PART II: KANT vs MILL - Rule-Utilitarianism
Rule-utilitarianism was introduced to overcome some of the problems encountered in the kind of problems cited above. If a judge could send bailiffs out to round up citizens when the need for jurors arose, then citizens could never be sure when they would be abducted and when their individual rights would be violated. Rule-utilitarianism, it is argued, resolves such a situation holding that an act is right if the rule used fits in with a body of rules that brings into existence a greater degree of utility than would otherwise be the case. Thus lying (in the former example, above) and abduction (in the latter case) will cause more unhappiness than happiness.
Utilitarianism has much to offer and, indeed, it seems to be well represented by its advocates at some prestigious American universities. It may be necessary to tell a lie to save someone who is hiding from a murderous, jealous lover. Thus we can come up with a rule that lying is wrong except in the above circumstances. Any special circumstances, no matter how devious, could then be incorporated into the rule. Could torture-murder be incorporated into the rule. There is nothing on utilitarian grounds that would exclude it. Yet many of us would feel that there is something intrinsically wrong with such an act that is not excluded by this consequentialist position. After all, an act is judged to be moral purely on the grounds of its consequences. Deontologists, like Immanuel Kant, believed that it was not the consequences that determined the rightness or wrongness of an act, but something intrinsic to the act itself, done out of a sense of duty.