7;t emend to all of act-utilitarianism’s flaws. As mentioned before rule-utilitarianism has flaws of it’s own. An objection to rule-utilitarianism is that it is not universal. This problem lies in the fact that not all societies or groups are equal in terms of having the same morals, beliefs and experiences. For example, some time ago it was suitable to own slaves. It was a common practice in ancient Rome, so much so that the number of slaves one owned often was an indication of how wealthy one was. Presently, in modern western society, it is reputed as amoral, unjust and cruel to hold slaves, so much so that there are laws that govern such actions. Rule-utilitarianism does not take into consideration that the rules that govern a society may be in them-selves deeply unjust. Owning slaves would have seems a norm in ancient Rome but presently it is not, rule-utilitarianism therefore cannot be justified as consistent throughout changing social idealisms. Rule-utilitarianism is suppose to be a basic principle of moral believes, time however, seems to change the moral beliefs of a society and in doing so changes the rules or laws and thus rule-utilitarianism is not universal as a principle. Another example of this non-universality is with different individual believes. Such as those that are races, or sexist. These individuals may be acting on a religious belief and according to rule-utilitarianism those are the ‘self-evident’ rules that one is to judge their actions upon. Not everyone has the same rules; this causes contradiction in the theory making it non-universal. By not being universal the theory cannot exist as a standard. To further amplify this non-universality let’s look at yet another example, assume that for every country, the rule was to keep to the right of the road. One ought to keep to the right according to rule-utilitarianism. But if I went to England and see that the people there drive on th...
