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What problem did David Lyons identify for rule utilitarianism?

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Jeremy Bentham: auto-icon — Utilitarianism English philosopher and economist Jeremy Bentham's preserved skeleton in his own clothes and surmounted by a wax head, at University College London.

In his work Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism (1965), the philosopher David Lyons identified a significant structural problem for rule utilitarianism: the risk of collapse into act utilitarianism.12

Lyons argued that if a moral rule is formulated with enough precision to account for all its causally relevant consequences, it effectively becomes indistinguishable from an act-utilitarian calculation. Specifically, if a rule is refined to include exceptions for every special case where violating the rule would produce better consequences, the distinction between the two theories vanishes.12

To maintain rule utilitarianism as a distinct position, one must impose arbitrary restrictions on how specific a rule can be. However, doing so requires ignoring certain relevant consequences, which critics argue violates the fundamental essence of consequentialism.12