Acciones y omisiones obligatorias y meritorias. Una perspectiva utilitarista

Abstract

One of the better known criticisms against Utilitarianism points out its refusal to give any moral relevance to the distinction between acts and omissions. According to this critic, to claim the moral irrelevance of this distinction 1) runs counter to common sense intuitions, 2) abolish the distinction between the meritorious and the mandatory and 3) makes the utilitarian ideal unrealizable as far as its moral proposal is too demanding.
This paper will focus in the second aspect of this critic, and claims that Utilitarianism do has the appropriate means to distinguish between the mandatory and the meritorious. At the same time, we will claim that Utilitarianism do not need to assume the moral relevance of the distinction between acts and omissions in order to be able to confront its critics.
To achieve this, we will mainly resort to John S. Mill’s analysis offered in the famous chapter V of Utilitarianism, in which we think the classical version of the answer to this critic can be found, version that contemporary utilitarians assume as a foundation and have further developed in one way or another.