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Utilitarianism Theory Essay

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Utilitarianism is an ethical movement that began in 18th century. It dictates that the best course of action is the one that benefits majority. Here, you will discover an essay about utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism theory argues that the consequence of an action determines whether that particular action is morally right or wrong. Philosophers behind this theory include Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, R.M. Hare and Peter Singer. All these philosophers evaluate morality of actions depending on overall happiness or well-being. Thus, they see utilitarianism as a consequentialist ethic.

Consequentialist ethics holds that in determining whether an act, policy, rule or motive is morally right, we should check whether it has good consequences for all affected persons. Rather than asking if an action has good consequences for a person, we should just inquire whether that action adds to the person’s happiness.

Therefore, utilitarianism is an ethical theory that centers on happiness, not just the happiness of one person, but happiness of many people. Thus, the greatest happiness principle is synonymous with the principle of utility. The principle of greatest happiness states that a person should do things that will have the most happiness for all involved persons.

Critics of utilitarian ethics argue that because utilitarianism emphasizes on results, utilitarian theorists should agree that the theory of ethical relativism solves the problem of relativism. These critics claim that since utilitarian theorists argue that morality of an action depends on what the product of the action will take to all affected persons, then almost every action is moral. That is to say, utilitarianism is a consequentialistic ethic and thus, we cannot know whether an action is immoral until we see its bad consequences.

Given that, utilitarian ethics in some ways holds morality of an action hostage to the result, morality of the action appears relative. However, we refute ethical relativism since utilitarian ethics is a type of universalism, given its grounds in trust in universal human nature. Utilitarian theorists say that all people have altruistic and egoistic elements, and all people seek to evade pain and augment pleasure. Then, instead of ethical relativism, they support a liberal ethics that acknowledges there are universal principles and values.

The utilitarian perspective that ethics is more inclined to our feelings and not our rationality may seem to give evidence that utilitarianism is a type of relativism. Obviously, people have different outlooks about different matters. However, description of ethics may not always be from this perspective. Think about a cruel act such as premeditated murder.

How comes that this act immoral? Is it due to societal, divine, or natural laws? The truth is that human beings cannot make the moral judgment that premeditated murder is immoral until they experience negative sentiments about such acts. If there are human beings who do not get negative sentiments after reflecting on the idea of premeditated murder, or other monstrous acts, it is because those persons have something wrong with them and thus, cannot feel others pain.

Desensitization is the contemporary psychological word that describes why some people may not have feeling for the pain of others. People become desensitized making them not feel others pain. This psychological thought matches perfectly well with the utilitarian idea of sentience. However, human nature is universal and a universal ethics rests upon nothing more than human sentiments.

At the center of the utilitarian argument that shifts from the concern we physically have for our personal feelings of pain and pleasure, to others feelings of pain and pleasure, is the belief that this is the nature of human beings. When we hear about calamities happening to others, we may find ourselves flinching or grimacing. However, to go from a claim about our human nature to a moral claim that we ought to do this, and it is correct that we do this, and wrong when we fail to do this, includes an extra step in the argument.

The crucial step is to ask ourselves whether there is actually a difference between our pains and joys and other peoples’ pains and joys. This, for instance, is a problem to any racist. If dissimilar races experience equal pleasures and pains, then how come one race sees itself as superior to another race? If there is actually no difference between our pains and pleasures with others pains and pleasures, then we ought to, just due to consistency, view their suffering as just as significant as ours.

This is the heart of the justification of the theory of utility; we should do what will have the best outcomes for all persons involved, not only for ourselves, since there actually is no significant difference involving our welfare and other people’s welfare.

It is clear that equality is a main concept involved in this reasoning. A different way to portray the central utilitarian concept is just to say humans are equal; your pain or happiness is equal to another person’s anguish or happiness. However, another person’s happiness, well-being, suffering, pleasure and pain are not more crucial than yours. Hence, considering ethics along utilitarian line takes us from egoism through altruism to equality.

Other critics of utilitarianism argue that it is difficult and impossible to apply its principles. Those that hold that it is difficult to apply utilitarian principles argue that calculating the outcomes for all persons is impractical due to uncertainty and the big number involved. The truth, however, is that utilitarianism offers a clear way of determining whether an action is moral or not, and this does not involve calculations.

As mentioned earlier, a morally right action should have pleasurable consequences. Therefore, a person who says that it is difficult to apply this theory should support his/her claims with examples of actions that produce pleasurable outcomes, but are wrong. Therefore, the argument that it is difficult to calculate what is right does not hold any water, since it has no harm to the principle of utility. Rather, this is a problem of the human condition.

Other critics that oppose the application of utilitarian principles argue that it is not possible to gauge or quantify happiness and there is no defined method of weighing happiness against suffering. However, the truth is that happiness is measurable and comparable through words like happier and happiest. If it were not measurable, then these words would have little meaning.

In conclusion, the theory of utilitarianism is sound, logical and consistent. Utilitarian ethics follow the law of greatest happiness. According to this law, human beings seek to decrease suffering and maximize happiness. Hence, an action that is correct morally must lead to the greatest possible pleasure. This also implies that actions that cause pain on human beings are morally wrong. As seen in the arguments above, this theory is beyond reproach, as it caters for all possible objections.

• Michael Sandel’s Objections to Utilitarianism
• A Critique of Utilitarianism
• Utilitarianism Critique From Kantian Perspective
• Ethics in Philosophy: Discussing Theories, Evaluating Key Concepts. In Search for the Truth
• Ethics is not Based on Religion
• Euthyphro: Concept of Holiness and Piety
• Humanity Theories: Utilitarianism
• Famine, Affluence, and Morality
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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The History of Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is one of the most powerful and persuasive approaches to normative ethics in the history of philosophy. Though not fully articulated until the 19 th century, proto-utilitarian positions can be discerned throughout the history of ethical theory.

Though there are many varieties of the view discussed, utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. What distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism has to do with the scope of the relevant consequences. On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good — that is, consider the good of others as well as one's own good.

The Classical Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, identified the good with pleasure, so, like Epicurus, were hedonists about value. They also held that we ought to maximize the good, that is, bring about ‘the greatest amount of good for the greatest number’.

Utilitarianism is also distinguished by impartiality and agent-neutrality. Everyone's happiness counts the same. When one maximizes the good, it is the good impartially considered. My good counts for no more than anyone else's good. Further, the reason I have to promote the overall good is the same reason anyone else has to so promote the good. It is not peculiar to me.

All of these features of this approach to moral evaluation and/or moral decision-making have proven to be somewhat controversial and subsequent controversies have led to changes in the Classical version of the theory.

1. Precursors to the Classical Approach

2.1 jeremy bentham, 2.2 john stuart mill, 3. henry sidgwick, 4. ideal utilitarianism, 5. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Though the first systematic account of utilitarianism was developed by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the core insight motivating the theory occurred much earlier. That insight is that morally appropriate behavior will not harm others, but instead increase happiness or ‘utility.’ What is distinctive about utilitarianism is its approach in taking that insight and developing an account of moral evaluation and moral direction that expands on it. Early precursors to the Classical Utilitarians include the British Moralists, Cumberland, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Gay, and Hume. Of these, Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) is explicitly utilitarian when it comes to action choice.

Some of the earliest utilitarian thinkers were the ‘theological’ utilitarians such as Richard Cumberland (1631–1718) and John Gay (1699–1745). They believed that promoting human happiness was incumbent on us since it was approved by God. After enumerating the ways in which humans come under obligations (by perceiving the “natural consequences of things”, the obligation to be virtuous, our civil obligations that arise from laws, and obligations arising from “the authority of God”) John Gay writes: “…from the consideration of these four sorts of obligation…it is evident that a full and complete obligation which will extend to all cases, can only be that arising from the authority of God ; because God only can in all cases make a man happy or miserable: and therefore, since we are always obliged to that conformity called virtue, it is evident that the immediate rule or criterion of it is the will of God” (R, 412). Gay held that since God wants the happiness of mankind, and since God's will gives us the criterion of virtue, “…the happiness of mankind may be said to be the criterion of virtue, but once removed ” (R, 413). This view was combined with a view of human motivation with egoistic elements. A person's individual salvation, her eternal happiness, depended on conformity to God's will, as did virtue itself. Promoting human happiness and one's own coincided, but, given God's design, it was not an accidental coincidence.

This approach to utilitarianism, however, is not theoretically clean in the sense that it isn't clear what essential work God does, at least in terms of normative ethics. God as the source of normativity is compatible with utilitarianism, but utilitarianism doesn't require this.

Gay's influence on later writers, such as Hume, deserves note. It is in Gay's essay that some of the questions that concerned Hume on the nature of virtue are addressed. For example, Gay was curious about how to explain our practice of approbation and disapprobation of action and character. When we see an act that is vicious we disapprove of it. Further, we associate certain things with their effects, so that we form positive associations and negative associations that also underwrite our moral judgments. Of course, that we view happiness, including the happiness of others as a good, is due to God's design. This is a feature crucial to the theological approach, which would clearly be rejected by Hume in favor of a naturalistic view of human nature and a reliance on our sympathetic engagement with others, an approach anticipated by Shaftesbury (below). The theological approach to utilitarianism would be developed later by William Paley, for example, but the lack of any theoretical necessity in appealing to God would result in its diminishing appeal.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3 rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) is generally thought to have been the one of the earliest ‘moral sense’ theorists, holding that we possess a kind of “inner eye” that allows us to make moral discriminations. This seems to have been an innate sense of right and wrong, or moral beauty and deformity. Again, aspects of this doctrine would be picked up by Francis Hutcheson and David Hume (1711–1776). Hume, of course, would clearly reject any robust realist implications. If the moral sense is like the other perceptual senses and enables us to pick up on properties out there in the universe around us, properties that exist independent from our perception of them, that are objective, then Hume clearly was not a moral sense theorist in this regard. But perception picks up on features of our environment that one could regard as having a contingent quality. There is one famous passage where Hume likens moral discrimination to the perception of secondary qualities, such as color. In modern terminology, these are response-dependent properties, and lack objectivity in the sense that they do not exist independent of our responses. This is radical. If an act is vicious, its viciousness is a matter of the human response (given a corrected perspective) to the act (or its perceived effects) and thus has a kind of contingency that seems unsettling, certainly unsettling to those who opted for the theological option.

So, the view that it is part of our very nature to make moral discriminations is very much in Hume. Further — and what is relevant to the development of utilitarianism — the view of Shaftesbury that the virtuous person contributes to the good of the whole — would figure into Hume's writings, though modified. It is the virtue that contributes to the good of the whole system, in the case of Hume's artificial virtues.

Shaftesbury held that in judging someone virtuous or good in a moral sense we need to perceive that person's impact on the systems of which he or she is a part. Here it sometimes becomes difficult to disentangle egoistic versus utilitarian lines of thought in Shaftesbury. He clearly states that whatever guiding force there is has made nature such that it is “…the private interest and good of every one, to work towards the general good , which if a creature ceases to promote, he is actually so far wanting to himself, and ceases to promote his own happiness and welfare…” (R, 188). It is hard, sometimes, to discern the direction of the ‘because’ — if one should act to help others because it supports a system in which one's own happiness is more likely, then it looks really like a form of egoism. If one should help others because that's the right thing to do — and, fortunately, it also ends up promoting one's own interests, then that's more like utilitarianism, since the promotion of self-interest is a welcome effect but not what, all by itself, justifies one's character or actions.

Further, to be virtuous a person must have certain psychological capacities — they must be able to reflect on character, for example, and represent to themselves the qualities in others that are either approved or disapproved of.

…in this case alone it is we call any creature worthy or virtuous when it can have the notion of a public interest, and can attain the speculation or science of what is morally good or ill, admirable or blameable, right or wrong….we never say of….any mere beast, idiot, or changeling, though ever so good-natured, that he is worthy or virtuous. (Shaftesbury IVM; BKI, PII, sec. iii)

Thus, animals are not objects of moral appraisal on the view, since they lack the necessary reflective capacities. Animals also lack the capacity for moral discrimination and would therefore seem to lack the moral sense. This raises some interesting questions. It would seem that the moral sense is a perception that something is the case. So it isn't merely a discriminatory sense that allows us to sort perceptions. It also has a propositional aspect, so that animals, which are not lacking in other senses are lacking in this one.

The virtuous person is one whose affections, motives, dispositions are of the right sort, not one whose behavior is simply of the right sort and who is able to reflect on goodness, and her own goodness [see Gill]. Similarly, the vicious person is one who exemplifies the wrong sorts of mental states, affections, and so forth. A person who harms others through no fault of his own “…because he has convulsive fits which make him strike and wound such as approach him” is not vicious since he has no desire to harm anyone and his bodily movements in this case are beyond his control.

Shaftesbury approached moral evaluation via the virtues and vices. His utilitarian leanings are distinct from his moral sense approach, and his overall sentimentalism. However, this approach highlights the move away from egoistic views of human nature — a trend picked up by Hutcheson and Hume, and later adopted by Mill in criticism of Bentham's version of utilitarianism. For writers like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson the main contrast was with egoism rather than rationalism.

Like Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson was very much interested in virtue evaluation. He also adopted the moral sense approach. However, in his writings we also see an emphasis on action choice and the importance of moral deliberation to action choice. Hutcheson, in An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil , fairly explicitly spelled out a utilitarian principle of action choice. (Joachim Hruschka (1991) notes, however, that it was Leibniz who first spelled out a utilitarian decision procedure.)

….In comparing the moral qualities of actions…we are led by our moral sense of virtue to judge thus; that in equal degrees of happiness, expected to proceed from the action, the virtue is in proportion to the number of persons to whom the happiness shall extend (and here the dignity , or moral importance of persons, may compensate numbers); and, in equal numbers , the virtue is the quantity of the happiness, or natural good; or that the virtue is in a compound ratio of the quantity of good, and number of enjoyers….so that that action is best , which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers ; and that worst , which, in like manner , occasions misery . (R, 283–4)

Scarre notes that some hold the moral sense approach incompatible with this emphasis on the use of reason to determine what we ought to do; there is an opposition between just apprehending what's morally significant and a model in which we need to reason to figure out what morality demands of us. But Scarre notes these are not actually incompatible:

The picture which emerges from Hutcheson's discussion is of a division of labor, in which the moral sense causes us to look with favor on actions which benefit others and disfavor those which harm them, while consequentialist reasoning determines a more precise ranking order of practical options in given situations. (Scarre, 53–54)

Scarre then uses the example of telling a lie to illustrate: lying is harmful to the person to whom one lies, and so this is viewed with disfavor, in general. However, in a specific case, if a lie is necessary to achieve some notable good, consequentialist reasoning will lead us to favor the lying. But this example seems to put all the emphasis on a consideration of consequences in moral approval and disapproval. Stephen Darwall notes (1995, 216 ff.) that the moral sense is concerned with motives — we approve, for example, of the motive of benevolence, and the wider the scope the better. It is the motives rather than the consequences that are the objects of approval and disapproval. But inasmuch as the morally good person cares about what happens to others, and of course she will, she will rank order acts in terms of their effects on others, and reason is used in calculating effects. So there is no incompatibility at all.

Hutcheson was committed to maximization, it seems. However, he insisted on a caveat — that “the dignity or moral importance of persons may compensate numbers.” He added a deontological constraint — that we have a duty to others in virtue of their personhood to accord them fundamental dignity regardless of the numbers of others whose happiness is to be affected by the action in question.

Hume was heavily influenced by Hutcheson, who was one of his teachers. His system also incorporates insights made by Shaftesbury, though he certainly lacks Shaftesbury's confidence that virtue is its own reward. In terms of his place in the history of utilitarianism we should note two distinct effects his system had. Firstly, his account of the social utility of the artificial virtues influenced Bentham's thought on utility. Secondly, his account of the role sentiment played in moral judgment and commitment to moral norms influenced Mill's thoughts about the internal sanctions of morality. Mill would diverge from Bentham in developing the ‘altruistic’ approach to Utilitarianism (which is actually a misnomer, but more on that later). Bentham, in contrast to Mill, represented the egoistic branch — his theory of human nature reflected Hobbesian psychological egoism.

2. The Classical Approach

The Classical Utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, were concerned with legal and social reform. If anything could be identified as the fundamental motivation behind the development of Classical Utilitarianism it would be the desire to see useless, corrupt laws and social practices changed. Accomplishing this goal required a normative ethical theory employed as a critical tool. What is the truth about what makes an action or a policy a morally good one, or morally right ? But developing the theory itself was also influenced by strong views about what was wrong in their society. The conviction that, for example, some laws are bad resulted in analysis of why they were bad. And, for Jeremy Bentham, what made them bad was their lack of utility, their tendency to lead to unhappiness and misery without any compensating happiness. If a law or an action doesn't do any good, then it isn't any good.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was influenced both by Hobbes' account of human nature and Hume's account of social utility. He famously held that humans were ruled by two sovereign masters — pleasure and pain. We seek pleasure and the avoidance of pain, they “…govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think…” (Bentham PML, 1). Yet he also promulgated the principle of utility as the standard of right action on the part of governments and individuals. Actions are approved when they are such as to promote happiness, or pleasure, and disapproved of when they have a tendency to cause unhappiness, or pain (PML). Combine this criterion of rightness with a view that we should be actively trying to promote overall happiness, and one has a serious incompatibility with psychological egoism. Thus, his apparent endorsement of Hobbesian psychological egoism created problems in understanding his moral theory since psychological egoism rules out acting to promote the overall well-being when that it is incompatible with one's own. For the psychological egoist, that is not even a possibility. So, given ‘ought implies can’ it would follow that we are not obligated to act to promote overall well-being when that is incompatible with our own. This generates a serious tension in Bentham's thought, one that was drawn to his attention. He sometimes seemed to think that he could reconcile the two commitments empirically, that is, by noting that when people act to promote the good they are helping themselves, too. But this claim only serves to muddy the waters, since the standard understanding of psychological egoism — and Bentham's own statement of his view — identifies motives of action which are self-interested. Yet this seems, again, in conflict with his own specification of the method for making moral decisions which is not to focus on self-interest — indeed, the addition of extent as a parameter along which to measure pleasure produced distinguishes this approach from ethical egoism. Aware of the difficulty, in later years he seemed to pull back from a full-fledged commitment to psychological egoism, admitting that people do sometimes act benevolently — with the overall good of humanity in mind.

Bentham also benefited from Hume's work, though in many ways their approaches to moral philosophy were completely different. Hume rejected the egoistic view of human nature. Hume also focused on character evaluation in his system. Actions are significant as evidence of character, but only have this derivative significance. In moral evaluation the main concern is that of character. Yet Bentham focused on act-evaluation. There was a tendency — remarked on by J. B. Schneewind (1990), for example — to move away from focus on character evaluation after Hume and towards act-evaluation. Recall that Bentham was enormously interested in social reform. Indeed, reflection on what was morally problematic about laws and policies influenced his thinking on utility as a standard. When one legislates, however, one is legislating in support of, or against, certain actions. Character — that is, a person's true character — is known, if known at all, only by that person. If one finds the opacity of the will thesis plausible then character, while theoretically very interesting, isn't a practical focus for legislation. Further, as Schneewind notes, there was an increasing sense that focus on character would actually be disruptive, socially, particularly if one's view was that a person who didn't agree with one on a moral issues was defective in terms of his or her character, as opposed to simply making a mistake reflected in action.

But Bentham does take from Hume the view that utility is the measure of virtue — that is, utility more broadly construed than Hume's actual usage of the term. This is because Hume made a distinction between pleasure that the perception of virtue generates in the observer, and social utility, which consisted in a trait's having tangible benefits for society, any instance of which may or may not generate pleasure in the observer. But Bentham is not simply reformulating a Humean position — he's merely been influenced by Hume's arguments to see pleasure as a measure or standard of moral value. So, why not move from pleasurable responses to traits to pleasure as a kind of consequence which is good, and in relation to which, actions are morally right or wrong? Bentham, in making this move, avoids a problem for Hume. On Hume's view it seems that the response — corrected, to be sure — determines the trait's quality as a virtue or vice. But on Bentham's view the action (or trait) is morally good, right, virtuous in view of the consequences it generates, the pleasure or utility it produces, which could be completely independent of what our responses are to the trait. So, unless Hume endorses a kind of ideal observer test for virtue, it will be harder for him to account for how it is people make mistakes in evaluations of virtue and vice. Bentham, on the other hand, can say that people may not respond to the actions good qualities — perhaps they don't perceive the good effects. But as long as there are these good effects which are, on balance, better than the effects of any alternative course of action, then the action is the right one. Rhetorically, anyway, one can see why this is an important move for Bentham to be able to make. He was a social reformer. He felt that people often had responses to certain actions — of pleasure or disgust — that did not reflect anything morally significant at all. Indeed, in his discussions of homosexuality, for example, he explicitly notes that ‘antipathy’ is not sufficient reason to legislate against a practice:

The circumstances from which this antipathy may have taken its rise may be worth enquiring to…. One is the physical antipathy to the offence…. The act is to the highest degree odious and disgusting, that is, not to the man who does it, for he does it only because it gives him pleasure, but to one who thinks [?] of it. Be it so, but what is that to him? (Bentham OAO , v. 4, 94)

Bentham then notes that people are prone to use their physical antipathy as a pretext to transition to moral antipathy, and the attending desire to punish the persons who offend their taste. This is illegitimate on his view for a variety of reasons, one of which is that to punish a person for violations of taste, or on the basis of prejudice, would result in runaway punishments, “…one should never know where to stop…” The prejudice in question can be dealt with by showing it “to be ill-grounded”. This reduces the antipathy to the act in question. This demonstrates an optimism in Bentham. If a pain can be demonstrated to be based on false beliefs then he believes that it can be altered or at the very least ‘assuaged and reduced’. This is distinct from the view that a pain or pleasure based on a false belief should be discounted. Bentham does not believe the latter. Thus Bentham's hedonism is a very straightforward hedonism. The one intrinsic good is pleasure, the bad is pain. We are to promote pleasure and act to reduce pain. When called upon to make a moral decision one measures an action's value with respect to pleasure and pain according to the following: intensity (how strong the pleasure or pain is), duration (how long it lasts), certainty (how likely the pleasure or pain is to be the result of the action), proximity (how close the sensation will be to performance of the action), fecundity (how likely it is to lead to further pleasures or pains), purity (how much intermixture there is with the other sensation). One also considers extent — the number of people affected by the action.

Keeping track of all of these parameters can be complicated and time consuming. Bentham does not recommend that they figure into every act of moral deliberation because of the efficiency costs which need to be considered. Experience can guide us. We know that the pleasure of kicking someone is generally outweighed by the pain inflicted on that person, so such calculations when confronted with a temptation to kick someone are unnecessary. It is reasonable to judge it wrong on the basis of past experience or consensus. One can use ‘rules of thumb’ to guide action, but these rules are overridable when abiding by them would conflict with the promotion of the good.

Bentham's view was surprising to many at the time at least in part because he viewed the moral quality of an action to be determined instrumentally. It isn't so much that there is a particular kind of action that is intrinsically wrong; actions that are wrong are wrong simply in virtue of their effects, thus, instrumentally wrong. This cut against the view that there are some actions that by their very nature are just wrong, regardless of their effects. Some may be wrong because they are ‘unnatural’ — and, again, Bentham would dismiss this as a legitimate criterion. Some may be wrong because they violate liberty, or autonomy. Again, Bentham would view liberty and autonomy as good — but good instrumentally, not intrinsically. Thus, any action deemed wrong due to a violation of autonomy is derivatively wrong on instrumental grounds as well. This is interesting in moral philosophy — as it is far removed from the Kantian approach to moral evaluation as well as from natural law approaches. It is also interesting in terms of political philosophy and social policy. On Bentham's view the law is not monolithic and immutable. Since effects of a given policy may change, the moral quality of the policy may change as well. Nancy Rosenblum noted that for Bentham one doesn't simply decide on good laws and leave it at that: “Lawmaking must be recognized as a continual process in response to diverse and changing desires that require adjustment” (Rosenblum 1978, 9). A law that is good at one point in time may be a bad law at some other point in time. Thus, lawmakers have to be sensitive to changing social circumstances. To be fair to Bentham's critics, of course, they are free to agree with him that this is the case in many situations, just not all — and that there is still a subset of laws that reflect the fact that some actions just are intrinsically wrong regardless of consequences. Bentham is in the much more difficult position of arguing that effects are all there are to moral evaluation of action and policy.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was a follower of Bentham, and, through most of his life, greatly admired Bentham's work even though he disagreed with some of Bentham's claims — particularly on the nature of ‘happiness.’ Bentham, recall, had held that there were no qualitative differences between pleasures, only quantitative ones. This left him open to a variety of criticisms. First, Bentham's Hedonism was too egalitarian. Simple-minded pleasures, sensual pleasures, were just as good, at least intrinsically, than more sophisticated and complex pleasures. The pleasure of drinking a beer in front of the T.V. surely doesn't rate as highly as the pleasure one gets solving a complicated math problem, or reading a poem, or listening to Mozart. Second, Bentham's view that there were no qualitative differences in pleasures also left him open to the complaint that on his view human pleasures were of no more value than animal pleasures and, third, committed him to the corollary that the moral status of animals, tied to their sentience, was the same as that of humans. While harming a puppy and harming a person are both bad, however, most people had the view that harming the person was worse. Mill sought changes to the theory that could accommodate those sorts of intuitions.

To this end, Mill's hedonism was influenced by perfectionist intuitions. There are some pleasures that are more fitting than others. Intellectual pleasures are of a higher, better, sort than the ones that are merely sensual, and that we share with animals. To some this seems to mean that Mill really wasn't a hedonistic utilitarian. His view of the good did radically depart from Bentham's view. However, like Bentham, the good still consists in pleasure, it is still a psychological state. There is certainly that similarity. Further, the basic structures of the theories are the same (for more on this see Donner 1991). While it is true that Mill is more comfortable with notions like ‘rights’ this does not mean that he, in actuality, rejected utilitarianism. The rationale for all the rights he recognizes is utilitarian.

Mill's ‘proof’ of the claim that intellectual pleasures are better in kind than others, though, is highly suspect. He doesn't attempt a mere appeal to raw intuition. Instead, he argues that those persons who have experienced both view the higher as better than the lower. Who would rather be a happy oyster, living an enormously long life, than a person living a normal life? Or, to use his most famous example — it is better to be Socrates ‘dissatisfied’ than a fool ‘satisfied.’ In this way Mill was able to solve a problem for utilitarianism.

Mill also argued that the principle could be proven, using another rather notorious argument:

The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible is that people actually see it…. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practiced, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so. (Mill, U, 81)

Mill then continues to argue that people desire happiness — the utilitarian end — and that the general happiness is “a good to the aggregate of all persons.” (81)

G. E. Moore (1873–1958) criticized this as fallacious. He argued that it rested on an obvious ambiguity:

Mill has made as naïve and artless a use of the naturalistic fallacy as anybody could desire. “Good”, he tells us, means “desirable”, and you can only find out what is desirable by seeking to find out what is actually desired…. The fact is that “desirable” does not mean “able to be desired” as “visible” means “able to be seen.” The desirable means simply what ought to be desired or deserves to be desired; just as the detestable means not what can be but what ought to be detested… (Moore, PE, 66–7)

It should be noted, however, that Mill was offering this as an alternative to Bentham's view which had been itself criticized as a ‘swine morality,’ locating the good in pleasure in a kind of indiscriminate way. The distinctions he makes strike many as intuitively plausible ones. Bentham, however, can accommodate many of the same intuitions within his system. This is because he notes that there are a variety of parameters along which we quantitatively measure pleasure — intensity and duration are just two of those. His complete list is the following: intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent. Thus, what Mill calls the intellectual pleasures will score more highly than the sensual ones along several parameters, and this could give us reason to prefer those pleasures — but it is a quantitative not a qualitative reason, on Bentham's view. When a student decides to study for an exam rather than go to a party, for example, she is making the best decision even though she is sacrificing short term pleasure. That's because studying for the exam, Bentham could argue, scores higher in terms of the long term pleasures doing well in school lead to, as well as the fecundity of the pleasure in leading to yet other pleasures. However, Bentham will have to concede that the very happy oyster that lives a very long time could, in principle, have a better life than a normal human.

Mill's version of utilitarianism differed from Bentham's also in that he placed weight on the effectiveness of internal sanctions — emotions like guilt and remorse which serve to regulate our actions. This is an off-shoot of the different view of human nature adopted by Mill. We are the sorts of beings that have social feelings, feelings for others, not just ourselves. We care about them, and when we perceive harms to them this causes painful experiences in us. When one perceives oneself to be the agent of that harm, the negative emotions are centered on the self. One feels guilt for what one has done, not for what one sees another doing. Like external forms of punishment, internal sanctions are instrumentally very important to appropriate action. Mill also held that natural features of human psychology, such as conscience and a sense of justice, underwrite motivation. The sense of justice, for example, results from very natural impulses. Part of this sense involves a desire to punish those who have harmed others, and this desire in turn “…is a spontaneous outgrowth from two sentiments, both in the highest degree natural…; the impulse of self-defense, and the feeling of sympathy.” (Chapter 5, Utilitarianism ) Of course, he goes on, the justification must be a separate issue. The feeling is there naturally, but it is our ‘enlarged’ sense, our capacity to include the welfare of others into our considerations, and make intelligent decisions, that gives it the right normative force.

Like Bentham, Mill sought to use utilitarianism to inform law and social policy. The aim of increasing happiness underlies his arguments for women's suffrage and free speech. We can be said to have certain rights, then — but those rights are underwritten by utility. If one can show that a purported right or duty is harmful, then one has shown that it is not genuine. One of Mills most famous arguments to this effect can be found in his writing on women's suffrage when he discusses the ideal marriage of partners, noting that the ideal exists between individuals of “cultivated faculties” who influence each other equally. Improving the social status of women was important because they were capable of these cultivated faculties, and denying them access to education and other opportunities for development is forgoing a significant source of happiness. Further, the men who would deny women the opportunity for education, self-improvement, and political expression do so out of base motives, and the resulting pleasures are not ones that are of the best sort.

Bentham and Mill both attacked social traditions that were justified by appeals to natural order. The correct appeal is to utility itself. Traditions often turned out to be “relics” of “barbarous” times, and appeals to nature as a form of justification were just ways to try rationalize continued deference to those relics.

In the latter part of the 20th century some writers criticized utilitarianism for its failure to accommodate virtue evaluation. However, though virtue is not the central normative concept in Mill's theory, it is an extremely important one. In Chapter 4 of Utilitarianism Mill noted

… does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired? The very reverse. It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but also that it is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue … they not only place virtue at the very head of things which are good as a means to the ultimate end, but they also recognize as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it; and hold, that the mind is not in a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner …

In Utilitarianism Mill argues that virtue not only has instrumental value, but is constitutive of the good life. A person without virtue is morally lacking, is not as able to promote the good. However, this view of virtue is someone complicated by rather cryptic remarks Mill makes about virtue in his A System of Logic in the section in which he discusses the “Art of Life.” There he seems to associate virtue with aesthetics, and morality is reserved for the sphere of ‘right’ or ‘duty‘. Wendy Donner notes that separating virtue from right allows Mill to solve another problem for the theory: the demandingness problem (Donner 2011). This is the problem that holds that if we ought to maximize utility, if that is the right thing to do, then doing right requires enormous sacrifices (under actual conditions), and that requiring such sacrifices is too demanding. With duties, on Mill's view, it is important that we get compliance, and that justifies coercion. In the case of virtue, however, virtuous actions are those which it is “…for the general interest that they remain free.”

Henry Sidgwick's (1838–1900) The Methods of Ethics (1874) is one of the most well known works in utilitarian moral philosophy, and deservedly so. It offers a defense of utilitarianism, though some writers (Schneewind 1977) have argued that it should not primarily be read as a defense of utilitarianism. In The Methods Sidgwick is concerned with developing an account of “…the different methods of Ethics that I find implicit in our common moral reasoning…” These methods are egoism, intuition based morality, and utilitarianism. On Sidgwick's view, utilitarianism is the more basic theory. A simple reliance on intuition, for example, cannot resolve fundamental conflicts between values, or rules, such as Truth and Justice that may conflict. In Sidgwick's words “…we require some higher principle to decide the issue…” That will be utilitarianism. Further, the rules which seem to be a fundamental part of common sense morality are often vague and underdescribed, and applying them will actually require appeal to something theoretically more basic — again, utilitarianism. Yet further, absolute interpretations of rules seem highly counter-intuitive, and yet we need some justification for any exceptions — provided, again, by utilitarianism. Sidgwick provides a compelling case for the theoretical primacy of utilitarianism.

Sidgwick was also a British philosopher, and his views developed out of and in response to those of Bentham and Mill. His Methods offer an engagement with the theory as it had been presented before him, and was an exploration of it and the main alternatives as well as a defense.

Sidgwick was also concerned with clarifying fundamental features of the theory, and in this respect his account has been enormously influential to later writers, not only to utilitarians and consequentialists, generally, but to intuitionists as well. Sidgwick's thorough and penetrating discussion of the theory raised many of the concerns that have been developed by recent moral philosophers.

One extremely controversial feature of Sidgwick's views relates to his rejection of a publicity requirement for moral theory. He writes:

Thus, the Utilitarian conclusion, carefully stated, would seem to be this; that the opinion that secrecy may render an action right which would not otherwise be so should itself be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems expedient that the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric. Or, if this concealment be difficult to maintain, it may be desirable that Common Sense should repudiate the doctrines which it is expedient to confine to an enlightened few. And thus a Utilitarian may reasonably desire, on Utilitarian principles, that some of his conclusions should be rejected by mankind generally; or even that the vulgar should keep aloof from his system as a whole, in so far as the inevitable indefiniteness and complexity of its calculations render it likely to lead to bad results in their hands. (490)

This accepts that utilitarianism may be self-effacing; that is, that it may be best if people do not believe it, even though it is true. Further, it rendered the theory subject to Bernard Williams' (1995) criticism that the theory really simply reflected the colonial elitism of Sidgwick's time, that it was ‘Government House Utilitarianism.’ The elitism in his remarks may reflect a broader attitude, one in which the educated are considered better policy makers than the uneducated.

One issue raised in the above remarks is relevant to practical deliberation in general. To what extent should proponents of a given theory, or a given rule, or a given policy — or even proponents of a given one-off action — consider what they think people will actually do, as opposed to what they think those same people ought to do (under full and reasonable reflection, for example)? This is an example of something that comes up in the Actualism/possibilism debate in accounts of practical deliberation. Extrapolating from the example used above, we have people who advocate telling the truth, or what they believe to be the truth, even if the effects are bad because the truth is somehow misused by others. On the other hand are those who recommend not telling the truth when it is predicted that the truth will be misused by others to achieve bad results. Of course it is the case that the truth ought not be misused, that its misuse can be avoided and is not inevitable, but the misuse is entirely predictable. Sidgwick seems to recommending that we follow the course that we predict will have the best outcome, given as part of our calculations the data that others may fail in some way — either due to having bad desires, or simply not being able to reason effectively. The worry Williams points to really isn't a worry specifically with utilitarianism (Driver 2011). Sidgwick would point out that if it is bad to hide the truth, because ‘Government House’ types, for example, typically engage in self-deceptive rationalizations of their policies (which seems entirely plausible), then one shouldn't do it. And of course, that heavily influences our intuitions.

Sidgwick raised issues that run much deeper to our basic understanding of utilitarianism. For example, the way earlier utilitarians characterized the principle of utility left open serious indeterminacies. The major one rests on the distinction between total and average utility. He raised the issue in the context of population growth and increasing utility levels by increasing numbers of people (or sentient beings):

Assuming, then, that the average happiness of human beings is a positive quantity, it seems clear that, supposing the average happiness enjoyed remains undiminished, Utilitarianism directs us to make the number enjoying it as great as possible. But if we foresee as possible that an increase in numbers will be accompanied by a decrease in average happiness or vice versa , a point arises which has not only never been formally noticed, but which seems to have been substantially overlooked by many Utilitarians. For if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individual's happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. (415)

For Sidgwick, the conclusion on this issue is not to simply strive to greater average utility, but to increase population to the point where we maximize the product of the number of persons who are currently alive and the amount of average happiness. So it seems to be a hybrid, total-average view. This discussion also raised the issue of policy with respect to population growth, and both would be pursued in more detail by later writers, most notably Derek Parfit (1986).

G. E. Moore strongly disagreed with the hedonistic value theory adopted by the Classical Utilitarians. Moore agreed that we ought to promote the good, but believed that the good included far more than what could be reduced to pleasure. He was a pluralist, rather than a monist, regarding intrinsic value. For example, he believed that ‘beauty’ was an intrinsic good. A beautiful object had value independent of any pleasure it might generate in a viewer. Thus, Moore differed from Sidgwick who regarded the good as consisting in some consciousness. Some objective states in the world are intrinsically good, and on Moore's view, beauty is just such a state. He used one of his more notorious thought experiments to make this point: he asked the reader to compare two worlds, one was entirely beautiful, full of things which complemented each other; the other was a hideous, ugly world, filled with “everything that is most disgusting to us.” Further, there are not human beings, one imagines, around to appreciate or be disgusted by the worlds. The question then is, which of these worlds is better, which one's existence would be better than the other's? Of course, Moore believed it was clear that the beautiful world was better, even though no one was around to appreciate its beauty. This emphasis on beauty was one facet of Moore's work that made him a darling of the Bloomsbury Group. If beauty was a part of the good independent of its effects on the psychological states of others — independent of, really, how it affected others, then one needn't sacrifice morality on the altar of beauty anymore. Following beauty is not a mere indulgence, but may even be a moral obligation. Though Moore himself certainly never applied his view to such cases, it does provide the resources for dealing with what the contemporary literature has dubbed ‘admirable immorality’ cases, at least some of them. Gauguin may have abandoned his wife and children, but it was to a beautiful end.

Moore's targets in arguing against hedonism were the earlier utilitarians who argued that the good was some state of consciousness such as pleasure. He actually waffled on this issue a bit, but always disagreed with Hedonism in that even when he held that beauty all by itself was not an intrinsic good, he also held that for the appreciation of beauty to be a good the beauty must actually be there, in the world, and not be the result of illusion.

Moore further criticized the view that pleasure itself was an intrinsic good, since it failed a kind of isolation test that he proposed for intrinsic value. If one compared an empty universe with a universe of sadists, the empty universe would strike one as better. This is true even though there is a good deal of pleasure, and no pain, in the universe of sadists. This would seem to indicate that what is necessary for the good is at least the absence of bad intentionality. The pleasures of sadists, in virtue of their desires to harm others, get discounted — they are not good, even though they are pleasures. Note this radical departure from Bentham who held that even malicious pleasure was intrinsically good, and that if nothing instrumentally bad attached to the pleasure, it was wholly good as well.

One of Moore's important contributions was to put forward an ‘organic unity’ or ‘organic whole’ view of value. The principle of organic unity is vague, and there is some disagreement about what Moore actually meant in presenting it. Moore states that ‘organic’ is used “…to denote the fact that a whole has an intrinsic value different in amount from the sum of the values of its parts.” (PE, 36) And, for Moore, that is all it is supposed to denote. So, for example, one cannot determine the value of a body by adding up the value of its parts. Some parts of the body may have value only in relation to the whole. An arm or a leg, for example, may have no value at all separated from the body, but have a great deal of value attached to the body, and increase the value of the body, even. In the section of Principia Ethica on the Ideal, the principle of organic unity comes into play in noting that when persons experience pleasure through perception of something beautiful (which involves a positive emotion in the face of a recognition of an appropriate object — an emotive and cognitive set of elements), the experience of the beauty is better when the object of the experience, the beautiful object, actually exists. The idea was that experiencing beauty has a small positive value, and existence of beauty has a small positive value, but combining them has a great deal of value, more than the simple addition of the two small values (PE, 189 ff.). Moore noted: “A true belief in the reality of an object greatly increases the value of many valuable wholes…” (199).

This principle in Moore — particularly as applied to the significance of actual existence and value, or knowledge and value, provided utilitarians with tools to meet some significant challenges. For example, deluded happiness would be severely lacking on Moore's view, especially in comparison to happiness based on knowledge.

Since the early 20th Century utilitarianism has undergone a variety of refinements. After the middle of the 20th Century it has become more common to identify as a ‘Consequentialist’ since very few philosophers agree entirely with the view proposed by the Classical Utilitarians, particularly with respect to the hedonistic value theory. But the influence of the Classical Utilitarians has been profound — not only within moral philosophy, but within political philosophy and social policy. The question Bentham asked, “What use is it?,” is a cornerstone of policy formation. It is a completely secular, forward-looking question. The articulation and systematic development of this approach to policy formation is owed to the Classical Utilitarians.

Primary Literature

• Bentham, Jeremy, 1789 [PML]. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907.
• –––, 1785 [OAO]. “Offences Against Oneself.” Louis Compton (ed.), The Journal of Homosexuality , 3(4) (1978): 389–406, 4(1): 91–107..
• Cooper, Anthony Ashley (3 rd Earl of Shaftesbury), 1711 [IVM]. Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit , in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times , excerpts reprinted in Raphael 1969.
• Cumberland, Richard, 1672. De Legibus Naturae Disquisitio Philosophica , London. English translation by John Maxwell, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature , 1727, reprinted New York, Garland, 1978.
• Gay, John, 1731. A Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle and Immediate Criterion of Virtue in Frances King's An Essay on the Origin of Evil , London.
• Hume, David, 1738. A Treatise of Human Nature , edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Hutcheson, Francis, 1725. An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue , London; excerpts reprinted in Raphael 1969.
• Mill, John Stuart, 1843. A System of Logic , London: John W. Parker.
• –––, 1859. On Liberty , London: Longman, Roberts & Green.
• –––, 1861 [U]. Utilitarianism , Roger Crisp (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Moore, G. E., 1903 [PE]. Principia Ethica , Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988.
• Price, Richard, 1758 [PE]. A Review of the Principle Questions in Morals , London: T. Cadell in the Strand, 1787.
• Raphael, D. D., 1969 [R]. British Moralists , in two volumes, London: Oxford, Clarendon Press.

Secondary Literature

• Crisp, Roger, 1997. Mill on Utilitarianism. , London: Routledge.
• Darwall, Stephen, 1995. Hume and the Invention of Utilitarianism , University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.
• Donner, Wendy, 1991. The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• –––, 2011. “Morality, Virtue, and Aesthetics in Mill's Art of Life,” in Ben Eggleston, Dale E. Miller, and David Weinstein (eds.) John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Driver, Julia, 2004. “Pleasure as the Standard of Virtue in Hume's Moral Philosophy.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. , 85: 173–194.
• –––, 2011. Consequentialism , London: Routledge.
• Gill, Michael, 2006. The British Moralists on Human Nature and the Birth of Secular Ethics , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Hruschka, Joachim, 1991. “The Greatest Happiness Principle and Other Early German Anticipations of Utilitarian Theory,” Utilitas , 3: 165–77.
• Long, Douglas, 1990. “‘Utility’ and the ‘Utility Principle’: Hume, Smith, Bentham, Mill,” Utilitas , 2: 12–39.
• Rosen, Frederick, 2003. “Reading Hume Backwards: Utility as the Foundation of Morals,” in Frederick Rosen (ed.), Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill , London: Routledge, 29–57.
• Rosenblum, Nancy, 1978. Bentham's Theory of the Modern State , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Ryan, Alan, 1990. The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill , Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
• Scarre, Geoffrey, 1996. Utilitarianism , London: Routledge.
• Schneewind, J. B., 1977. Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• –––, 1990. “The Misfortunes of Virtue,” Ethics , 101: 42–63.
• Schofield, Philip, 2006. Utility and Democracy: the Political Thought of Jeremy Bentham , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Schultz, Bart, 2004. Henry Sidgwick, Eye of the Universe , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Skorupski, John, 1989. John Stuart Mill , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

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Bentham, Jeremy | consequentialism | hedonism | Hume, David | Mill, John Stuart | Moore, George Edward | Scottish Philosophy: in the 18th Century | Shaftesbury, Lord [Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of] | Sidgwick, Henry | well-being

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Gintautas Miliauskas (Vilnius University) for notifying us about several typographical errors in this entry.

Copyright © 2014 by Julia Driver < julia . driver @ austin . utexas . edu >

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5 Utilitarianism

Frank Aragbonfoh Abumere

Introduction

Let us start our introduction to utilitarianism with an example that shows how utilitarians answer the following question, “Can the ends justify the means?” Imagine that Peter is an unemployed poor man in New York. Although he has no money, his family still depends on him; his unemployed wife (Sandra) is sick and needs $500 for treatment, and their little children (Ann and Sam) have been thrown out of school because they could not pay tuition fees ($500 for both of them). Peter has no source of income and he cannot get a loan; even John (his friend and a millionaire) has refused to help him. From his perspective, there are only two alternatives: either he pays by stealing or he does not. So, he steals $1000 from John in order to pay for Sandra’s treatment and to pay the tuition fees of Ann and Sam. One could say that stealing is morally wrong. Therefore, we will say that what Peter has done— stealing from John—is morally wrong.

Utilitarianism, however, will say what Peter has done is morally right. For utilitarians, stealing in itself is neither bad nor good; what makes it bad or good is the consequences it produces. In our example, Peter stole from one person who has less need for the money, and spent the money on three people who have more need for the money. Therefore, for utilitarians, Peter’s stealing from John (the “means”) can be justified by the fact that the money was used for the treatment of Sandra and the tuition fees of Ann and Sam (the “end”). This justification is based on the calculation that the benefits of the theft outweigh the losses caused by the theft. Peter’s act of stealing is morally right because it produced more good than bad. In other words, the action produced more pleasure or happiness than pain or unhappiness, that is, it increased net utility.

The aim of this chapter is to explain why utilitarianism reaches such a conclusion as described above, and then examine the strengths and weaknesses of utilitarianism. The discussion is divided into three parts: the first part explains what utilitarianism is, the second discusses some varieties (or types) of utilitarianism, and the third explores whether utilitarianism is persuasive and reasonable.

What is Utilitarianism?

Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism. For consequentialism, the moral rightness or wrongness of an act depends on the consequences it produces. On consequentialist grounds, actions and inactions whose negative consequences outweigh the positive consequences will be deemed morally wrong while actions and inactions whose positive consequences outweigh the negative consequences will be deemed morally right. On utilitarian grounds, actions and inactions which benefit few people and harm more people will be deemed morally wrong while actions and inactions which harm fewer people and benefit more people will be deemed morally right.

Benefit and harm can be characterized in more than one way; for classical utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), they are defined in terms of happiness/unhappiness and pleasure/pain. On this view, actions and inactions that cause less pain or unhappiness and more pleasure or happiness than available alternative actions and inactions will be deemed morally right, while actions and inactions that cause more pain or unhappiness and less pleasure or happiness than available alternative actions and inactions will be deemed morally wrong. Although pleasure and happiness can have different meanings, in the context of this chapter they will be treated as synonymous.

Utilitarians’ concern is how to increase net utility. Their moral theory is based on the principle of utility which states that “the morally right action is the action that produces the most good” (Driver 2014). The morally wrong action is the one that leads to the reduction of the maximum good. For instance, a utilitarian may argue that although some armed robbers robbed a bank in a heist, as long as there are more people who benefit from the robbery (say, in a Robin Hood-like manner the robbers generously shared the money with many people) than there are people who suffer from the robbery (say, only the billionaire who owns the bank will bear the cost of the loss), the heist will be morally right rather than morally wrong. And on this utilitarian premise, if more people suffer from the heist while fewer people benefit from it, the heist will be morally wrong.

From the above description of utilitarianism, it is noticeable that utilitarianism is opposed to deontology, which is a moral theory that says that as moral agents we have certain duties or obligations, and these duties or obligations are formalized in terms of rules (see Chapter 6). There is a variant of utilitarianism, namely rule utilitarianism, that provides rules for evaluating the utility of actions and inactions (see the next part of the chapter for a detailed explanation). The difference between a utilitarian rule and a deontological rule is that according to rule utilitarians, acting according to the rule is correct because the rule is one that, if widely accepted and followed, will produce the most good. According to deontologists, whether the consequences of our actions are positive or negative does not determine their moral rightness or moral wrongness. What determines their moral rightness or moral wrongness is whether we act or fail to act in accordance with our duty or duties (where our duty is based on rules that are not themselves justified by the consequences of their being widely accepted and followed).

Some Varieties (or Types) of Utilitarianism

The above description of utilitarianism is general. We can, however, distinguish between different types of utilitarianism. First, we can distinguish between “actual consequence utilitarians” and “foreseeable consequence utilitarians.” The former base the evaluation of the moral rightness and moral wrongness of actions on the actual consequences of actions; while the latter base the evaluation of the moral rightness and moral wrongness of actions on the foreseeable consequences of actions. J. J. C. Smart (1920-2012) explains the rationale for this distinction with reference to the following example: imagine that you rescued someone from drowning. You were acting in good faith to save a drowning person, but it just so happens that the person later became a mass murderer. Since the person became a mass murderer, actual consequence utilitarians would argue that in hindsight the act of rescuing the person was morally wrong. However, foreseeable consequence utilitarians would argue that—looking forward (i.e., in foresight)—it could not be foreseen that the person was going to be a mass murderer, hence the act of rescuing them was morally right (Smart 1973, 49). Moreover, they could have turned out to be a “saint” or Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr., in which case the action would be considered to be morally right by actual consequence utilitarians.

A second distinction we can make is that between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism focuses on individual actions and says that we should apply the principle of utility in order to evaluate them. Therefore, act utilitarians argue that among possible actions, the action that produces the most utility would the morally right action. But this may seem impossible to do in practice since, for every thing that we might do that has a potential effect on other people, we would thus be morally required to examine its consequences and pick the one with the best outcome. Rule utilitarianism responds to this problem by focusing on general types of actions and determining whether they typically lead to good or bad results. This, for them is the meaning of commonly held moral rules: they are generalizations of the typical consequences of our actions. For example, if stealing typically leads to bad consequences, stealing in general would be considered by a rule utilitarian to be wrong. [1]

Hence rule utilitarians claim to be able to reinterpret talk of rights, justice, and fair treatment in terms of the principle of utility by claiming that the rationale behind any such rules is really that these rules generally lead to greater welfare for all concerned. We may wonder whether utilitarianism in general is capable of even addressing the notion that people have rights and deserve to be treated justly and fairly, because in critical situations the rights and wellbeing of persons can be sacrificed as long as this seems to lead to an increase overall utility.

For example, in a version of the famous “trolley problem,” imagine that you and an overweight stranger are standing next to each other on a footbridge above a rail track. You discover that there is a runaway trolley rolling down the track and the trolley is about to kill five people who cannot get off of the track quickly enough to avoid the accident. Being willing to sacrifice yourself to save the five persons, you consider

jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley…but you realize that you are far too light to stop the trolley….The only way you can stop the trolley killing five people is by pushing this large stranger off the footbridge, in front of the trolley. If you push the stranger off, he will be killed, but you will save the other five. (Singer 2005, 340)

Utilitarianism, especially act utilitarianism, seems to suggest that the life of the overweight stranger should be sacrificed regardless of any purported right to life he may have. A rule utilitarian, however, may respond that since in general killing innocent people to save others is not what typically leads to the best outcomes, we should be very wary of making a decision to do so in this case. This is especially true in this scenario since everything rests on our calculation of what might possibly stop the trolley, while in fact there is really far too much uncertainty in the outcome to warrant such a serious decision. If nothing else, the emphasis placed on general principles by rule utilitarians can serve as a warning not to take too lightly the notion that the ends might justify the means.

Whether or not this response is adequate is something that has been extensively debated with reference to this famous example as well as countless variations. This brings us to our final question here about utilitarianism—whether it is ultimately a persuasive and reasonable approach to morality.

Is Utilitarianism Persuasive and Reasonable?

First of all, let us start by asking about the principle of utility as the foundational principle of morality, that is, about the claim that what is morally right is just what leads to the better outcome. John Stuart Mill’s argument that it is is based on his claim that “each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness” (Mill [1861] 1879, Ch. 4). Mill derives the principle of utility from this claim based on three considerations, namely desirability, exhaustiveness, and impartiality. That is, happiness is desirable as an end in itself; it is the only thing that is so desirable (exhaustiveness); and no one person’s happiness is really any more desirable or less desirable than that of any other person (impartiality) (see Macleod 2017).

In defending desirability, Mill argues,

The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner…the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. (Mill [1861] 1879, Ch. 4)

In defending exhaustiveness, Mill does not argue that other things, apart from happiness, are not desired as such; but while other things appear to be desired , happiness is the only thing that is really desired since whatever else we may desire, we do so because attaining that thing would make us happy. Finally, in defending impartiality, Mill argues that equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable, whether the happiness is felt by the same person or by different persons. In Mill’s words, “each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons” (Mill [1861] 1879, Ch. 4). We may wonder, however, whether this last argument is truly adequate. Does Mill really show here that we should treat everyone’s happiness as equally worthy of pursuit, or does he simply assert this?

Let us grant that Mill’s argument here is successful and the principle of utility is the basis of morality. Utilitarianism claims that we should thus calculate, to the best of our ability, the expected utility that will result from our actions and how it will affect us and others, and use that as the basis for the moral evaluation of our decisions. But then we may ask, how exactly do we quantify utility? Here there are two different but related problems: how can I come up with a way of comparing different types of pleasure and pain, benefit or harm that I myself might experience, and how can I compare my benefit and yours on some neutral scale of comparison? Bentham famously claimed that there was a single universal scale that could enable us to objectively compare all benefits and harms based on the following factors: intensity, duration, certainty/uncertainty, proximity, fecundity, purity, and extent. And he offered on this basis what he called a “felicific calculus” as a way of objectively comparing any two pleasures we might encounter (Bentham [1789] 1907).

For example, let us compare the pleasure of drinking a pint of beer to that of reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet . Suppose the following are the case:

• The pleasure derived from drinking a pint of beer is more intense than the pleasure derived from reading Hamlet (intensity).
• The pleasure of drinking the beer lasts longer than that of reading Hamlet (duration).
• We are confident that drinking the beer is more pleasurable than reading Hamlet (certainty/uncertainty).
• The beer is closer to us than the play, and therefore it is easier for us to access the former than the latter (proximity).
• Drinking the beer is more likely to promote more pleasure in the future while reading Hamlet is less likely to promote more pleasure in the future (fecundity).
• Drinking the beer is pure pleasure while reading Hamlet is mixed with something else (purity).
• Finally, drinking the beer affects both myself and my friends in the bar and so has a greater extent than my solitary reading of Hamlet (extent).

Since, on all of these measures, drinking a pint of beer is more pleasurable than reading Hamlet , it follows according to Bentham that it is objectively better for you to drink the pint of beer and forget about reading Hamlet , and so you should. Of course, it is up to each individual to make such a calculation based on the intensity, duration, certainty, etc. of the pleasure resulting from each possible choice they may make in their eyes, but Bentham at least claims that such a comparison is possible.

This brings us back to the problem we mentioned before that, realistically, we cannot be expected to always engage in very difficult calculations every single time we want to make a decision. In an attempt to resolve this problem, utilitarians might claim that in the evaluation of the moral rightness and moral wrongness of actions, the application of the principle of utility can be backward-looking (based on hindsight) or forward-looking (based on foresight). That is, we can use past experience of the results of our actions as a guide to estimating what the probable outcomes of our actions might be and save ourselves from the burden of having to make new estimates for each and every choice we may face.

In addition, we may wonder whether Bentham’s approach misses something important about the different kinds of pleasurable outcomes we may pursue. Mill, for example, would respond to our claim that drinking beer is objectively more pleasurable than reading Hamlet by saying that it overlooks an important distinction between qualitatively different kinds of pleasure. In Mill’s view Bentham’s calculus misses the fact that not all pleasures are equal—there are “higher” and “lower” pleasures that make it “better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (Mill [1861] 1879, Ch. 2). Mill justifies this claim by saying that between two pleasures, although one pleasure requires a greater amount of difficulty to attain than the other pleasure, if those who are competently acquainted with both pleasures prefer (or value) one over the other, then the one is a higher pleasure while the other is a lower pleasure. For Mill, although drinking a pint of beer may seem to be more pleasurable than reading Hamlet , if you are presented with these two options and you are to make a choice—each and every time or as a rule—you should still choose to read Hamlet and forego drinking the pint of beer. Reading Hamlet generates a higher quality (although perhaps a lower quantity) of pleasure, while drinking a pint of beer generates lower quality (although higher quantity) of pleasure.

In the end, these issues may be merely technical problems faced by utilitarianism—is there some neutral scale of comparison between pleasures? If there is, is it based on Betham’s scale which makes no distinctions between higher and lower pleasures, or Mill’s which does? The more serious problem, however, remains, which is that utilitarianism seems willing in principle to sacrifice the interests and even perhaps lives of individuals for the sake of the benefit of a larger group. And this seems to conflict with our basic moral intuition that people have a right not to be used in this way. While Mill argued that the notion of rights could be accounted for on purely utilitarian terms, Bentham simply dismissed it. For him such “natural rights” are “simple nonsense, natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts”  (Bentham [1796] 1843, 501).

Let us conclude by revisiting the question we started with: can the ends justify the means? I stated that as far as utilitarianism is concerned the answer to this question is in the affirmative. While the answer is plausible and right for utilitarians, it is implausible for many others, and notably wrong for deontologists. As we have seen in this chapter, on a close examination utilitarianism is less persuasive and less reasonable than it appears to be when it is far away.

Bentham, Jeremy. (1789) 1907. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Bentham, Jeremy. (1796) 1843. Anarchical Fallacies. In The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring. Vol 2. Edinburgh: William Tait.

Driver, Julia. 2014.  “The History of Utilitarianism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/utilitarianism-history/

Hooker, Brad. 2016. “Rule Consequentialism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/consequentialism-rule/

Macleod, Christopher. 2017. “John Stuart Mill.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/mill/

Mill, John Stuart . Utilitarianism . (1861) 1879. 7th ed. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11224

Singer, Peter. 2005. “Ethics and Intuitions.” The Journal of Ethics 9(3/4): 331-352.

Smart, J. J. C. 1973. “An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics.” In Smart, J. J. C. and Bernard Williams.

Smart, J. J. C. and Bernard Williams. 1973. Utilitarianism: For and Against . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Further Reading

Hare, R. M. 1981. Moral Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hooker, Brad. 1990. “Rule-Consequentialism.” Mind 99(393): 66-77.

Scheffler, Samuel. 1988. Consequentialism and Its Critics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sen, Amartya and Bernard Williams, eds. 1982. Utilitarianism and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sidgwick, Henry. 1907. The Methods of Ethics. London: Macmillan.

Singer, Peter. 2000. Writings on an Ethical Life. New York: HarperCollins.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1985. “The Trolley Problem.” The Yale Law Journal 94(6): 1395-1415.

Williams, Bernard. 1973. “A Critique of Utilitarianism.” In Smart, J. J. C and Bernard Williams.

• Of course, there may be exceptions to such a rule in particular, atypical cases if stealing might lead to better consequences. This raises a complication for rule utilitarians: if they were to argue that we should follow rules such as “do not steal” except in those cases where stealing would lead to better consequences, then this could mean rule utilitarianism wouldn’t be very different from act utilitarianism. One would still have to evaluate the consequences of each particular act to see if one should follow the rule or not. Hooker (2016) argues that rule utilitarianism need not collapse into act utilitarianism in this way, because it would be better to have a set of rules that are more clear and easily understood and followed than ones that require us to evaluate many possible exceptions. ↵

Utilitarianism Copyright © 2019 by Frank Aragbonfoh Abumere is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Utilitarianism

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Utilitarianism by Ben Eggleston LAST REVIEWED: 29 November 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 29 November 2022 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0431

Utilitarianism is a moral theory that judges actions based on their consequences—specifically, based on their effects on well-being. Most utilitarians take well-being to be constituted largely by happiness, and historically utilitarianism has been known by the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” As the second part of this phrase suggests, utilitarianism is concerned with the well-being of all people, not just the person who performs an action or the people most directly affected; in fact, because nonhuman animals can also experience pleasure and pain, their well-being also counts in the moral assessment of actions, according to most utilitarians. Thus, a simple statement of the utilitarian view is that an action is right if and only if it brings about at least as much overall well-being as any action the agent could have performed instead. Controversially, this means that, according to utilitarianism, in principle, any type of action—such as lying, stealing, or even killing someone—could conceivably be condoned by utilitarianism if, in the particular circumstances, it would produce at least as much overall well-being as anything else the agent could have done. Utilitarians tend to condemn such actions because they tend to reduce overall well-being, but they hold that the impact on well-being is what makes such actions wrong—not their being prohibited by conventionally accepted moral rules, the commands of a deity, principles of human rights, or other considerations that can conflict with the fundamental moral goal of maximizing overall well-being. In addition to the straightforward form of utilitarianism summarized above, there are other forms of the view, such as ones that judge acts not in terms of their direct effects on overall well-being, but in terms of their compliance with rules whose general acceptance tends to promote well-being. All forms of the view, however, hold that the moral assessment of acts derives directly or indirectly from the fundamental utilitarian moral criterion of the maximization of overall well-being.

For most readers, de Lazari-Radek and Singer 2017 is the best work to start with. They will then be well-situated to enjoy the debate between Smart 1973 and Williams 1973 . They can then turn to Brink 2006 to appreciate the place of utilitarianism within consequentialism and several issues that arise there.

Brink, David O. “Some Forms and Limits of Consequentialism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory . Edited by David Copp, 380–423. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195325911.003.0015

An overview of the general consequentialist approach to ethics, situating utilitarianism within that approach. The chapter is divided into twenty sections, providing clarity of organization and enabling the reader to home in on topics of particular interest. The introduction and sections 1–8 (pp. 380–398) are especially important and accessible.

de Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna, and Peter Singer. Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

DOI: 10.1093/actrade/9780198728795.001.0001

A brief and accessible introduction to utilitarianism, by two leading contemporary utilitarian theorists, covering the historical roots of the view, arguments in support of it, objections, different varieties of the view, and its contemporary relevance. Probably the best choice for most readers looking for a brief but substantial introduction presupposing no prior philosophical background.

Smart, J. J. C. “An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics.” In Utilitarianism: For and Against . Edited by J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, 3–74. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

One of the classic defenses of utilitarianism, emphasizing act utilitarianism in particular, and a hedonistic theory of well-being. Brief, direct, and uncompromising. Some aspects of Smart’s view have been superseded by subsequent developments in utilitarian thought, but Smart’s essay is still well worth the time required to read it. Best read just before Williams 1973 .

Williams, Bernard. “A Critique of Utilitarianism.” In Utilitarianism: For and Against . Edited by J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, 77–150. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

One of the classic critiques of utilitarianism, by one of the most influential ethicists of the twentieth century, written with his customary verve. The essay’s examples and arguments on two topics—negative responsibility and what has come to be called the integrity objection—have become mainstays of the critical literature on utilitarianism. Even proponents of utilitarianism who consider Williams’s objections misguided generally acknowledge his critique as seminal. Best read just after Smart 1973 .

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Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that asserts that right and wrong are best determined by focusing on outcomes of actions and choices.

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes. It is a form of consequentialism.

Utilitarianism holds that the most ethical choice is the one that will produce the greatest good for the greatest number. It is the only moral framework that can be used to justify military force or war. It is also the most common approach to moral reasoning used in business because of the way in which it accounts for costs and benefits.

However, because we cannot predict the future, it’s difficult to know with certainty whether the consequences of our actions will be good or bad. This is one of the limitations of utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism also has trouble accounting for values such as justice and individual rights.  For example, assume a hospital has four people whose lives depend upon receiving organ transplants: a heart, lungs, a kidney, and a liver. If a healthy person wanders into the hospital, his organs could be harvested to save four lives at the expense of one life. This would arguably produce the greatest good for the greatest number. But few would consider it an acceptable course of action, let alone the most ethical one.

So, although utilitarianism is arguably the most reason-based approach to determining right and wrong, it has obvious limitations.

Related Terms

Consequentialism

Consequentialism is an ethical theory that judges an action’s moral correctness by its consequences.

Moral Philosophy

Moral Philosophy studies what is right and wrong, and related philosophical issues.

Moral Reasoning

Moral Reasoning is the branch of philosophy that attempts to answer questions with moral dimensions.

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• > Understanding Utilitarianism
• > Introduction

Book contents

• Frontmatter
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Classical utilitarianism
• 3 Proofs of utilitarianism
• 4 Well-being
• 5 Injustice and demands
• 6 Acts, rules and institutions
• 7 Acts, rules and institutions
• 8 Practicality
• 9 The future of utilitarianism
• Questions for discussion and revision
• Further reading

1 - Introduction

What is utilitarianism?

In his brief essay Utilitarianism , John Stuart Mill provides a very succinct account of the Utility Principle.

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

However, this deceptively simple principle is not the whole story. Utilitarianism is a broad tradition of philosophical and social thought, not a single principle. The central utilitarian idea is that morality and politics are (and should be) centrally concerned with the promotion of happiness. While Mill's principle is one expression of this basic idea, there are many others. In particular, Mill's principle focuses our attention on particular actions. As we shall see, utilitarians have often been more interested in evaluating codes of moral rules or systems of political institutions.

Why study utilitarianism?

If you are taking an introductory ethics course, then you will probably be asked questions about utilitarianism. If you want to pass the course, this gives you a reason to study utilitarianism. Fortunately, there are other – nobler – reasons to study utilitarianism. Throughout the past two centuries, the utilitarian tradition has been very influential – not just within philosophy, but in the more obviously practical disciplines of politics and economics. As a result of this influence, utilitarian assumptions and arguments abound in modern economic and political life, especially in public policy.

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• Introduction
• Tim Mulgan , University of St Andrews
• Book: Understanding Utilitarianism
• Online publication: 05 February 2013
• Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/UPO9781844653904.001

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Utilitarianism Essay | Essay on Utilitarianism for Students and Children in English

February 13, 2024 by Prasanna

Utilitarianism Essay:  Utilitarianism is one of the most influential theories of morality. It mainly advocates actions that lead to happiness and avoids any form of negativity. The purpose of mortality is to make lives better. It is the greatest principle of happiness. It determines right from wrong. It mainly focuses on the outcomes.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on Utilitarianism for Students and Kids in English

We are providing the students with essay samples, of a long essay of 500 words in English and a short essay of 150 words in English for reference.

Long Essay on Utilitarianism 500 Words in English

Long Essay on Utilitarianism is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Utilitarianism usually uses actions that maximize happiness and well-being of an individual. It is a version of consequentialism, which means that the consequences of any actions are either right or wrong. It considers all the interests of humans in an equal manner.

With utilitarianism, an action seems to be morally right or wrong. The concept of utilitarianism was first looked into keenly by Jeremy Bentham. He was an English philosopher, and he believed that happiness is the only true good, and that is the only truth that exists. Bentham’s form of utilitarianism is known as classic utilitarianism in today’s date. According to Bentham, the morally right action had the most net happiness for everyone.

To determine, which action was morally correct, a person had to add up all units of happiness and had to subtract all kinds of sadness that the action would create. Modern utilitarianism has two forms they are, act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism. Classic utilitarianism created by Bentham leads to the act-utilitarianism. The concept of act-utilitarianism means, each time an action is decided upon, that particular event is completely different than any other actions that are needed to be calculated.

Rule-utilitarianism, on the other hand, is the morally correct action that one follows as a general rule. Following these rules brings great happiness. The ultimate goal of utilitarianism, be it act-utilitarianism, or rule-utilitarianism, is to bring happiness. It is a moral theory which denotes that one should aim to maximize utility whenever possible.

Utilitarianism is about people who care about everyone capable of suffering and capable of making their lives better by improving it. It also refers to those actions that maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This theory is based on the elucidation that a consequence of an action justifies the moral acceptability of means to reach an end, and the results of the action outweigh any other considerations. Utilitarianism believes that sacrificing one man to save a community is the right choice because the happiness of a whole bunch of people is being maximized.

Utilitarianism does not take into account personal relationships. It is the duty of every person following utilitarianism to help people without thinking about the consequences. Utilitarianism is based on three principles which are as follows, happiness or pleasure is the only thing that holds intrinsic value, all actions that promote happiness are correct, and the actions that do are not right. Everyone’s happiness counts equally.

Utilitarianism in socio-political construct aims for the betterment of the society as a whole. It is a reason-based approach that determines the right and the wrong. It also has certain limitations based on the consequences of the situation. In the world of business and commerce, utilitarianism holds the most ethical choice that a person will produce the greatest good for the greatest number. If a limitation is applied to utilitarianism, it tends to create a black and white construct of mortality. There are no shades of grey in utilitarianism. It is either black or white.

Short Essay on Utilitarianism 150 Words in English

Short Essay on Utilitarianism is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Utilitarianism is a traditional and ethical philosophy that is associated with Jeremy Bentham and his fellow mate John Mill. Both were British philosophers, economists and political thinkers. The concept of utilitarianism promotes that an action is right if it leads to happiness.

A utilitarian philosophy aims at making society better. It says that if an action is right, it results in happiness and would lead to the betterment of a group or a society. Utilitarianism also has its types. Apart from act-utilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism, there is a concept known as negative utilitarianism. R.N Smart introduced it. This concept seeks the quickest and the least painful method of killing the existence of humanity.

People who follow utilitarianism are known as utilitarians. The utilitarians believe that the purpose of mortality is to make life better by increasing the number of good things in the world like pleasure and happiness and reducing the bad things in the world like pain and unhappiness. This concept rejects any kinds of moral codes like taboos and commands based on different traditions or any order given by any leader.

10 Lines on Utilitarianism in English

• Utilitarianism is one of the most persuasive approaches to normative ethics.
• Bentham used science to explain human behaviour based on utilitarianism.
• In the spirit of utilitarianism, Bentham requested to deposit his body after death.
• As per Bentham’s request, his body was laid out for public dissection.
• It is considered to be the most influential and effective theory of modern times.
• Utilitarianism is derived from the term “utility”.
• Utility in this context of utilitarianism means happiness or pleasure and not useful.
• Bentham’s commitment to equality was radical
• One of the limitations of utilitarianism is, the outcome of the consequences is not known.
• It is the only moral framework that can define military force or war.

FAQ’s on Utilitarianism Essay

Question 1.  What is the main theme of utilitarianism?

Answer:  The main theme of utilitarianism is, it morally promotes everyone’s values with equal treatment to everyone, centring around happiness.

Question 2. Name one drawback of utilitarianism.

Answer: It fails to take into consideration the concept of justice since its main focus is on happiness and pleasure of the individual, no matter what be the outcome of a situation.

Question 3. Does utilitarianism threaten individual rights?

Answer: It does threaten individual rights to some extent. It weakens the notion of individual rights, making it useless in its context. It talks about sacrifice for the sake of others’ happiness.

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• Utilitarianism: Simply Explained

Arguments for Utilitarianism

Introduction: moral methodology & reflective equilibrium.

You cannot prove a moral theory. Whatever arguments you come up with, it’s always possible for someone else to reject your premises—if they are willing to accept the costs of doing so. Different theories offer different advantages. This chapter will set out some of the major considerations that plausibly count in favor of utilitarianism. A complete view also needs to consider the costs of utilitarianism (or the advantages of its competitors), which are addressed in Chapter 8: Objections to Utilitarianism . You can then reach an all-things-considered judgment as to which moral theory strikes you as overall best or most plausible.

To this end, moral philosophers typically use the methodology of reflective equilibrium . 1 This involves balancing two broad kinds of evidence as applied to moral theories:

• Intuitions about specific cases (thought experiments).
• General theoretical considerations, including the plausibility of the theory’s principles or systematic claims about what matters.

General principles can be challenged by coming up with putative counterexamples , or cases in which they give an intuitively incorrect verdict. In response to such putative counterexamples, we must weigh the force of the case-based intuition against the inherent plausibility of the principle being challenged. This could lead you to either revise the principle to accommodate your intuitions about cases or to reconsider your verdict about the specific case, if you judge the general principle to be better supported (especially if you are able to “explain away” the opposing intuition as resting on some implicit mistake or confusion).

As we will see, the arguments in favor of utilitarianism rest overwhelmingly on general theoretical considerations. Challenges to the view can take either form, but many of the most pressing objections involve thought experiments in which utilitarianism is held to yield counterintuitive verdicts.

There is no neutral, non-question-begging answer to how one ought to resolve such conflicts. 2 It takes judgment, and different people may be disposed to react in different ways depending on their philosophical temperament. As a general rule, those of a temperament that favors systematic theorizing are more likely to be drawn to utilitarianism ( and related views ), whereas those who hew close to common sense intuitions are less likely to be swayed by its theoretical virtues. Considering the arguments below may thus do more than just illuminate utilitarianism; it may also help you to discern your own philosophical temperament!

While our presentation focuses on utilitarianism, it’s worth noting that many of the arguments below could also be taken to support other forms of welfarist consequentialism (just as many of the objections to utilitarianism also apply to these related views). This chapter explores arguments for utilitarianism and closely related views over non-consequentialist approaches to ethics.

What Fundamentally Matters

Moral theories serve to specify what fundamentally matters , and utilitarianism offers a particularly compelling answer to this question.

Almost anyone would agree with utilitarianism that suffering is bad, and well-being is good. What could be more obvious? If anything matters morally, human well-being surely does. And it would be arbitrary to limit moral concern to our own species, so we should instead conclude that well-being generally is what matters. That is, we ought to want the lives of sentient beings to go as well as possible (whether that ultimately comes down to maximizing happiness , desire satisfaction , or other welfare goods ).

Could anything else be more important? Such a suggestion can seem puzzling. Consider: it is (usually) wrong to steal. 3 But that is plausibly because stealing tends to be harmful , reducing people’s well-being. 4 By contrast, most people are open to redistributive taxation, if it allows governments to provide benefits that reliably raise the overall level of well-being in society. So it’s not that individuals just have a natural right to not be interfered with no matter what. When judging institutional arrangements (such as property and tax law), we recognize that what matters is coming up with arrangements that tend to secure overall good results , and that the most important factor in what makes a result good is that it promotes well-being . 5

Such reasoning may justify viewing utilitarianism as the default starting point for moral theorizing. 6 If someone wants to claim that there is some other moral consideration that can override overall well-being (trumping the importance of saving lives, reducing suffering, and promoting flourishing), they face the challenge of explaining how that could possibly be so. Many common moral rules (like those that prohibit theft, lying, or breaking promises), while not explicitly utilitarian in content, nonetheless have a clear utilitarian rationale. If they did not generally promote well-being—but instead actively harmed people—it’s hard to see what reason we would have to still want people to follow them. To follow and enforce harmful moral rules (such as rules prohibiting same-sex relationships) would seem like a kind of “rule worship”, and not truly ethical at all. 7 Since the only moral rules that seem plausible are those that tend to promote well-being, that’s some reason to think that moral rules are, as utilitarianism suggests, purely instrumental to promoting well-being.

Similar judgments apply to hypothetical cases in which you somehow know for sure that a typically reliable rule is, in this particular instance, counterproductive. In the extreme case, we all recognize that you ought to lie or break a promise if lives are on the line. In practice, of course, the best way to achieve good results over the long run is to respect commonsense moral rules and virtues while seeking opportunities to help others. (It’s important not to mistake the hypothetical verdicts utilitarianism offers in stylized thought experiments with the practical guidance it offers in real life .) The key point is just that utilitarianism offers a seemingly unbeatable answer to the question of what fundamentally matters : protecting and promoting the interests of all sentient beings to make the world as good as it can be.

The Veil of Ignorance

Humans are masters of self-deception and motivated reasoning. If something benefits us personally, it’s all too easy to convince ourselves that it must be okay. We are also more easily swayed by the interests of more salient or sympathetic individuals (favoring puppies over pigs, for example). To correct for such biases, it can be helpful to force impartiality by imagining that you are looking down on the world from behind a “ veil of ignorance ”. This veil reveals the facts about each individual’s circumstances in society—their income, happiness level, preferences, etc.—and the effects that each choice would have on each person, while hiding from you the knowledge of which of these individuals you are . 8 To more fairly determine what ideally ought to be done , we may ask what everyone would have most personal reason to prefer from behind this veil of ignorance. If you’re equally likely to end up being anyone in the world, it would seem prudent to maximize overall well-being, just as utilitarianism prescribes. 9

How much weight we should give to the verdicts that would be chosen, on self-interested grounds, from behind the veil? The veil thought experiment highlights how utilitarianism gives equal weight to everyone’s interests, without bias. That is, utilitarianism is just what we get when we are beneficent to all : extending to everyone the kind of careful concern that prudent people have for their own interests. 10 But it may seem question-begging to those who reject welfarism , and so deny that interests are all that matter. For example, the veil thought experiment clearly doesn’t speak to whether non-sentient life or natural beauty has intrinsic value. It’s restricted to that sub-domain of morality that concerns what we owe to each other , where this includes just those individuals over whom our veil-induced uncertainty about our identity extends: presently existing sentient beings, perhaps. 11 Accordingly, any verdicts reached via the veil of ignorance will still need to be weighed against what we might yet owe to any excluded others (such as future generations, or non-welfarist values).

Still, in many contexts other factors will not be relevant, and the question of what we morally ought to do will reduce to the question of how we should treat each other. Many of the deepest disagreements between utilitarians and their critics concern precisely this question. And the veil of ignorance seems relevant here. The fact that some action is what everyone affected would personally prefer from behind the veil of ignorance seems to undermine critics’ claims that any individual has been mistreated by, or has grounds to complain about, that action.

Ex Ante Pareto

A Pareto improvement is better for some people, and worse for none. When outcomes are uncertain, we may instead assess the prospect associated with an action—the range of possible outcomes, weighted by their probabilities. A prospect can be assessed as better for you when it offers you greater well-being in expectation , or ex ante . 12 Putting these concepts together, we may formulate the following principle:

Ex ante Pareto: in a choice between two prospects, one is morally preferable to another if it offers a better prospect for some individuals and a worse prospect for none.

This bridge between personal value (or well-being) and moral assessment is further developed in economist John Harsanyi’s aggregation theorem. 13 But the underlying idea, that reasonable beneficence requires us to wish well to all , and prefer prospects that are in everyone’s ex ante interests, has also been defended and developed in more intuitive terms by philosophers. 14

A powerful objection to most non-utilitarian views is that they sometimes violate ex ante Pareto, such as when choosing policies from behind the veil of ignorance. Many rival views imply, absurdly, that prospect Y could be morally preferable to prospect X , even when Y is worse in expectation for everyone involved.

Caspar Hare illustrates the point with a Trolley case in which all six possible victims are stuffed inside suitcases: one is atop a footbridge, five are on the tracks below, and a train will hit and kill the five unless you topple the one on the footbridge (in which case the train will instead kill this one and then stop before reaching the others). 15 As the suitcases have recently been shuffled, nobody knows which position they are in. So, from each victim’s perspective, their prospects are best if you topple the one suitcase off the footbridge, increasing their chances of survival from 1/6 to 5/6. Given that this is in everyone’s ex ante interests, it’s deeply puzzling to think that it would be morally preferable to override this unanimous preference, shared by everyone involved, and instead let five of the six die; yet that is the implication of most non-utilitarian views. 16

Expanding the Moral Circle

When we look back on past moral atrocities—like slavery or denying women equal rights—we recognize that they were often sanctioned by the dominant societal norms at the time. The perpetrators of these atrocities were grievously wrong to exclude their victims from their “circle” of moral concern. 17 That is, they were wrong to be indifferent towards (or even delight in) their victims’ suffering. But such exclusion seemed normal to people at the time. So we should question whether we might likewise be blindly accepting of some practices that future generations will see as evil but that seem “normal” to us. 18 The best protection against making such an error ourselves would be to deliberately expand our moral concern outward, to include all sentient beings—anyone who can suffer—and so recognize that we have strong moral reasons to reduce suffering and promote well-being wherever we can, no matter who it is that is experiencing it.

While this conclusion is not yet all the way to full-blown utilitarianism, since it’s compatible with, for example, holding that there are side-constraints limiting one’s pursuit of the good, it is likely sufficient to secure agreement with the most important practical implications of utilitarianism (stemming from cosmopolitanism , anti-speciesism , and longtermism ).

The Poverty of the Alternatives

We’ve seen that there is a strong presumptive case in favor of utilitarianism. If no competing view can be shown to be superior, then utilitarianism has a strong claim to be the “default” moral theory. In fact, one of the strongest considerations in favor of utilitarianism (and related consequentialist views) is the deficiencies of the alternatives. Deontological (or rule-based) theories, in particular, seem to rest on questionable foundations. 19

Deontological theories are explicitly non-consequentialist : instead of morally assessing actions by evaluating their consequences, these theories tend to take certain types of action (such as killing an innocent person) to be intrinsically wrong. 20 There are reasons to be dubious of this approach to ethics, however.

The Paradox of Deontology

Deontologists hold that there is a constraint against killing: that it’s wrong to kill an innocent person even if this would save five other innocent people from being killed. This verdict can seem puzzling on its face. 21 After all, given how terrible killing is, should we not want there to be less of it? Rational choice in general tends to be goal-directed, a conception which fits poorly with deontic constraints. 22 A deontologist might claim that their goal is simply to avoid violating moral constraints themselves , which they can best achieve by not killing anyone, even if that results in more individuals being killed. While this explanation can render deontological verdicts coherent, it does so at the cost of making them seem awfully narcissistic, as though the deontologist’s central concern was just to maintain their own moral purity or “clean hands”.

Deontologists might push back against this characterization by instead insisting that moral action need not be goal-directed at all. 23 Rather than only seeking to promote value (or minimize harm), they claim that moral agents may sometimes be called upon to respect another’s value (by not harming them, even as a means to preventing greater harm to others), which would seem an appropriately outwardly-directed, non-narcissistic motivation.

The challenge remains that such a proposal makes moral norms puzzlingly divergent from other kinds of practical norms. If morality sometimes calls for respecting value rather than promoting it, why is the same not true of prudence? (Given that pain is bad for you, for example, it would not seem prudent to refuse a painful operation now if the refusal commits you to five comparably painful operations in future.) Deontologists may offer various answers to this question, but insofar as we are inclined to think, pre-theoretically, that ethics ought to be continuous with other forms of rational choice, that gives us some reason to prefer consequentialist accounts.

Deontologists also face a tricky question about where to draw the line. Is it at least okay to kill one person to prevent a hundred killings? Or a million? Absolutists never permit killing, no matter the stakes. But such a view seems too extreme for many. Moderate deontologists allow that sufficiently high stakes can justify violations. But how high? Any answer they offer is apt to seem arbitrary and unprincipled. Between the principled options of consequentialism or absolutism, many will find consequentialism to be the more plausible of the two.

The Hope Objection

Impartial observers should want and hope for the best outcome. Non-consequentialists claim, nonetheless, that it’s sometimes wrong to bring about the best outcome. Putting the two claims together yields the striking result that you should sometimes hope that others act wrongly.

Suppose it would be wrong for some stranger—call him Jack—to kill one innocent person to prevent five other (morally comparable) killings. Non-consequentialists may claim that Jack has a special responsibility to ensure that he does not kill anyone, even if this results in more killings by others. But you are not Jack. From your perspective as an impartial observer, Jack’s killing one innocent person is no more or less intrinsically bad than any of the five other killings that would thereby be prevented. You have most reason to hope that there is only one killing rather than five. So you have reason to hope that Jack acts “wrongly” (killing one to save five). But that seems odd.

More than merely being odd, this might even be taken to undermine the claim that deontic constraints matter , or are genuinely important to abide by. After all, to be important just is to be worth caring about. For example, we should care if others are harmed, which validates the claim that others’ interests are morally important. But if we should not care more about Jack’s abiding by the moral constraint against killing than we should about his saving five lives, that would seem to suggest that the constraint against killing is not in fact more morally important than saving five lives.

Finally, since our moral obligations ought to track what is genuinely morally important, if deontic constraints are not in fact important then we cannot be obligated to abide by them. 24 We cannot be obliged to prioritize deontic constraints over others’ lives, if we ought to care more about others’ lives than about deontic constraints. So deontic constraints must not accurately describe our obligations after all. Jack really ought to do whatever would do the most good overall, and so should we.

Skepticism About the Distinction Between Doing and Allowing

You might wonder: if respect for others requires not harming them (even to help others more), why does it not equally require not allowing them to be harmed? Deontological moral theories place great weight on distinctions such as those between doing and allowing harm , or killing and letting die, or intended versus merely foreseen harms. But why should these be treated so differently? If a victim ends up equally dead either way, whether they were killed or “merely” allowed to die would not seem to make much difference to them—surely what matters to them is just their death. Consequentialism accordingly denies any fundamental significance to these distinctions. 25

Indeed, it’s far from clear that there is any robust distinction between “doing” and “allowing”. Sometimes you might “do” something by remaining perfectly still. 26 Also, when a doctor unplugs a terminal patient from life support machines, this is typically thought of as “letting die”; but if a mafioso, worried about an informant’s potentially incriminating testimony, snuck in to the hospital and unplugged the informant’s life support, we are more likely to judge it to constitute “killing”. 27 Jonathan Bennett argues at length that there is no satisfactory, fully general distinction between doing and allowing—at least, none that would vindicate the moral significance that deontologists want to attribute to such a distinction. 28 If Bennett is right, then that might force us towards some form of consequentialism (such as utilitarianism) instead.

Status Quo Bias

Opposition to utilitarian trade-offs—that is, benefiting some at a lesser cost to others—arguably amounts to a kind of status quo bias, prioritizing the preservation of privilege over promoting well-being more generally.

Such conservatism might stem from the Just World fallacy: the mistake of assuming that the status quo is just, and that people naturally get what they deserve. Of course, reality offers no such guarantees of justice. What circumstances one is born into depends on sheer luck, including one’s endowment of physical and cognitive abilities which may pave the way for future success or failure. Thus, even later in life we never manage to fully wrest back control from the whimsies of fortune and, consequently, some people are vastly better off than others despite being no more deserving. In such cases, why should we not be willing to benefit one person at a lesser cost to privileged others? They have no special entitlement to the extra well-being that fortune has granted them. 29 Clearly, it’s good for people to be well-off, and we certainly would not want to harm anyone unnecessarily. 30 However, if we can increase overall well-being by benefiting one person at the lesser cost to another, we should not refrain from doing so merely due to a prejudice in favor of the existing distribution. 31 It’s easy to see why traditional elites would want to promote a “morality” which favors their entrenched interests. It’s less clear why others should go along with such a distorted view of what (and who) matters.

It can similarly be argued that there is no real distinction between imposing harms and withholding benefits. The only difference between the two cases concerns what we understand to be the status quo, which lacks moral significance. Suppose scenario A is better for someone than B. Then to shift from A to B would be a “harm”, while to prevent a shift from B to A would be to “withhold a benefit”. But this is merely a descriptive difference. If we deny that the historically given starting point provides a morally privileged baseline, then we must say that the cost in either case is the same, namely the difference in well-being between A and B. In principle, it should not matter where we start from. 32

Now suppose that scenario B is vastly better for someone else than A is: perhaps it will save their life, at the cost of the first person’s arm. Nobody would think it okay to kill a person just to save another’s arm (that is, to shift from B to A). So if we are to avoid status quo bias, we must similarly judge that it would be wrong to oppose the shift from A to B—that is, we should not object to saving someone’s life at the cost of another’s arm. 33 We should not care especially about preserving the privilege of whoever stood to benefit by default; such conservatism is not truly fair or just. Instead, our goal should be to bring about whatever outcome would be best overall , counting everyone equally, just as utilitarianism prescribes.

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

Against these powerful theoretical objections, the main consideration that deontological theories have going for them is closer conformity with our intuitions about particular cases. But if these intuitions cannot be supported by independently plausible principles, that may undermine their force—or suggest that we should interpret these intuitions as good rules of thumb for practical guidance, rather than as indicating what fundamentally matters.

The force of deontological intuitions may also be undermined if it can be demonstrated that they result from an unreliable process. For example, evolutionary processes may have endowed us with an emotional bias favoring those who look, speak, and behave like ourselves; this, however, offers no justification for discriminating against those unlike ourselves. Evolution is a blind, amoral process whose only “goal” is the propagation of genes, not the promotion of well-being or moral rightness. Our moral intuitions require scrutiny, especially in scenarios very different from our evolutionary environment. If we identify a moral intuition as stemming from our evolutionary ancestry, we may decide not to give much weight to it in our moral reasoning—the practice of evolutionary debunking . 34

Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer argue that views permitting partiality are especially susceptible to evolutionary debunking, whereas impartial views like utilitarianism are more likely to result from undistorted reasoning. 35 Joshua Greene offers a different psychological debunking argument. He argues that deontological judgments—for instance, in response to trolley cases —tend to stem from unreliable and inconsistent emotional responses, including our favoritism of identifiable over faceless victims and our aversion to harming someone up close rather than from afar. By contrast, utilitarian judgments involve the more deliberate application of widely respected moral principles. 36

Such debunking arguments raise worries about whether they “prove too much”: after all, the foundational moral judgment that pain is bad would itself seem emotionally-laden and susceptible to evolutionary explanation—physically vulnerable creatures would have powerful evolutionary reasons to want to avoid pain whether or not it was objectively bad, after all! 37

However, debunking arguments may be most applicable in cases where we feel that a principled explanation for the truth of the judgment is lacking. We do not tend to feel any such lack regarding the badness of pain—that is surely an intrinsically plausible judgment if anything is. Some intuitions may be over-determined : explicable both by evolutionary causes and by their rational merits. In such a case, we need not take the evolutionary explanation to undermine the judgment, because the judgment also results from a reliable process (namely, rationality). By contrast, deontological principles and partiality are far less self-evidently justified, and so may be considered more vulnerable to debunking. Once we have an explanation for these psychological intuitions that can explain why we would have them even if they were rationally baseless, we may be more justified in concluding that they are indeed rationally baseless.

As such, debunking objections are unlikely to change the mind of one who is drawn to the target view (or regards it as independently justified and defensible). But they may help to confirm the doubts of those who already felt there were some grounds for scepticism regarding the intrinsic merits of the target view.

Utilitarianism can be supported by several theoretical arguments, the strongest perhaps being its ability to capture what fundamentally matters . Its main competitors, by contrast, seem to rely on dubious distinctions—like “doing” vs. “allowing”—and built-in status quo bias. At least, that is how things are apt to look to one who is broadly sympathetic to a utilitarian approach. Given the flexibility inherent in reflective equilibrium, these arguments are unlikely to sway a committed opponent of the view. For those readers who find a utilitarian approach to ethics deeply unappealing, we hope that this chapter may at least help you to better understand what appeal others might see in the view.

However strong you judge the arguments in favor of utilitarianism to be, your ultimate verdict on the theory will also depend upon how well the view is able to counter the influential objections that critics have raised against it .

The next chapter discusses theories of well-being, or what counts as being good for an individual.

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Resources and Further Reading

• John Broome (1987). Utilitarianism and Expected Utility , The Journal of Philosophy 84 (8): 405–422.
• John Broome (1991). Weighing Goods: Equality, Uncertainty and Time . Blackwell.
• Krister Bykvist (2010). Utilitarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed . Continuum.
• Robert Goodin (1995). Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy . Cambridge University Press.
• Johan Gustafsson (2021). Utilitarianism without Moral Aggregation . Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (4): 256-269.
• Caspar Hare (2016). Should We Wish Well to All? , Philosophical Review 125(4): 451–472.
• John C. Harsanyi (1955). Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility , The Journal of Political Economy 63 (4): 309–321.
• John C. Harsanyi (1977). Rational Behavior and Bargaining Equilibrium in Games and Social Situations . Cambridge University Press.
• Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek & Peter Singer (2017). Chapter 2: Justifications, in Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction . Oxford University Press.
• J.J.C. Smart (1973). An outline of a system of utilitarian ethics, in J.J.C. Smart & Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against . Cambridge University Press.

Daniels, N. (2020). Reflective Equilibrium . The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Edward N. Zalta (ed.).  ↩︎

That is not to say that either answer is in fact equally good or correct, but just that you should expect it to be difficult to persuade those who respond to the conflicts in a different way than you do.  ↩︎

Of course, there may be exceptional circumstances in which stealing is overall beneficial and hence justified, for instance when stealing a loaf of bread is required to save a starving person’s life.  ↩︎

Here it is important to consider the indirect costs of reducing social trust, in addition to the obvious direct costs to the victim.  ↩︎

Compare our defense of aggregationism in Chapter 2 , showing how, in practice, almost everyone endorses allowing sufficiently many small benefits to outweigh great costs to a few: “For example, allowing cars to drive fast on roads increases the number of people who die in accidents. Placing exceedingly low speed limits would save lives at the cost of inconveniencing many drivers. Most people demonstrate an implicit commitment to aggregationism when they judge it worse to impose these many inconveniences for the sake of saving a few lives.”

See also Goodin, R. (1995). Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy . Cambridge University Press.  ↩︎

Peter Singer argues, relatedly, that “we very swiftly arrive at an initially preference utilitarian position once we apply the universal aspect of ethics to simple, pre-ethical decision making.” (p.14)

Singer, P. (2011). Practical Ethics , 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press.  ↩︎

Smart, J.J.C. (1956). Extreme and restricted utilitarianism. The Philosophical Quarterly , 6(25): 344–354.  ↩︎

The “veil of ignorance” thought experiment was originally developed by Vickrey and Harsanyi, though nowadays it is more often associated with John Rawls, who coined the term and tweaked the thought experiment to arrive at different conclusions. Specifically, Rawls appealed to a version in which you are additionally ignorant of the relative probabilities of ending up in various positions, to block the utilitarian implications and argue instead for a “maximin” position that gives lexical priority to raising the well-being of the worst-off.

Vickrey, W. (1945). Measuring Marginal Utility by Reactions to Risk. Econometrica , 13(4): 329.

Harsanyi, J.C. (1953). Cardinal Utility in Welfare Economics and in the Theory of Risk-taking. Journal of Political Economy , 61(5): 434–435.

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice . Belknap Press.  ↩︎

This assumes a fixed-population setting. Variable population ethics is covered in Chapter 5 .

For related formal proofs, see: Harsanyi, J. (1978). Bayesian Decision Theory and Utilitarian Ethics . The American Economic Review , 68(2): 223–228.

For discussion of Harsanyi’s proof, see Greaves, H. (2017). A Reconsideration of the Harsanyi–Sen–Weymark Debate on Utilitarianism . Utilitas , 29(2): 175–213.  ↩︎

Caspar Hare (2016). Should We Wish Well to All? Philosophical Review , 125(4): 451–472.  ↩︎

It’s notoriously unclear how to apply the veil of ignorance to “different number” cases in population ethics , for example. If the agent behind the veil is guaranteed to exist, it would naturally suggest the average view . If they might be a merely possible person, and so have some incentive to want more (happy) lives to get to exist, it would instead suggest the total view .  ↩︎

Ex post interests, by contrast, concern the actual outcomes that result. Interestingly, theories may combine ex post welfare evaluations with a broader “expectational” element. For example, ex post prioritarianism assigns extra social value to avoiding bad outcomes (rather than bad prospects ) for the worst off individuals, but can still assess prospects by their expected social value .  ↩︎

Harsanyi (1955, pp. 312–314; 1977, pp. 64–68), as reinterpreted by John Broome (1987, pp. 410–411; 1991, pp. 165, 202–209). For further explanation, keep an eye out for our forthcoming guest essay on Formal Arguments for Utilitarianism, by Johan E. Gustafsson & Kacper Kowalczyk, to appear at <www.utilitarianism.net/guest-essays/>.  ↩︎

For example: Hare, C. (2016). Should We Wish Well to All? Philosophical Review , 125(4): 451–472.  ↩︎

Hare, C. (2016). Should We Wish Well to All? Philosophical Review , 125(4): 451–472, pp. 454–455.  ↩︎

Hare (2016) discusses some philosophers’ grounds for skepticism about the moral significance of ex ante justifiability to all , and supports the principle with further arguments from presumed consent , dirty hands , and composition .  ↩︎

Singer, P. (2011). The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress . Princeton University Press.  ↩︎

Cf. Williams, E. G. (2015). The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe . Ethical Theory and Moral Practice , 18(5): 971–982.  ↩︎

The following arguments should also apply against virtue ethics approaches, if they yield non-consequentialist verdicts about what acts should be done.  ↩︎

Absolutist deontologists hold such judgments to apply no matter the consequences . Moderate deontologists instead take the identified actions to be presumptively wrong, and not easily outweighed, but allow that this may be outweighed if a sufficient amount of value was on the line. So, for example, a moderate deontologist might allow that it’s permissible to lie to save someone’s life, or to kill one innocent person to save a million.  ↩︎

Samuel Scheffler noted that “either way, someone loses: some inviolable person is violated. Why isn’t it at least permissible to prevent the violation of five people by violating one?” (p. 88)

Scheffler, S. (1994). The Rejection of Consequentialism , revised edition. Oxford University Press.  ↩︎

Scheffler, S. (1985). Agent-Centred Restrictions, Rationality, and the Virtues . Mind , 94(375): 409–19.  ↩︎

See, e.g., Chappell, T. (2011). Intuition, System, and the “Paradox” of Deontology . In Jost, L. & Wuerth, J. (eds.), Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics . Cambridge University Press, pp. 271–88.  ↩︎

It’s open to the deontologist to insist that it should be more important to Jack , even if not to anyone else. But this violates the appealing idea that the moral point of view is impartial, yielding verdicts that reasonable observers (and not just the agent themselves) could agree on.  ↩︎

Though it remains open to consequentialists to accommodate nearby intuitions by noting ways in which these distinctions sometimes correlate with other features that may be of moral interest. For example, someone who goes out of their way to cause harm is likely to pose a greater threat to others than someone who merely allows harms to occur that they could prevent.  ↩︎

For example, you might gaslight your spouse by remaining hidden in camouflage, when they could have sworn that you were just in the room with them. Or, as Foot (1978, 26) suggests, “An actor who fails to turn up for a performance will generally spoil it rather than allow it to be spoiled”.

Foot, P. (1978). The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect. In Virtues and Vices and Other Essays . University of California Press.  ↩︎

Beauchamp, T. (2020). Justifying Physician-Assisted Deaths. In LaFollette, H. (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (5th ed.), pp. 78–85.  ↩︎

Bennett, J. (1998). The Act Itself . Oxford University Press.  ↩︎

In a similar vein, Derek Parfit wrote that “Some of us ask how much of our wealth we rich people ought to give to these poorest people. But that question wrongly assumes that our wealth is ours to give. This wealth is legally ours. But these poorest people have much stronger moral claims to some of this wealth. We ought to transfer to these people… at least ten per cent of what we earn”.

Parfit, D. (2017). On What Matters, Volume Three . Oxford University Press, pp. 436–37.  ↩︎

On the topic of sacrifice, John Stuart Mill wrote that “The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.”

Mill, J. S. (1863). Chapter 2: What Utilitarianism Is , Utilitarianism .  ↩︎

However, this does not mean that utilitarianism will strive for perfect equality in material outcomes or even well-being. Joshua Greene notes that “a world in which everyone gets the same outcome no matter what they do is an idle world in which people have little incentive to do anything. Thus, the way to maximize happiness is not to decree that everyone gets to be equally happy, but to encourage people to behave in ways that maximize happiness. When we measure our moral success, we count everyone’s happiness equally, but achieving success almost certainly involves inequality of both material wealth and happiness. Such inequality is not ideal, but it’s justified on the grounds that, without it, things would be worse overall.”

Greene, J. (2013). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them . Penguin Press, p. 163. See also: The Equality Objection to Utilitarianism .  ↩︎

In practice, the psychological phenomenon of loss aversion means that someone may feel more upset by what they perceive as a “loss” rather than a mere “failure to benefit”. Such negative feelings may further reduce their well-being, turning the judgment that “loss is worse” into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. But this depends on contingent psychological phenomena generating extra harms; it’s not that the loss is in itself worse.  ↩︎

Bostrom, N. & Ord, T. (2006). The Reversal Test: Eliminating Status Quo Bias in Applied Ethics . Ethics , 116(4): 656–679.  ↩︎

There are other types of debunking arguments not grounded in evolution. Consider that in most Western societies Christianity was the dominant religion for over one thousand years, which explains why moral intuitions grounded in Christian morality are still widespread. For instance, many devout Christians have strong moral intuitions about sex, which non-Christians do not typically share, such as the intuition that it’s wrong to have sex before marriage or that it’s wrong for two men to have sex. The discourse among academics in moral philosophy generally disregards such religiously-contingent moral intuitions. Many philosophers, including most utilitarians, would therefore not give much weight to Christians’ moral intuitions about sex.  ↩︎

de Lazari-Radek, K. & Singer, P. (2012). The Objectivity of Ethics and the Unity of Practical Reason . Ethics, 123(1): 9–31.  ↩︎

Greene, J. (2007). The secret joke of Kant’s soul . In Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (ed.), Moral Psychology, Vol. 3 . MIT Press.  ↩︎

Though some utilitarians, including those cited above, try to argue that utilitarian verdicts are less susceptible to debunking. For another example, see Neil Sinhababu’s guest essay offering an introspective argument for hedonism: https://www.utilitarianism.net/guest-essays/naturalistic-arguments-for-ethical-hedonism/ .  ↩︎

Utilitarianism

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Introduction

Utilitarianism is one of the most influential theories of contemporary moral and political theory. It “arguably has the distinction of being the moral theory that, more than any other, shapes the discipline of moral theory and forms the background against which rival theories are imagined, refined, and articulated” (Eggleston and Miller 2014 , 1).

Utilitarianism has long been subject to fierce criticism. It is possible to identify the following objections to utilitarianism: (1) utilitarianism has an inadequate theory of value; (2) utilitarianism permits abhorrent actions, or at least actions that are wrong; (3) utilitarianism is too demanding; (4) utilitarianism fails to respect the separation of persons; and (5) utilitarianism is committed to implausible claims about the psychology of persons (Woodard 2019 , 211–16).

This entry will first discuss major figures in the history of utilitarian tradition, namely Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), John Austin (1790–1859), John Stuart...

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Kaino, M. (2022). Utilitarianism. In: Sellers, M., Kirste, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6730-0_999-1

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4.3: Utilitarianism- Pros and Cons (B.M. Wooldridge)

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21 Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons B.M. Wooldridge 79

Consequentialism is a general moral theory that tells us that, in any given situation, we should perform those actions that lead to better overall consequences. There are generally two branches of Consequentialism: Hedonism, which tells us that the consequences we should pursue should be ‘pleasurable’ consequences, and Utilitarianism, which tells us that the consequences we should pursue should be ‘happy’ consequences. The focus of this paper will be on Utilitarianism, as this is undoubtedly the most popular form of consequentialist theories. John Stuart Mill, one of the foremost Utilitarian moral theorists, sums up Utilitarianism as follows: “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” 80

Any account of Utilitarianism will have two central tenets. First, Utilitarians are focused on states of affairs, which means that Utilitarianism is concerned with the result, or consequences, of one’s actions, and disregards other features like one’s motives or reasons for acting. One might have good motives or reasons for performing a certain action, but an action is only considered morally good for a Utilitarian if it maximizes the consequences, or happiness, of a given situation. Secondly, Utilitarians emphasize that agents are to be neutral in making their decisions. What this means is that under Utilitarianism, everyone counts for the same, and nobody counts for more than anybody else. Friends, family members, significant others, and anyone else important to you counts just the same as a complete stranger when making a moral decision.

On the face of it, this seems like a sensible moral theory. Like any other theory, Utilitarianism has its advantages and disadvantages. In this paper, I will argue that the disadvantages of Utilitarianism far outweigh the advantages. More specifically, I will argue that, despite its initial appeal, there are serious problems with Utilitarianism that render it a problematic moral theory. In what follows, I will consider a thought experiment from Bernard Williams to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of Utilitarianism, followed by a discussion of why Utilitarianism is a problematic moral theory.

To begin, consider the case of George. George has recently completed his PhD in Chemistry, and, like any other PhD candidate, finds it extremely difficult to land a job after completing his degree. George has a family, and his wife works hard to support them. While she is supportive of George, his difficulty finding a job puts a serious strain on their relationship. An older chemist who knows George tells George that he can get him a job in a laboratory. The laboratory pursues research into chemical and biological warfare. George, however, is opposed to chemical and biological warfare, and he therefore cannot accept the job. However, if George refuses the job, it will go to a colleague of George’s who does not have any reservations about chemical and biological warfare. Indeed, if this colleague takes the job, he will pursue the research with great zeal. For what it’s worth, George’s wife is not against chemical and biological warfare. Should George take the job? 81

It seems that a Utilitarian would inform us that George should take the job, for doing so will lead to better overall consequences than turning down the job. In taking the job, George will not perform the research with great enthusiasm. Williams is not clear on whether George will actively sabotage the research, but it can be reasonably assumed that if George takes the job, he will perform his duties in such a way that will minimize the impact that chemical and biological research will have on developing weapons for war. While George will not directly be saving anyone, his work will indirectly lead to the saving of thousands of lives. Indeed, simply taking the job will ensure that someone who has great enthusiasm for chemical and biological warfare does not get the job. So even if George does not directly or indirectly save anyone while performing his duties, he will already have maximized the consequences by preventing someone who would do great harm from getting the job.

This thought experiment is useful in considering the strengths and weaknesses of Utilitarianism. Let us first begin with the strengths of the theory. Perhaps the biggest strength of Utilitarianism is that it is, at least prima facie, easier to reach a conclusion under this theory than other theories. That is, Utilitarianism provides us with a clear path for determining which action in a given situation will be the correct one: it is that action that will increase utility. This is in contrast to other moral theories, such as Deontology, which do not always provide a clear answer. Deontology, for example, focuses on the motives or reasons one has for acting, and it can be difficult sometimes to ascertain what one’s motives and/or reasons are. Even if one explicitly outlines their motives or reasons, it is not always the case that this is truthful. The consequences of an action, however, do provide us with a clear criterion for what counts as a morally good action. If one’s action leads to good, or happy, consequences, then that action is morally permissible. Thus, Utilitarianism is a theory that can easily help us reach decisions.

Relating this to the case of George, George’s actions can be judged on whether they will lead to better consequences. In this case, his action will lead to good consequences, albeit indirectly. In accepting the job, George prevents someone else who might indirectly harm others by promoting chemical and biological warfare from getting the job. Consider, for a moment, if we judged this action not on the consequences, but rather on the reasons or motives for acting. Suppose George accepts the job because he is motivated to end chemical and biological warfare, or that his reason for taking the job is to help support his family. While these reasons might be noble ones, we cannot be clear on whether these are actually the motives/reasons that George has. Motives and reasons, in other words, are not as clearly accessible as the consequences of an action.

Another strength of Utilitarianism is its emphasis on neutrality. When making a decision, one is to take a ‘God’s eye’ view of things, and consider everyone equally. This emphasis on neutrality makes Utilitarianism an impartial moral theory, meaning it considers everyone’s status and interests as equal. Relating this to the case of George, we see that George needs to assess the situation from a neutral perspective. He should not favour his or his family’s interests as opposed to the interests of others who might be impacted by chemical and biological warfare. Even if his wife and family were against chemical and biological warfare, and even considering that George himself is against chemical and biological warfare, he needs to put these interests and considerations aside and make the decision that is best for everyone involved.

While Utilitarianism does have its strengths as a theory, it also has some very serious weaknesses, and in the remainder of this paper I will outline of these weaknesses and argue why I think they make Utilitarianism a problematic moral theory.

We can begin by considering the point about neutrality. While Utilitarians will count this as a strength of their theory, it can also be considered a weakness of the theory. In considering everyone equally, Utilitarianism devalues the importance of personal relationships. In some cases, following Utilitarianism will force us to disregard those who are close to us. Suppose, for instance, that George’s wife and children, like George, were also against chemical and biological warfare. Utilitarianism will tell us that George should disregard their interests and feelings and perform that action that will increase the consequences. But this seems to be impersonal. The interests, feelings, and desires of George’s family should matter more than the interests, feelings, and desires of complete strangers, simply because these people are closer to George. Each of us has special relations to individuals that we work hard to develop, and that, in many cases, help us become better people. To disregard the interests, feelings, and desires of these individuals seems to be wrong.

I should also point out here that while Utilitarians will consider everyone equally, this does not mean that they will treat everyone equally. Consider another example from Williams. Suppose that there is a racial minority in a society. This minority does not harm anyone else in the society, nor does it do anything particularly good either. However, the other citizens, who make up the majority, have prejudices against this minority, and consider its presence very disagreeable, and proposals are put forward to remove this minority. 82 Williams is not clear on what would be involved in ‘removing’ the minority. The removal of the minority need not involve murder, although it could. It might involve, for example, removing them from society by forcing them to leave the society.

It seems that a Utilitarian would be forced to accept that eliminating this minority would increase the happiness for the majority of people, and would therefore be a moral action. But this seems wrong, mainly because removing the minority from society would involve what many people take to be morally evil actions, which is another problem with Utilitarianism. In some cases, Utilitarianism might sanction morally evil actions in order to achieve morally desirable consequences. Removing the minority might involve genocide or mass deportations, both of which seem morally problematic. Killing people simply because they are of a certain race or ethnicity, and/or removing them from a society without just cause, are severe moral violations that any reasonable person could not sanction. The idea here is this: sometimes, in working to achieve the greatest overall consequences, individuals will be forced to do bad things, and these bad things, even if they increase happiness, are still bad. And it is a failing of Utilitarianism that it does not recognize the moral value of labeling these as morally bad actions.

At this point a Utilitarian will surely have something to say. A Utilitarian might respond to the above points as follows. All of the critiques I have offered are focused only on the short-term consequences, and not the long-term consequences. When we focus on the long-term consequences of the above cases, the Utilitarian answer will change. For example, if George takes the job, this might lead to good consequences in the immediate future. But in the long run, it might lead to bad consequences. It might, for example, cause a serious strain on his marriage, and make George unhappy, which will in turn affect his relationships with others. In the racial minority case, while removing the minority might lead to better consequences in the short term, it will lead to worse consequences in the long term. It will, for example, weaken the trust among members of a community, and destabilize the social relations of individuals within that community. In response to this, a Utilitarian might adopt a rule, the general following of which will lead to better long-term consequences. In so doing, a Utilitarian switches the focus from a version of Utilitarianism that is focused on acts, to one that is focused on rules.

This response from a Utilitarian fails, in that it invites more questions than what it does answers. Mainly, just how far into the future should we look when considering the consequences of our actions? Utilitarians do not provide a clear answer to this question. Saying that we should focus on the long-term consequences of an action when the implications of the short-term consequences are troubling seems to be problematic. And, moreover, should we really follow a rule when, in the moment, we can perform an act that will increase the happiness of others? Adopting rule-utilitarianism as a way to respond to these objections seems not only ad-hoc, but also inconsistent with the Utilitarian maxim of increasing the consequences.

Overall, the theory of Utilitarianism, while perhaps initially appealing, seems to have some serious flaws. While the theory of Utilitarianism might help us more easily reach moral conclusions than what other theories do, and while it emphasizes the neutrality of moral agents, it does nonetheless have a tendency to alienate us from those we are closest to, and might require us to perform actions that, under other moral theories, are considered morally problematic. It is for these reasons that Utilitarianism is a problematic moral theory.

For Review and Discussion

1. What are the benefits of Utilitarianism? Are these benefits enough to convince you that it is the correct moral theory we should follow?

2. What are the drawbacks of Utilitarianism? Are these benefits enough to convince you that it is an incorrect moral theory we should follow?

3. If more happiness is produced by not following Utilitarianism, is that what we should do? What does this say about the theory?

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5 Utilitarianism: Theory and Applications

• Published: October 2002
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Utilitarianism is a comprehensive doctrine claiming that the greatest amount of happiness is an end that should exclusively guide all actions of both government and individuals. The fact that people value the happiness of those close to them more than that of strangers makes utilitarianism personally unacceptable to many, but it may still be a proper principle for government, given some overriding respect for individual rights. There are, however, basic problems concerning the value of life, and the treatment of future people and foreigners. The conventional discounting of future incomes does not imply that the utility of future people is discounted. The state's primary responsibility is to its own citizens, but it should not treat aliens as mere instruments for the welfare of citizens.

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Model Essay – Utilitarianism

August 14, 2018.

To what extent, if any, is Utilitarianism a good theory for approaching moral decisions in life? (30/40 Grade B)

Below is a sample essay from our book on Model Essays available in the shop. If you have an essay you’d be happy for us to include in our next selection please email it to me (preferably grade A or B standard). I will mark it with detailed comments for free if we use it. Other essays can be marked for £10 an essay – please buy an essay marking credit in the shop.

Arguably, the use of utilitarianism for the making of moral decisions is more detrimental to a society than it is beneficial. Indeed the very basis on which utilitarianism is founded, ‘happiness’ or ‘pleasure’, proves to be the first stumbling block. The ‘paradox of hedonism’ suggests that pleasure itself cannot be directly obtained. Instead, we must aim for more substantial conclusions, such as wealth or power – pleasure is merely a symptom that follows. This idea is most acutely explained by politician William Bennett: ‘Happiness is like a cat, If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you’ll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.’

Good. Excellent summary of the utilitarian problem that once you pursue happiness or pleasure as an end in itself it tends to elude you.

Therefore, to base one’s entire ethical approach to life on happiness, something which is so fleeting and indistinct, suddenly seems irrational. You need to mention a philosopher here such as Mill and ground the argument in what he says . If we cannot amass pleasure within ourselves, how can we be so vain as to assume we can recognise its form in others, particularly those we don’t know (e.g. in the case of a politician forming their policies on utilitarian principles.) That is not to say that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in a wider sense will always be futile, but that one should make decisions independently, on grounds other than those utilitarian, and allow happiness to follow.

Is it not true to say we can assess polices looking backwards with hindsight because all the consequences are known, but not forwards when there are often unintended consequences? This paragraph is too general to be of much analytical quality – make sure you go straight into a philosophical theory.

On the other hand, rule utilitarianism appears to offer a resolution. If one chooses to implement a pre-determined set of rules (e.g. to avoid lying, to be pacifistic, to be modest,) which predominantly bring about the most ‘pleasure’/good for society, then focus can be diverted away from pursuing you mean personal happiness here happiness, and instead towards living a righteous life.

Yes, but again, you need to give this a theoretical grounding in Mill’s so-called ‘weak rule utilitarianism’ – Mill’s point is we are foolish to ignore the experience of people who have gone before us in terms of general rules or guidelines for creating the happy society. But when moral dilemmas occur we revert to being act utilitarians.

Jeremy Bentham (the father of modern utilitarianism) was somewhat of a polymath – to suggest that he was solely a ‘philosopher’ would be a vast understatement. This kind of comment is irrelevant to the question and a waste of time. Undoubtedly, he was also a great social reformer, basing his beliefs on the underlying principle of egalitarianism (i.e. equality for all.) However, in many ways, utilitarianism innately contradicts ‘egalité . ’

This paragraph is a good example of the kind of paragraph a highly analytical essay never contains because you are merely describing the life and times of Mr Bentham and not adding anything to the argument.

Initially a thought experiment experiment devised by the American philosopher Robert Nozick, ‘the utility monster,’ undermines the very equality for which Bentham’s philosophy once fought. Visualise a situation in which the hedonic calculus is being employed. In such a case, the intensity (quality) of the perceived happiness must be acknowledged. For illustration’s sake, imagine rations are being distributed amongst a group of isolated individuals. However, one of these individuals appears to gain a disproportionately high intensity of pleasure on receiving food, despite all other individuals being of an equally critical state of health (e.g. starvation.) To apply the hedonic calculus would not only (unfairly) favour the minority, but also pose a great risk to the majority (assuming that the individual’s pleasure is greater than the collective pleasure of the majority.)

Ye s this is a good point but it wouldn’t apply to Mill’s theory because social utility would mean we need principles of justice, otherwise any of us would be permanently miserable at just the thought of a utility monster.

The most valid counterargument to which is proposed by the British philosopher Derek Parfit, arguing that the scale of happiness should be seen as asymptotic rather than linear. That is, the happiness of a utility monster cannot perpetually increase, but will eventually reach a point near enough to ‘complete’ happiness. Hence, such a being is not conceivable. This argument bears a strong resemblance to prioritarianism, which suggests that individuals on the lower end of the ‘pleasure spectrum’ will obtain a greater amount of happiness (‘per unit of utility’) than those closer to the reverse end.

Again a good point and actually illustrating what economists call the principle of diminishing marginal utility – we eventually have less and less satisfaction as an individual until at some point we experience no satisfaction at all.

Or, to some extent, the intensity of happiness could thereby be omitted from the hedonic calculus to account for the utility monster. However, there is also a troubling flaw with the seventh principle – ‘extent,’ or the amount of people that a particular moral choice may affect. Counterintuitively, the one society which utilitarianism does not appear to permit, is a microcosmic ‘utopia.’ When summating the pleasure of individuals, the greatest amount will be achieved, theoretically, by an extremely populous group with indifferent levels of happiness rather than a very small but extremely contented group. This is known as the ‘repugnant conclusion.’

Interesting and unusual point. Which philosopher talks about this problem?

In counterargument one might say, ‘the average pleasure should supersede the total amount of pleasure’ for this particular instance. Yet this line of argument spawns issues of its own. A simple average can easily be skewed by extremities. Such that one individual in a state of euphoria would significantly raise the average happiness of his miserable counterparts. Under the aforementioned, atrocities such as slavery could feasibly be justified. What’s the suffering of one thousand imprisoned subordinates if the overseer is delighted by the recent success of his cotton farm? Utilitarianism, in this context, seeks to diminish the more valuable pursuits (charity, liberal arts) over the happiness one gains through materialism (e.g. the wealth garnered from a cotton farm.)

Even if all the preceding shortcomings were to be deemed permissible, there is still a flaw which is perhaps the most pertinent of all. Humans, by their very nature, are unable to reliably predict consequence, and without consequence, the principle of utilitarianism is worthless. Given the nature of the ‘ripple effect,’ it would be naive to assume that every possible consequence of even the simplest of decisions could be accounted for. Or moreover, to predict the ways in which people would (potentially dangerously,) apply utilitarianism if it were to be adopted as a global ethic.

Yes, again a very good point.

Even attempting to apply such a primitive, nebulous philosophy to an infinite diversity of ethical decisions seems rather unrefined. Despite superficially appearing succinct and rational, the impracticalities of achieving ‘the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number of people’ cannot be overlooked. Indeed, utilitarianism is theoretically sound but there are far too many exceptional cases for it to be one’s ruling principle.

‘Primitive’ and ‘nebulous’ are rather emotive (rude) words to use of a philosophy that has guided Government policy for years.  Welfare is another word for happiness (just a little more neutral!).In Politics and Economics we use social welfare measures to evaluate our decisions – as it is impartial.

Overall 30/40 75% Grade B

The essay has some very interesting points to make.   However, it would not achieve an A* because the establishment of how the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill actually works is rather thin. Particularly, there is little substance about how Mill’s weak rule utilitarianism actually works, and how some argue that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism. In terms of social benefits versus individual benefits the candidate needs to bring out how this operates in Mill’s theory, and how he grounds the final chapter of his essay on justice as a fundamental prerequisite of the happy society. Mill also moves his whole argument much closer to Aristotle as he writes his essay – leading some to call him an inconsistent utilitarian because he can’t quite decide whether to go for qualitative pleasures or another concept of long-term welfare that is closer to eudaimonia in Aristotelean thought. It is lighter on AO1 marks than AO2 but seems to miss some of the analytical steps necessary to be a really compelling argument.

AO1 Level 4 10/16

A good demonstration of knowledge and understanding. Addresses the question well. Good selection of relevant material, used appropriately on the whole. Mostly accurate knowledge which demonstrates good understanding of the material used, which should have reasonable amounts of depth or breadth. A good range of scholarly views.

It is ‘good’ because it contains a very strong critical thesis. But it is neither very good nor excellent because the precise detail of how Bentham’s and Mills theories work is lacking – it is assumed rather than stated and established and analysed. For example, there is an interesting relationship in Mill between higher and lower pleasures and act and rue utilitarianism whereby we should, Mill argues, generally follow a rule which past experience suggest will maximise social happiness but when we face a moral dilemma we revert to being an act utilitarian. There is also an ambiguity in the question which is never considered – moral decisions for whom?

AO2 level 5 20/24

A very good demonstration of analysis and evaluation in response to the question. successful and clear analysis, evaluation and argument. Views very well stated, coherently developed and justified. There is a well–developed and sustained line of reasoning which is coherent, relevant and logically structured.

It would have been excellent if there had been a little more engagement with the academic philosophers who produce the arguments, rather than just the arguments themselves.

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A Level Philosophy & Religious Studies

Utilitarianism

Bentham’s act utilitarianism.

Jeremy Bentham invented the first form of Utilitarianism – Act utilitarianism. He was one of the first atheist philosophers and wanted to devise a morality that would reflect an atheistic understanding of what it meant to be human. Such an understanding involved no longer considering ourselves as a special part of creation, but as just a part of nature. On this basis, Bentham made this claim:

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure’” – Bentham.

This means that it is human nature to find pleasure good and pain bad, which Bentham goes on claim suggests that it is pleasure and pain which determine what we ought to do as well as what we will do. We can say that we value something other than pleasure, but Bentham claims we would just be pretending. It is the nature of the human animal to seek pleasure and avoid pain, so that’s all there is for morality to be about. From this, Bentham devised the principle of utility:

An action is good if it leads to the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people

Utilitarianism is a consequentialist ethical theory because it is what an action “leads to”, i.e. its consequences, that determines whether it is good.

Bentham’s felicific/hedonic calculus

The principle of utility holds that the ‘greatest’ pleasure is the goal of ethical action. It follows that a method for measuring pleasure is required. Bentham devised the hedonic calculus to do this. It is a list of seven criteria which each measure a different aspect of the pleasurable consequences of an action. In order to decide which action to do, you need to know in advance which action will result in the greater amount of pleasure. The hedonic calculus is what allows you to calculate that.

• How strong the pleasure is.
• How long the pleasure lasts.
• How likely it is that the pleasure will occur.
• How far away in time the pleasure will occur.
• The likelihood that the pleasure will lead to further pleasure.
• The likelihood that the pleasure will be followed by pain.
• How many people are affected.

Mill’s qualitative Utilitarianism; higher & lower pleasures

The claim of Utilitarianism, that the morality of an action reduces entirely to how far it maximises pleasure, provoked many to criticise it for degrading morality and humanity; that it is a “doctrine worthy only of swine”.

Mill combated this objection by distinguishing between lower pleasures gained from bodily activity, such as food, sex and drugs, and higher pleasures gained from mental activity, such as poetry, reading, philosophy, music. Swine are not capable of experiencing higher pleasures, so to combat this objection Utilitarianism need only show that higher pleasures are superior to the lower.

Mill points out that Utilitarian thinkers had already successfully defended against this issue by showing that higher pleasures are overall superior at producing a greater quantity of happiness than lower. Lower pleasures are fleeting, lasting only for the duration of the action that produce them. Furthermore, lower pleasures are costly because they are addictive and tempt people to choose instant gratification, or what Mill calls a ‘nearer good’ over greater goods like health, for example by consuming sugar or drinking alcohol. Higher pleasures of the mind have no such ill effects and can have a lasting enlightening effect on a mind which has cultivated a habit of appreciating them.

Bentham claimed that all pleasures were equal, that the pleasure gained from poetry is just as valuable as that gained from playing pushpin (a children’s game). Yet even Bentham’s quantitative approach will judge higher pleasures superior for tending to produce more durable pleasure with less cost than lower pleasures.

However, Mill goes further than Bentham and claims that the superiority of higher pleasures can be proven not only on quantitative grounds, but a ‘higher ground’ than that, their superior quality.

“It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others” – Mill

Higher pleasures are of greater quality than lower pleasures. That is why they are worth more. We can determine whether a pleasure is of greater quality than another based on which is preferred over the other. Through education in the collective experience and choices of humanity we can discover which pleasures are desired over others.

‘Competent judges’ are people with experience of both higher and lower pleasures. Mill claims they always prefer higher pleasures to lower pleasures, thus demonstrating their greater quality. Mill now has his full answer to those who say Utilitarianism is a doctrine fit only for swine:

“it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides” – Mill.

Humans can experience mental pleasures of a higher quality than the low pleasures that both humans and pigs can experience. Socrates illustrates that some humans can experience mental pleasures of a higher quality than other humans. Mill’s claim is that when we investigate such cases, we find that beings prefer the highest mental pleasure they are capable of experiencing over lower pleasures. In fact, people acquainted with both higher and lower pleasures show such a great preference for the higher that they will put up with discontent to get them and would not lose it even for any quantity of a lower pleasure. Mill concludes:

“we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account” – Mill.

When we study what types of pleasure are preferred over others by those with the capacity to experience many types, we find that it is those higher pleasures of the mind that are preferred and are often pursued while sacrificing comfort. We can thus conclude of their greater quality.

For example, consider the case of an artist who suffers from financial deprivation to produce their art. A piano player who arduously wades through hours of practice to finally experience the pleasure of playing some composition of genius. A student who avoids short-term pleasures and indolence by diligently studying for their exams, to avoid a monotonous life and pursue the pleasure that comes from development, exercise and eventual mastery of their interests and talents.

Many will object to Mill’s claim that a person who can and has experienced higher pleasures will always prefer them to lower ones. There are plenty of times when mentally cultivated people will occasionally give in to instant gratification or even sink into complete addiction to lower pleasures.

However, Mill responds that this objection misunderstands his argument. Everyone prefers the highest pleasures they have been able to experience, but it doesn’t follow that everyone always chooses them over lower ones. The ability to experience higher pleasures requires careful cultivation which is easily lost, either due to falling into addiction, weakness of will/character, external pressures or lack of internal support.

“Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying.” – Mill.

Rule Utilitarianism

Generic Rule Utilitarianism adds the idea of following rules to the principle of utility. So, an action is good if it conforms to a rule which maximises happiness.

We need to determine whether following a rule, e.g., like not lying, will promote more happiness than not following it. If so, then following that rule is good.

This then typically splits into strong and weak rule Utilitarianism. Strong Utilitarianism is the view that the rules should be stuck to no matter the situation. Weak Utilitarianism is the view that the rules can be broken if it maximises happiness to do so.

Strong Rule Utilitarianism is typically criticised for simply becoming deontological, for abandoning the principle of utility and its consequentialism and becoming an empty deontological theory that follows rules for no good reasons, having abandoned its own supposed meta-ethical grounding.

Weak Rule Utilitarianism is typically criticised for in effect reducing into act utilitarianism, since they would judge every action the same. If following a rule such as telling the truth maximises happiness in a situation, then both Act and weak Rule would say to tell the truth. If breaking the rule and lying maximises happiness in a situation, then both act and weak rule would say to lie.

Mill’s Rule Utilitarianism

Mill’s version of Rule Utilitarianism was an attempt to improve on Bentham’s and arguably also avoids the issues of the strong and weak varieties.

The principle of Utility holds that the goal of moral action is to maximise happiness. Mill says he “entirely” agrees with Bentham’s principle of Utility, that what makes an action good is the degree to which it promotes happiness over suffering. Mill calls this the principle of Utility the ‘first principle’.

However, Mill disagreed with Bentham’s approach of judging every action by the principle of utility. Mill claimed that happiness is ‘much too complex and indefinite a goal’ for that.

“Although I entirely agree with Bentham in his principle, I do not agree with him that all right thinking on the details of morals depends on its explicit assertion. I think that utility or happiness is much too complex and indefinite a goal to be sought except through various intermediate goals” – Mill.

This is an attempt to solve the issue of calculation. It is extremely difficult to calculate which action will maximise happiness. Even though that is what constitutes the moral rightness of an action, nonetheless because of our limited knowledge our actual moral obligation is to follow whatever secondary principles humanity’s current level of understanding has produced regarding how to gain happiness and minimise suffering. We can draw on the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of our species on what avoids suffering and produces satisfaction and happiness.

This gives us ‘secondary principles’ which are more general rules and guidelines. These are the product of our civilisation’s current best attempt to understand how to produce happiness. They are therefore subject to improvement. As particularly obvious examples, Mill points to murder and theft as being injurious to human happiness.

Another secondary principle Mill thought important enough to be adopted as the practice of government was the harm principle. It essentially states that people should be free to do what they want so long as they aren’t harming others. Mill argued that each individual is in the best position to make themselves happy and so if we all allowed each other to do what made us happy, society would overall be the happiest it could be.

Of course, secondary principles will sometimes conflict. Another secondary principle could be helping others. In the case of the trolly problem, where killing one person is the only way to save five people, the harm principle conflicts with the principle of helping others. In the case of theft, which is a harm, if it is the only way to save a starving family then the secondary principles of not harming and not stealing come into conflict. Mill explains that to resolve conflicts we need to apply the first principle:

“ Those who adopt utility as a standard can seldom apply it truly except through the secondary principles … It is when two or more secondary principles conflict that a direct appeal to some first principle becomes necessary” – Mill

If we appeal to the first principle of utility, it looks like we should steal to save starving people or inflict harm (to the point of killing) by pulling the leaver in the trolly problem, to save five people.

It’s debated whether Mill is a Rule Utilitarian. He clearly thinks that it is morally right to do an action that conforms to a rule which experience has shown to maximise happiness. However, Mill clearly also thinks that sometimes individual actions should be judged to resolve a conflict or applicability issue in rules/principles. Arguably the question of how exactly to categorise Mill is irrelevant and we could simply conclude that Mill’s Utilitarianism is the perfect synthesis of Act and Rule Utilitarianism. It does avoid the problem of generic Rule Utilitarianism, that it either becomes a meta-ethically empty deontological theory or collapses back into Act Utilitarianism.

Criticisms of Utilitarianism

Problems with calculation.

Utilitarianism seems to require:

• That we know can the future.

If the goodness of an action depends on whether it maximises pleasure, then we need to know the consequences of the action before we do it. That seems to require that we know the future. Yet, predicting the future is often incredibly difficult.

Worse, we need to know not only the consequences of an action, but of all the possible actions we could do in a situation.

• That we can make incredibly complex calculations about the range of possible actions, sometimes under time-constraints.

Once we know the consequences of all the actions we could do, we then need to calculate the impact they will have on pleasure and pain. Not just in the short, but in the long-term. Worse, we might need to make these calculations in time-sensitive situations.

• That these calculations include the objective measuring of subjective mental states like pleasure and pain.

We can only make objective measurements of objective things. For example we can measure a thing’s length by putting a tape measure next to it. The calculations about the amount of pleasure and pain an action will lead to require that we measure subjective feelings, which seems impossible. There is no objective way to measure subjective feelings because we can’t put a ruler next to them.

All three of these conditions are plagued with difficulty, and yet each seems absolutely necessary if we are act on the principle of utility.

Bentham’s response to issues with calculation. Bentham claims that an action is right regarding “the tendency which it appears to have” to maximise happiness. So, we actually only need to have a reasonable expectation of what the consequences will be based on how similar actions have tended to turn out in the past.

To further defend Bentham, we could argue that we can measure subjective feelings. In hospital, doctors ask patients how much pain they are in out of 10. Doctors will admit that this is never a perfect indicator, but it is accurate enough to be informative.

Mill’s response to issues with calculation. Mill’s version of Utilitarianism seems to avoid these issues regarding calculation. We do not need to know the future, nor make incredibly complex calculations, nor measure subjective feelings. We only need to know the secondary principles that our civilisation has, through its collective efforts and experience, judged to be those best conducive to happiness. We then need to simply follow those principles as best we can. For Mill, the moral rightness of an action depends on maximise happiness, but because of the immense complexity of that, our only moral obligation is to just do our best to follow the principles geared towards producing happiness of our society, which are themselves only the best current principle that our current stage of civilisation and culture has managed to develop.

Mill is admitting that to perfectly act on the principle of utility is currently impossible. However, he denies that this means Utilitarianism fails in its requirement as a normative theory to successfully guide action. For that, Utilitarianism can rely on the principles and rules that, to the best of our current knowledge, most produce happiness. Society also ought to be progressive, meaning it should retrospectively assess and improve its principles and rules. This works well enough and in principle can continue to work better as we discover more, biologically, psychologically, sociologically and politically how to maximise happiness.

In cases of a conflict of rules, Mill adopts the same approach as Bentham and says we must judge the individual action by the principle of utility, though Mill adds that we should consider the quality not only quantity of the pleasure it could produce. He agrees with Bentham’s point that when judging individual actions, we can base our calculations on what we know of the ‘tendencies’ actions have. We do not need to exactly predict their consequences.

Regarding how to calculate or measure the quality of a pleasure, Mill explains that we need only investigate people’s preferences and we see that people always prefer higher pleasures to lower ones, except when falling into addiction or weakness of character.

Mill’s response to issues with calculation is quite amusing in how dismissive he is, so I’ve been tempted to quote part of it in full:

“Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this—that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time, mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions; on which experience all the prudence, as well as all the morality of life, are dependent … Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong” – Mill.

Utilitarianism justifies bad actions and is against human rights

The moral basis of human rights is deontological because human rights are intrinsically good. This seems incompatible with consequentialist ethics like Utilitarianism, which argue that something is only good not because of anything intrinsic but depending on whether it leads to happiness. So, Utilitarianism could never say ‘X is wrong’ or ‘X is right’. They can only say that ‘X is right/wrong if it leads to/doesn’t lead to – the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. In that case they couldn’t say ‘torture is wrong’. In fact, if 10 people gained happiness from torturing one person, a Utilitarian it seems would have to say that was morally right as it led to the greatest happiness for the greatest number. When a majority of people decide, for their benefit, to gang up on a minority, that is called the tyranny of the majority.

Bentham didn’t accept that his theory had this consequence. In a case like 10 torturers gaining pleasure from torturing one person, that is certainly more pleasure than pain – but Bentham’s theory is not simply about producing more pleasure than pain. It is about maximising pleasure. An action is good if it maximises pleasure, meaning if it is the action which produces the maximum amount of pleasure possible. The action of allowing torture produces less pleasure than the action which finds a way to make everyone happy – not just the torturers.

However, what if, since we have limited resources, the best action we can possibly do is not one which enables everyone to be happy? In that situation, which does seem to be our actual situation, it looks like the logic of Bentham’s theory would justify the sacrifice of the well-being or even deliberate infliction of pain on some minority of the sake of the pleasure of the majority.

Mill’s Rule utilitarianism attempts to solve those kinds of issues too. The rule of the harm principle will result in a happier society than one which doesn’t. Since torture is harm, Mill’s utilitarianism can overrule individual cases where torture might result in happiness. Mill does not believe in rights. He thinks that everyone should be free to do whatever they want except harm others. The justification for this freedom from harm is not that people have a ‘right’ to be unharmed, but that it is for the greatest happiness for the greatest number that we live without harming each other. So, while Mill doesn’t believe in intrinsic rights, he proposes rules which seem identical to rights in their ethical outcome. Arguably that is sufficient.

It’s questionable whether Mill’s harm principle really is what would make people happiest. Arguably individuals are not in the best position to figure out and follow through on what will make them happy. This can be seen by the various mistakes and bad life choices people make when trying to achieve happiness.

Many argue that the problem with secular society is that people have become selfishly focused on their own happiness. The hyper-individualism that comes from capitalism and the oversexualisation of western culture are argued to be the result of Mill’s liberalism and his utopian belief that individuals best know how to make themselves happy.

Mill was writing in a time when religion and culture created a huge pressure of social conformity. Mill thought that because people were actually so different, each person would be much better off trying figure out what made them happy than if they were forced to behave the way others might prefer.

The issue of intentions and character

  Utilitarianism only views the consequences of actions as good, not the character (integrity) of the person who performs them. This goes against the intuition that a person can be a good person. It also has the bizarre effect that e.g stabbing someone could be good if after being rushed to hospital it was found, coincidentally, they had a brain tumour. Or someone who attempts to do good but bad consequences result which were unforeseeable, such as the priest who saved Hitler’s life when he was a child. The way we’d normally solve this problem is to claim that although the action had good consequences, the person’s intentions or character was bad. However, consequentialist theories seem unable to claim that because for them, it is only consequences which are good or bad, not intentions/character.

Mill responds firstly that a person’s character does matter because it will determine their future actions. The stabber should be condemned for his motive because that will prevent them stabbing others in future. The priest should be forgiven because he’s not likely to do anything bad in the future as his character is good. Secondly, Mill argues that having a good character helps you become happy. Motives and character therefore do matter ethically, though not intrinsically but only insofar as they result in good consequences, in line with consequentialism.

Kant vs consequentialism

If a Nazi asked whether we were hiding Jews and we were, it seems Kant is committed to the view that it’s wrong to lie. That seems to go against most people’s moral intuitions because of the obvious terrible consequences to telling the truth in that situation. This puts Kant at odds with consequentialist theories like Utilitarianism.

Kant could respond that each person is ultimately responsible for what they do. As a rational agent, you are responsible for what you do, and the Nazi is responsible for what they do. Lying to prevent the Nazi from killing is to act as if you were responsible for the Nazi’s action, but you are not. You are responsible for what you do, and so you should not lie.

Kant points out that we cannot control consequences in the example of the murderer at the door. If we lied about where the victim was, yet unknown to us the victim had actually moved there, then we would be responsible for their death. So Kant is arguing that we cannot control consequences and thus cannot be responsible for them. So, they cannot be part of our moral equation.

Arguably we are responsible for what others do. Kant pictures a human being as a rational agent who is ultimately an individual, responsible only for what they do. This arguably overlooks the fact that we exist in complex webs of social influence such that part of who we are depends on our interactions with other people. We exist in deep connection to other people and thus to that extent are in fact responsible for each other’s actions.

Furthermore, just because we can’t control consequences completely, does that mean they don’t matter ethically? Also, consequentialism isn’t arguing we can completely control the consequences, just that we should consider them when acting. Furthermore, we can control consequences to a degree. Shouldn’t we therefore be responsible for them to that degree?

The issue of partiality

Utilitarianism argues that we should do whatever action leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. It does not consider an individual’s particular emotional ties to their family or friends as relevant to that ethical calculation. E.g most parents would save their child’s life over the life of two random people. However, Utilitarianism would not regard that as the most moral action as saving two rather than one would lead to the greatest happiness. Therefore, Utilitarianism seems to be against the foundation of familial relationships which is at least a practical impediment to its implantability because family relationships define so much of our social existence. It is arguably also a conceptual flaw since family is intuitively thought of as a good thing.

Mill tried to respond that most people don’t have the opportunity to help a multitude of people so it’s good to just focus on those in our lives.

However, these days we have extensive charities all over the world so Mill’s argument seems outdated.

Peter Singer makes the point that being brought up in a loving family is the best way to ensure children grow up to be as happy as they can. Singer points out that there have been experiments at bringing up children without parents and that they haven’t worked out well. So, if no one had a family, people would be much less happy therefore perhaps the happiness we gain from family is worth the unhappiness caused by our exclusion from our consideration of those who are not our family.

But, if you think about how much parents in the west spend on their children, if half that money were given to charity instead, actually the amount of suffering that reduced might outweigh the happiness the world gains by its having family relationships.

The burning building

If you were in a burning building and had a choice between saving a child and an expensive painting, which would you choose? Most people on first hearing this scenario would say the child, but utility based ethics seems to suggest that saving the painting is better because we could sell the paining for enough money to save the life of a hundred children. Giles Fraser argues that saving the painting suggests a lack of sympathy for the child and thus Utilitarianism encourages us to be immoral.

William MacAskill responds that actually saving the painting suggests a more cultivated sympathy which is able to connect to the many more children elsewhere who are in just as much need of saving and outnumber the single child there now. Their needs are greater than the individual needs of the one child.

Arguably it is practically impossible to expect people to act in the way utilitarianism wants, even if we admitted it was right in theory. Human emotions, especially empathy, are thus a practical impediment to the implementation of utilitarianism.

Possible exam questions for Utilitarianism

Easy Does utilitarianism provide a helpful method of moral decision-making? Can moral judgement be based on the extent to which, in any given situation, utility is best served?

Medium Is it possible to measure good or pleasure and then reach a moral decision? “The moral action is the one which has the greatest balance of pleasure over pain” – Discuss. Is moral action a matter of following accepted laws that lead to the greatest balance of pleasure over pain? Is an action morally justified if it produces the greatest amount of good over evil? Assess whether rule utilitarianism successfully improves on act utilitarianism. Critically compare act and rule utilitarianism

Hard How morally valid is the hedonic calculus? “Morality is not based on utility” – Discuss. Should Utilitarianism aim to promote the greatest overall balance of good over evil or the greatest amount of good over evil?

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Year 12 ethics topics: Natural Law. Situation ethics. Kantian ethics. Utilitarianism. Euthanasia. Business ethics. 

Year 13 ethics topics: Meta-ethics. Conscience. Sexual ethics. 

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