Benevolence for each and benevolence for all

Many agents, agencies and institutions are committed to furnishing benefits to members of some group who are the “clients” served by the agency, its “club members” or its “citizens”. Such agents include public and governmental institutions, commercial concerns, private clubs and family groupings as well as persons. The benefits being promoted may be of diverse kinds. Some clubs provide opportunities for recreation of various sorts. Other institutions provide educational opportunities, insurance, travel opportunities and the like. The institutions promoting the benefits (whatever they might be) may be regarded as endorsing certain value commitments which impose constraints on the value structures they use to evaluate feasible options in various kinds of decision problems.

Utilitarians urge that all value commitments be constrained by the requirement that utility accruing to all human beings (or, at least, all human beings in some more restricted class) be promoted. Utilitarians have differed among themselves concerning the precise character of the benefit they seek to confer on their clients under the guise of utility, happiness or well-being. We need not address that matter now. Still, utilitarian value commitments are themselves but a species of a more general category of value commitments marked by benevolence.

Some value commitments marked by benevolence are marked by benevolence for each client, citizen or member of the club. Others are marked by benevolence for all clients, citizens or members of the club. Some are marked by both benevolence for each and benevolence for all.