Brandt Richard B. (1910–97), American moral philosopher, most closely associated with rule utilitarianism (which term he coined). Brandt earned degrees from Denison College and Cambridge University, and obtained a Ph.D. from Yale in 1936. He taught at Swarthmore College from 1937 to 1964 and at the University of Michigan from 1964 to 1981. His six books and nearly one hundred articles included work on philosophy of religion, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, political philosophy, and philosophy of law. His greatest contributions were in moral philosophy. He first defended rule utilitarianism in his textbook Ethical Theory (1959), but greatly refined his view in the 1960s in a series of articles, which were widely discussed and reprinted and eventually collected together in Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights (1992). Further refinements appear in his A Theory of the Good and the Right (1979) and Facts, Values, and Morality (1996).
Brandt famously argued for a ‘reforming definition’ of ‘rational person’. He proposed that we use it to designate someone whose desires would survive exposure to all relevant empirical facts and to correct logical reasoning. He also proposed a ‘reforming definition’ of ‘morally right’ that assigns it the descriptive meaning ‘would be permitted by any moral code that all (or nearly all) rational people would publicly favor for the agent’s society if they expected to spend a lifetime in that society’. In his view, rational choice between moral codes is determined not by prior moral commitments but by expected consequences. Brandt admitted that different rational people may favor different codes, since different rational people may have different levels of natural benevolence. But he also contended that most rational people would favor a rule-utilitarian code.
See also COGNITIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY, ETHICS , UTILITARIANIS. B.W.H.