Rule consequentialism

Abstract

Rule-consequentialism (RC) judges moral rightness based on whether a set of policies would maximize overall net good, if they were accepted by a large majority of a society. In this theory, harmful outcomes from following rules are justified if the benefits to society as a whole justify them, and hence there is no need for rules against such actions. RC assesses acts indirectly, via rules, for their consequential impact. Opponents argue that RC suffers from incoherence and collapse into practical equivalence with act-consequentialism, while proponents have developed sophisticated responses to these objections. Some alleged weaknesses of RC lie not in the theory itself but in the difficulty of formulating it to make it both coherent and realistically applicable to real-world scenarios. – AI-generated abstract.