ilitarians will not have conflicts over any action being right or wrong because the hedonistic calculus is an objective test that proves the amount of please or pain that will result. It is a standard that all actions can be evaluated by. Another point or act utilitarianism that can be seen as an advantage over rule utilitarianism is that each individual situation can have a different action be right. This means that in every situation the right action will provide more happiness or less pain as opposed to rule utilitarianism where the individual situations do not matter. Act utilitarianism also has some disadvantages. One major fault of act utilitarianism is that some actions would produce a greater amount of happiness if they were done in secret. The same action, however, would produce less happiness if it were done in public. That means that the exact same action and situation would be right if no one knew about it but wrong if enough people were aware of it. If people know about an action and believe it is wrong, then wouldnt it be just as wrong if no one knew about it? The action would still have the same affect on the same amount of people, they just would not know about, so they could not be unhappy about it. Act utilitarianism can also seem unjust because the hedonistic calculus may say that it is right to take away the rights of a person because it will contribute to the overall happiness in the universe. Act utilitarianism would say an action producing pain for a small number of innocent people is right as long as the rest of the world is happy about it. Another problem is the feelings of a person are disregarded; only the consequences are important. Some other problems with act utilitarianism are if a person has never experienced a similar situation, then they will be unable to perform the hedonistic calculus because they will not know if people will be happy or not. It also may not be possible to compare the dif...
