formulation eliminates those counterfactual comparisons. Part of the interest of the new formulation is as a model of how to reformulate structurally similar views, including various kinds of contractualism.
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  • Act Consequentialism without Free Rides.Preston Greene & Benjamin A. Levinstein - 2020 - Philosophical Perspectives 34 (1):88-116.
    Consequentialist theories determine rightness solely based on real or expected consequences. Although such theories are popular, they often have difficulty with generalizing intuitions, which demand concern for questions like “What if everybody did that?” Rule consequentialism attempts to incorporate these intuitions by shifting the locus of evaluation from the consequences of acts to those of rules. However, detailed rule-consequentialist theories seem ad hoc or arbitrary compared to act consequentialist ones. We claim that generalizing can be better incorporated into consequentialism by (...)
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  • Contractualism.Jussi Suikkanen - 2020 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This essay begins by describing T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism according to which an action is right when it is authorised by the moral principles no one could reasonably reject. This view has argued to have implausible consequences with regards to how different-sized groups, non-human animals, and cognitively limited human beings should be treated. It has also been accused of being theoretically redundant and unable to vindicate the so-called deontic distinctions. I then distinguish between the general contractualist framework and Scanlon’s version of (...)
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  • Measuring the Consequences of Rules: A Reply to Smith.Shang Long Yeo - 2017 - Utilitas 29 (1):125-131.
    In ‘Measuring the Consequences of Rules’, Holly Smith presents two problems involving the indeterminacy of compliance, which she takes to be fatal for all forms of rule-utilitarianism. In this reply, I attempt to dispel both problems.
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  • Rule-Consequentialism's Assumptions.Kevin P. Tobia - 2018 - Utilitas 30 (4):458-471.
    Rule-Consequentialism faces “the problem of partial acceptance”: How should the ideal code be selected given the possibility that its rules may not be universally accepted? A new contender, “Calculated Rates” Rule-Consequentialism claims to solve this problem. However, I argue that Calculated Rates merely relocates the partial acceptance question. Nevertheless, there is a significant lesson from this failure of Calculated Rates. Rule-Consequentialism’s problem of partial acceptance is more helpfully understood as an instance of the broader problem of selecting the ideal code (...)
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  • Rule Utilitarianism and Rational Acceptance.Evan G. Williams - 2023 - The Journal of Ethics 27 (3):305-328.
    This article presents a rule-utilitarian theory which lies much closer to the social contract tradition than most other forms of consequentialism do: calculated-rates rule preference utilitarianism. Being preference-utilitarian allows the theory to be grounded in instrumental rationality and the equality of agents, as opposed to teleological assumptions about impartial goodness. The calculated-rates approach, judging rules’ consequences by what would happen if they were accepted by whatever number of people is realistic rather than by what would happen if they were accepted (...)
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  • Hooker's rule‐consequentialism and Scanlon's contractualism—A re‐evaluation.Jussi Suikkanen - 2022 - Ratio 35 (4):261-274.
    Brad Hooker’s rule-consequentialism and T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism have been some of the most debated ethical theories in normative ethics during the last twenty years or so. This article suggests that these theories can be compared at two levels. Firstly, what are the deep, structural differences between the rule-consequentialist and contractualist frameworks in which Hooker and Scanlon formulate their views? Secondly, what are the more superficial differences between Hooker’s and Scanlon’s formulations of these theories? Based on exploring these questions and several (...)
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  • Moral Education and Rule Consequentialism.Dale E. Miller - 2020 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1):120-140.
    Rule consequentialism holds that an action's moral standing depends on its relation to the moral code whose general adoption would have the best consequences. Heretofore rule consequentialists have understood the notion of a code's being generally adopted in terms of its being generally obeyed or, more commonly, its being generally accepted. I argue that these ways of understanding general adoption lead to unacceptable formulations of the theory. For instance, Brad Hooker, Michael Ridge, and Holly Smith have recently offered different answers (...)
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  • Empirical ignorance as defeating moral intuitions? A puzzle for rule consequentialists.Caleb Perl - 2019 - Analysis 79 (1):62-72.
    This paper develops an argument that, if rule consequentialism is true, it’s not possible to defend it as the outcome of reflective equilibrium. Ordinary agents like you and me are ignorant of too many empirical facts. Our ignorance is a defeater for our moral intuitions. Even worse, there aren’t enough undefeated intuitions left to defend rule consequentialism. The problem I’ll describe won’t be specific to rule consequentialists, but it will be especially sharp for them.
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  • Contractualism and the Counter-Culture Challenge.Jussi Suikkanen - 2017 - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics 7:184-206.
    T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism attempts to give an account of right and wrong in terms of the moral code that could not be reasonably rejected. Reasonable rejectability is then a function of what kind of consequences the general adoption of different moral codes has for different individuals. It has been shown that moral codes should be compared at a lower than 100% level of social acceptance. This leads to the counter-culture challenge. The problem is that the cultural background of the (...)
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  • Universal practice and universal applicability tests in moral philosophy.Scott Forschler - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (12):3041-3058.
    We can distinguish two kinds of moral universalization tests for practical principles. One requires that the universal practice of the principle, i.e., universal conformity to it by all agents in a given world, satisfies some condition. The other requires that conformity to the principle by any possible agent, in any situation and at any time, satisfies some condition. We can call these universal practice and universal applicability tests respectively. The logical distinction between these tests is rarely appreciated, and many philosophers (...)
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  • Putting pain in its proper place.Kevin Reuter, Michael Sienhold & Justin Sytsma - 2019 - Analysis 79 (1):72-82.
    In a series of articles in this journal, Michael Tye (2002) and Paul Noordhof (2001, 2002) have sparred over the correct explanation of the putative invalidity of the following argument: the pain is in my fingertip; the fingertip is in my mouth; therefore, the pain is in my mouth. Whereas Tye explains the failure of the argument by stating that “pain “creates an intensional context, Noordhof maintains that the “in” in ‘the pain is in my fingertip’ is not spatial, but (...)
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  • An Investigation into Unethical Behavior Intentions Among Undergraduate Students: A Malaysian Study. [REVIEW]Joyce K. H. Nga & Evelyn W. S. Lum - 2013 - Journal of Academic Ethics 11 (1):45-71.
    The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the dimensions of the theory of planned behavior, gender and course majors on unethical behavior intentions among Generation Y undergraduates. The sample of this study comprises 245 undergraduates from a private higher education institution (PHEI) in Malaysia. The instrument of this study is developed based on concepts developed from extant literature. Reliability and validity is accessed using Cronbach’s Alpha and Exploratory Factor Analysis respectively. Social desirability bias was monitored utilizing (...)
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  • Solving Rule-Consequentialism's Acceptance Rate Problem.Timothy D. Miller - 2016 - Utilitas 28 (1):41-53.
    Recent formulations of rule-consequentialism have attempted to select the ideal moral code based on realistic assumptions of imperfect acceptance. But this introduces further problems. What assumptions about acceptance would be realistic? And what criterion should we use to identify the ideal code? The solutions suggested in the recent literature all calculate a code's value using formulas that stipulate some uniform rate of acceptance. After pointing out a number of difficulties with these approaches, I introduce a formulation of RC on which (...)
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  • From Compliance, to Acceptance, to Teaching: On Relocating Rule Consequentialism's Stipulations.Timothy D. Miller - 2021 - Utilitas 33 (2):204-220.
    Several recent formulations of Rule Consequentialism (RC) have broken with the consensus that RC should be formulated in terms of codeacceptance, claiming instead that RC should focus on the consequences of codes' beingtaught. I begin this article with an examination of the standard case for acceptance formulations. In addition to depending on the mistaken assumption thatcomplianceandacceptanceformulations are the only options, the standard case claims advantages for acceptance formulations that, upon closer examination, favor teaching formulations. In the remainder of the article, (...)
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