Rules and principles are different. Principles are general guidelines, things we need to exercise our minds in order to apply, like ‘be fair’ or ‘universalise your behaviour’. Rules are usually expressed as imperatives – often negative imperatives like ‘do not kill, do not lie’. We follow these either as rules of thumb – which we use as a simplification as we don’t have the time to assess the circumstances. Or we follow them as hard and fast rules which we apply unthinkingly – as moral absolutes. Let’s call rules of thumb ‘soft rules’ and hard absolutes ‘hard rules’.

John Stuart Mill’s version of utilitarianism, usually described by textbooks, but not by Mill himself, as rule

JS Mill sought to establish morality on one supreme principle – the Greatest Happiness Pirnciple. He never used the term ‘rule utilitarianism’ – that was an invention in 1953 of JO Urmson.

utilitarianism, is actually a combination of one great principle, the principle of utility, and a set of guidelines to make navigating our lives easier. In fact Mill describes it as like having a chart on the ocean and a tide table, and using these to plot a course. When we find the information o the chart no longer works (the depth ahs changed since the wise surveyor made their sounding) , we use our own judgement. These rules are ‘soft rules’ or guidelines derived from the wisdom of others.

The ultimate test of goodness, and so the only non-negotiable absolute, says Mill, comes form the greatest happiness principle – if it’s obvious that the guideline do not lie is not working or going to work in this situation, we need to abandon it. But generally, the wisdom of the ages suggests that following the rule ‘do not lie’ makes everyone happier – it builds trust and saves a lot of time if I’m not always required to check whether you are telling the truth or whether you will keep your word. We can see how this works in practice in a famous and tragic case from 1972.

Dr Roberto Canessa was one of 16 men who survived when their plane crashed in the Andes on October 13^th, 1972. The survivors faced a hostile environment with no food; a place we might call uninhabitable. To make it worse, they heard on the radio that the search for the plane had been called off. Now the sanctity of life is often expressed as a hard rule – always respect human life and grant people dignity you would expect them to grant you (which roughly is how Kant expressed it). The moral dilemma created was this: should the survivors eat the flesh of their dead friends in order to raise their chances of pulling through?

They made a act that if any one of them should die, they give their bodies willingly to help one another as an act of love and respect. And then they unanimously agreed, even though the idea revolted them, that they would eat the flesh of their dead friends, reasoning that this is what their dead friends would wish them to do. And perhaps we would also say – because they had no choice.

Dr Robert Canessa wrote a book about the events which was turned into a film in 1993, called Alive! This case provides a very good illustration of what Aquinas meant by secondary precepts or ‘proximate conclusions’ we should derive from the more general primary precepts, which by my definition are principles, such as ‘seek to preserve life’. Aquinas refused to accept that secondary precepts could ever be absolute because they were conclusions of reason stemming from the unchanging primary principles which best expressed our essential human natures. So even in natural law ethics we find these ‘soft rules’ ad surely Aquinas would have approved of the way the sixteen men abandoned on a mountain in 1972 used their reason to survive and flourish.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2217141/I-eat-piece-friend-survive-Torment-1972-Andes-plane-crash-survivor-haunted-ordeal-40-years-later.html#ixzz3nhxEmBg9
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