John Stuart Mill through Rawls

John Rawls makes three well-known basic interrelated points about utilitarianism: It undermines the distinctness between persons and reduces the diversity of individual plans into a single scale of value. It superficially accommodates equality within its structure, for equality can never be in genuine conflict with maximization. Rights, rules, claims of desert are but first-order maxims, nothing more than efficient rules of thumb, based on generalized experience. This is what we may call Rawls’ mainstream critique of what he usually calls “classical utilitarianism.” However, Rawls articulates more sophisticated interpretations of utilitarianism, when he introduces, for example, the “practice” view of rules, which places constraints on direct maximization. He further allows for modifications that broaden the concept of utility, provided that the category of the right does not become part of it. Sometimes he even seems to adopt a rather broad understanding of utilitarianism. For example, in “Two Concepts of Rules” he includes among “classical utilitarians” David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and even Thomas Hobbes,1 and one naturally might wonder in what sense Hobbes’ theory undermines the separateness of persons! Moreover, Rawls insists that Hume adopts a very “loose”2 conception of utility, but he also claims that Hume’s notion of the “judicial spectator” naturally draws him close to the classical utilitarian view.3