The Role of the Concept of Utility in Ethical Theory

In view of the fact that the adoption of rationalism cannot be justified by an appeal to reason and experience alone but can only be vindicated rationally, critical rationalism bases itself on a dualism of fact and norm and rejects ethical naturalism which tries to reduce ethical statements to factual statements. In theorising and systematising moral ideas, a critical rationalist, therefore, would come to recommend a group of methodological rules as was propounded by R. M. Hare in his Freedom and Reason. 1) Moral judgements are a kind of prescriptive judgements. 2) Moral judgements are distinguished from other judgements of this class by being universalisable. 3) It is possible for there to be logical relations between prescriptive judgements. Now, ethical theories viewed as a kind of theory of action, may be classified into three types, namely, egoistic theory, teleological theory and deontological theory. Ethical egoism, however, will be rejected by the rules above with the help of the concept of people's interest. The left two types of theory have their own merits and defects respectively. It should, however, be noted that these two types of ethical theory are not incompatible. That is, teleological or utilitarian theory is not necessarily naturalistic, and no ethical theory whether teleological or deontological, can demand us to do something beyond what we can. In other words a prescriptive statement may be advocated subject to factual examination but is not reducible to factual statement. Some sort of utilitarian argument would in fact conjoin deontological theory and teleological theory and produce a rational kind of ethical theory effective to fight against social evils. The point is 1) that we should not try to justify moral decision by the deduction from the supreme moral principles or ideals which define what is good, and 2) that we should rather pay attention to what is actually bad. Basic statements for the construction, of ethical theory should be those statements which describe bad states that must urgently be eliminated. Moral ideals tend to give rise to the conflicts between ethical judgements rather than to appease them