Abstract
This essay is another installment in a continuing examination of the logical foundations of utilitarianism.1 Here we discuss act-utilitarianism.
(i) ... when the question is which among several courses still open to a man he ought to choose. G. E. Moore, Ethics, Chapter 5 (ii) ... an obligation must be an obligation, not to do something, but to perform an activity of a totally different kind, that of setting or exerting ourselves to do something, i.e., to bring something about. H. A. Prichard, ‘Duty and Ignorance of Fact’
This paper was written while the author was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1967–68.
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Notes
Of late we have gained a good deal of understanding into the nature of action. The recent literature on action is quite large, but among the important essays developing views in consonance with the one behind this paper we should mention: (i) H. A. Prichard, ‘Duty and Ignorance of Fact’, A British Academy lecture of 1932, reprinted in H. A. Prichard, Moral Obligation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1949; (ii) Arthur C. Danto, ‘Basic Actions’, American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1965); (iii) Arthur C. Danto, ‘What We Can Do’, The Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963).
Bergstrom’s ‘Utilitarianism and Deontic Logic’ in Analysis 29 (1968) is a very nice reply to my ‘A Problem for Utilitarianism’, that both (i) concedes the contention that value-maximizing conditions are not necessary for obligations, and (ii) proposes a recursive version of act-utilitarianism. Unfortunately, this version cannot be appraised because he relies on his analysis of alternativeness in his book, and he has furnished no sufficient condition for a set of relevant alternatives that makes a bit of his proposal feasible. See the items mentioned in Note 3. See my ‘On the Problem of Formulating a Coherent Act-Utilitarianism’, Analysis 32 (1972).
See, e.g., R. Duncan Luce and Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1957, Chapter 3.
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© 1972 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland
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Castañeda, HN. (1972). Open Action, Utility, and Utilitarianism. In: Leach, J., Butts, R., Pearce, G. (eds) Science, Decision and Value. The University of Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2571-3_13
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