Conservative Utilitarianism1

Dudley Knowles

Utilitas, 2000, vol. 12, issue 2, 155-175

Abstract: The resilience of utilitarian ethics in the face of unremitting criticism can be explained in part by its use of various strategies of indirect utilitarianism. The success of these strategies throws up a distinctive problem: how can one measure the utility of moral rules, large-scale social institutions or character traits distinctive of virtues? Reading Hume as a utilitarian of sorts in his treatment of justice (and rejecting contractarian readings), I explain his conservative endorsement of entrenched social practices as a consequence of his broadly functionalist approach. I claim that this account has enough merit to ground conservativism in ethics as a satisfactory default position. Projects for reform rather than established institutions are the proper object of utilitarian assessment, thus finessing the problem of measurement I opened up initially.

Date: 2000
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