Abstract

This book consists of two essays of equal length. The first is a revised edition of Smart’s An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics while the second, by Williams, is a general critique of utilitarianism with pointed reference to Smart. Combining the normative utilitarianism of Henry Sidgwick with the non-cognitivist metaethics of R. M. Hare, Smart outlines a version of act utilitarianism. In the course of doing this, he tackles the traditional problems of utilitarianism. He rejects rule utilitarianism because it is "rule worship." He defends a middle ground between hedonistic and idealistic utilitarianism by admitting that happiness is in part an evaluative and not entirely a descriptive concept. Finally, he defends utilitarianism against deontic and common sense ethical theories by remarking about those cases in which utilitarianism seems to produce jarring results, "so much the worse for common sense ethics." Once one commits oneself to the principle of benevolence, it is the yardstick against which the value of acts is to be measured. Furthermore, this principle leads to the traditional utilitarian distinction between the value of an action and the value of praising or blaming the action.