Brad Hooker (2003), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism-rule/
Key takeaways
- Rule-consequentialism — selecting rules by the good of their general acceptance and judging acts by those rules — survives the classic collapse, incoherence and rule-worship objections, provided it is formulated in terms of acceptance by less than everyone and includes a prevent-disaster rule.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-160. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The entry defines full rule-consequentialism as a theory that chooses rules solely by the goodness of their consequences and lets those rules determine which acts are wrong, which decision procedure to use, and when blame is apt; Berkeley is cited as its first proponent. It surveys the consequentialist family (utilitarianism, theories of welfare, non-welfare goods, global consequentialism) and the choices in formulating rule-consequentialism: actual vs. expected good, compliance vs. acceptance, complete vs. incomplete acceptance. It gives three ways of arguing for it and defends it against the long-standing collapse-or-incoherence dilemma and the charge of rule-worship before reviewing newer objections.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 65 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-160 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as the standard, carefully argued reference on rule-consequentialism and its §8 replies, provided it is read as an advocate’s survey (Hooker is the view’s main contemporary proponent) rather than a neutral one.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-160, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — the most-read of the SEP entries in this batch and a well-structured argument, but the skim captures its main lines.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-160 is that reading):
- The acceptance-vs-compliance and imperfect-internalisation framing (§6) parallels designing rule sets for agents that will only partly absorb them; check the exact formulations.
- §8’s collapse argument is the canonical case of a rule-based policy degenerating into case-by-case optimisation — a useful analogue for rule-based vs. outcome-based specification of AI behaviour.
- The owner spent 65s here; a deeper read should focus on §§6 and 8.
Access when seeded: Fetched the full entry from plato.stanford.edu with curl; read preamble, the opening of every section and subsection, and the passages of §§7–9 on arguments for the view and the collapse, incoherence and rule-worship objections. First published Wed Dec 31, 2003; current revision is the substantive revision of Sun Jan 15, 2023 (copyright 2023, Brad Hooker).