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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books The Varieties of Normativity: an Essay On Social Ontology II. Rawls and Rule-Utilitarianism In 1955, at the beginning of his career, Rawls published an important article called “ Two Concepts of Rules”,[^7] a work which was unfortunately overshadowed by his later A Theory of Justice, [^8] but which has nonetheless exerted some considerable influence along the way.

It has been translated into numerous languages and it is a mainstay in anthologies dealing with moral philosophy. It consists of an attempt to defend utilitarianism against certain traditional objections relating to the alleged incapacity of utilitarians to deal with the institutions of the promise and of punishment, and to the widespread supposition that utilitarians must perforce allow on felicific grounds the occasional breaking of promises and the punishing of innocents.

Rawls’ defense of utilitarianism, which has become a commonplace in many philosophical circles, goes roughly as follows: utilitarianism should not be seen as a theory that seeks to maximize general welfare in every instance. Rather, it is a theory that seeks to devise general rules of behavior of a sort that would tend to maximize welfare.

The idea is that, once the rules have been established, then they must be followed, even if violating rules on this or that occasion yielded a net increase in general welfare. It is then unlikely that human beings would ever endorse on felicific grounds rules that would authorize the breaking of promises or the punishment of innocents. In this way Rawls draws the nowadays familiar distinction between act- and rule-utilitarianism, and this constitutes the first half of his article.

It is however the somewhat neglected second half which is important for our purposes. Indeed, the distinction which occupies him in the first half Rawls himself considers to be rather obvious.[^9] What he considers not obvious is the existence of a certain ambiguity regarding the notion of a rule, as between what he calls summary rules and practice rules. A summary rule is simply a guide for action, formulated on the basis of experience.

For example, if upon encountering caustic persons in the past one has established that the best course of action has been to keep a low profile, one might decide on encountering a caustic person now that it is best to do the same. Summary rules are inductive. The decisions they are based upon are logically prior to the rules themselves.