Abstract

The way individual actions enter into larger courses of action often has an effect on the utility of those individual actions. This simple fact has motivated recent discussions about the intelligibility of act-utilitarianism. It has become clear that act-utilitarianism is incomplete, if not intelligible, without an account of the utility-making properties of courses of action taken as a whole. In this paper I offer a brief discussion of the difficulties of a simple act-utilitarianism and then offer three complementary principles in which the utility of an action is made to depend upon the courses of action of which it may be a constituent. I hope that the discussion will be of interest not only to committed act-utilitarians but to its sympathetic critics as well.