phlogma

Rawls reminds us in a footnote to his classic paper, “Two Concepts of Rules”:

It is important to remember that those whom I have called the classical utilitarians were largely interested in social institutions. They were among the leading economists and political theorists of their day, and they were not infrequently reformers interested in practical affairs. Utilitarianism historically goes together with a coherent view of society, and is not simply an ethical theory, much less an attempt at philosophical analysis in the modern sense.

Not only is utilitarianism not simply, it is not even an ethical theory per se. It is, even more than Rawls suggests, primarily a technique for managing crowds, institutions, policies…