Improved Formulations of Act-Utilitarianism

Abstract

Lars Bergstrom's The Alternatives and Consequences of Actions (Stockholm: 1966) is an outstanding contribution to utilitarian ethics, which definitely sets a standard of comparison for future work in the area. In the first part of his book Bergstrom deals with the following problem that seems to have been almost altogether neglected by moral philosophers: (i) how are we to understand and explicate the notion of the alternatives to an action that admittedly plays a crucial r6le in act-utilitarianism? Another problem appears to be intimately bound up with (i), viz. (ii) how is act-utilitarianism related to deontic logic? It would seem that, since act-utilitarianism provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the obligatoriness, rightness and wrongness of actions, one is entitled to expect it to validate certain principles of deontic logic automatically, so to speak. If this were not so, it would seem that act-utilitarianism could be ruled out on purely logical grounds, provided, of course, that deontic logic is concerned with obligatoriness, etc. in a sense with which act-utilitarianism, too, is concerned, and provided also that deontic logic is a sufficiently well-established discipline (which certainly may be doubted). Now, Bergstrbm does not explicitly claim to be dealing with this problem (ii),' but its presence and relevance can be felt throughout his interesting discussion of alternatives (problem (i)). The main intent of the present paper is to give a treatment of problems (i) and (ii) in the light of Bergstrbm's work. As far as

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