Explain the ‘collapse objection’ to rule utilitarianism. Is the ‘collapse objection’ fatal to the project of developing a convincing rule-based alternative to act utilitarianism?

Essay

Yes, the “collapse objection” is fatal to rule-based alternatives to act utilitarianism, the ethical theory that an action is right only if it leads to the greatest total welfare as compared to any other possible action. Rule-based alternatives attempt to overcome criticisms of act utilitarianism such as the epistemic and moral debasement objections by redefining rightness as being exactly when an action is in accordance with a set of rules which, when uniformly followed, lead to the greatest total welfare as compared to any other set of rules. However, this rule-based approach fails to counter such challenges convincingly. I will outline these two objections to act utilitarianism, explain rule utilitarianism’s responses, and show that these replies are either incoherent with utilitarian principles or simply indistinguishable from act utilitarianism. My goal is to demonstrate that rule utilitarianism cannot come to the rescue of its act-based sibling in countering such arguments, and so it collapses A thought: rule utilitarianism is an attempt to operationalise act utilitarianism. Of course it collapses! You can approximate act utilitarianism with rules of increasing complexity. These additional rules aren't epicycles, more like higher-order derivatives in a Taylor series. In the limit your Taylor expansion is equal to the function itself; in the limit rule utilitarianism is equal to act utilitarianism. (A disanalogy here is that pure rule utilitarianism doesn't seem to be the most computable approximation; how does one know what set of rules is the best set? You have to take the additional assumption that society's current rule set is a reasonably good one.) The question we ought to be concerned with is what is useful. Representation of ideas matters: there’s a great point in a fast.ai tutorial that although a hex dump of a photo contains more information than the printed image itself, if you’re trying to run away from a lion, the latter is much more helpful. into effectively the same theory.

The epistemic objection argues that act utilitarianism does not fulfil its deliberative goal of providing instruction on what actions to take, and so cannot be a correct ethical theory. We can formalise the objection as follows:

As Crisp (1997, p101) notes, this objection does seem to pose a substantial problem for act utilitarianism. If (as we currently have it defined) the right action is the one which actually leads to the greatest welfare, then not only is arriving at a decision about which action to take computationally intractable, the right action is in some sense undefined until some end point in time which may not even exist. Williams (1993, p85) suggests that an attractive feature of act utilitarianism is that under it, “all moral obscurity becomes a matter of technical limitations”. If these limitations are insurmountable by all, though, that is hardly a selling point for the theory.

A rule utilitarian such as Urmson (1953) might respond that their theory offers a solution: rather than requiring agents to calculate the consequences of every action they take and selecting the one which maximises welfare, they can instead follow a pre-determined and interpretable list of rules which specify what action is right given the circumstances. Whilst it is true that were such a set of rules to exist, they would sidestep the epistemic objection, a rule utilitarian must explain how an agent (or indeed humanity) would arrive at this set of rules in the first place.

Unfortunately, rule utilitarians here find themselves faced with the same problem as act utilitarians. For instance, although it might seem that welfare is maximised when the general rule “Do not murder” is followed, no human can really be sure that this is the case, given that we cannot compute with certainty the long-term effects on welfare if the rule were routinely broken. Instead, we fall back on observations made up to the present point to conclude that the maxim “Do not murder” is part of the rule set which maximises welfare. Rule utilitarianism doesn’t rely on us having certainty that a particular action recommended by the theory is the right one, merely that we have good reason to think it is.

However, lowering the standard of proof to this level means act utilitarianism is also able to clear it. If we are to do what we have good reason to believe the criterion says is right, then an act utilitarian can just turn to probabilism (Crisp 1997, p100) and perform the action which a rational agent would expect to maximise utility, letting the unknowable and effectively random long-term consequences of an action cancel out. Moreover, act utilitarianism does not exclude agents from using heuristics in place of computing welfare every time they take an action. Since computation is itself an action which consumes time and is either right or wrong (Williams 1993, p90), falling back on a rule of thumb may be reasonably considered the right action from an act utilitarian standpoint. As Mill (2.24) argues, there is no need for a utilitarian to constantly return to first principles when heuristics will do the job.¹ So, if one only needs a reasonable expectation that the decision criterion tracks the rightness criterion to apply the theory, then act utilitarianism also becomes robust against the epistemic objection, and thus rule utilitarianism provides no advantage here.

Another objection to act utilitarianism is that it leads to a debasement of moral standards According to Williams (1993, p96), “it is empirically probable that an escalation of pre-emptive activity may be expected” in an act utilitarian society, because “a utilitarian must always be justified in doing the least bad thing which is necessary to prevent the worst thing that would otherwise happen in the circumstances”. This more specific claim that nastiness would escalate uncontrollably in a utilitarian society is addressed as soon as expectations be addressed with taking expectations into account: there only some small probability p that another agent would carry out an awful action, and so you should take preemptive measures only if the amount of disutility (including higher-order effects) created by your doing so is less that the expected disutility from not doing so and them potentially doing the (absolutely) more awful act. He also argues (Ibid, p92) that “the familiar pattern of moral argument ‘how would it be if everyone did that?’ cannot have any effect on a consistent utilitarian unless his action really will have the effect of making everyone do it, which is usually pretty implausible”. But this is a poor argument; a better question to pose is ‘how would it be if more people did that?’. , and endorses (indeed, requires) actions which appear to us to be wrong.² Williams (1993, p91) points to the conviction of an innocent man to prevent wider disorder as one such case.³ Rule utilitarianism would seem to provide a different, more welcome conclusion: since uniform adherence to the rule “Do not convict innocent people” leads to greater welfare than non-adherence, we should follow it even if doing so leads to lower welfare in a particular instance. Yet this is simply “pure irrationality” Williams (1993, p94). As Smart (1973, p12) argues compellingly, if rule utilitarianism truly does view welfare as a fundamental constituent of the criterion of rightness, the rule would surely be modified to “Do not convict innocent people, except where doing so prevents mass riots”. There would of course be exceptions to this exception, and so on with infinite regress, until the rules given are specific to every single possible situation – and reducible to the simple act utilitarian maxim of “Do whichever action will lead to the greatest welfare”. Alternatively, rule utilitarians might insist on following their rule, but this would then prioritise rule-following over welfare, removing any of its utilitarian qualities (Williams 1993, p95).

In light of these arguments, I conclude that the “collapse objection” is fatal to rule-based alternatives to act utilitarianism, and that such alternatives provide no advantages in fulfilling the deliberative or explanatory goals of an ethical theory.

Bibliography

Roger Crisp, “Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Mill on Utilitarianism” (Routledge, 1997): 95-124.

J.S. Mill, “Utilitarianism” in “The Blackwell Guide Mill's Utilitarianism” ed. Henry R. West (Blackwell, 2006).

J.J.C. Smart, “An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics” in Smart & Williams, “Utilitarianism: For and Against” (Cambridge, 1993).

J. O. Urmson, “The Interpretation of the Moral Philosophy of J. S. Mill”, The Philosophical Quarterly vol. 3, no. 10 (1953): 33-39.

Bernard Williams, “Morality: An Introduction to Ethics” (Cambridge, 1993): 82-98.