The utilitarian rule "everyone to count for one, nobody for more than one" is already a substantive egalitarian norm, which goes beyond the bare assertion of equal basic human worth.
We show that every unanimous and dominant strategy implementable allocation rule in this problem is a component-wise weighted utilitarian rule, which assigns non-negative weight vectors to agents in each component and chooses an alternative in each component by maximizing the weighted sum of valuations in that component.
Is he an act utilitarian, a rule utilitarian, or some other kind of indirect utilitarian?
This pattern of responses revealed people's strong underlying preference for a "utilitarian" set of rules designed to maximize lives saved and minimize deaths — with one big exception.
One of Urmson's reasons for this rule utilitarian reading appeals to Mill's reliance on various rules and secondary principles in moral reasoning.
Although Rawls originally defended a Rule Utilitarian theory of promissory obligation (cf. Two Concepts of Rules, passim, 1955), in A Theory of Justice (1971) he takes promissory obligations to be a matter of justice, and as such grounded in the (contractual) theory of justice, rather than in any more general moral theory.
Hare proposed that on a day-to-day basis, one should think and act like a rule utilitarian and follow a set of intuitive prima facie rules, in order to avoid human error and bias influencing one's decision-making, and thus avoiding the problems that affected act utilitarianism.
But neither is he a "rule utilitarian" who holds that individual acts are judged by various moral rules which are themselves judged by the principle of utility acting as a second order principle to determine which set of rules secures the greatest amount of happiness.
J.O. Urmson famously defended a rule utilitarian reading of Mill (1953).
But Urmson also appeals to the Proportionality Doctrine as requiring a rule utilitarian interpretation of Mill.
