ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a review of what utilitarianism says. These comments will be relevant to the assessment of maximalism, although they will arise from the assessment of utilitarianism overall. It turn to the fourth and last component thesis of utilitarianism: consequentialism. So it will face a series of decisions about whether it will produce better consequences for it to deliberate further in order to get a clearer idea of the consequences of my various options. Satisficing rule utilitarianism still faces the same problems about knowing what consequences any action or policy will produce. If, by contrast, we accepted act utilitarianism, then we would break the rule against stealing whenever there was more utility to be gained by breaking that rule than by keeping it. However, he will say, that loss of utility is worthwhile, because it means that rule utilitarianism can reflect our intuitions about situations where we ought not to do what promotes utility.
