Introduction

Last week we looked at the ethical theory of Immanuel Kant. There were a couple of features of Kant’s theory that I wanted to emphasize then.

1.             In the first place, according to Kant there could be nothing in the world that was absolutely good except a good will. And therefore the only thing that can be made the object of moral judgement is the will of a person who is acting in some way for some reason.

2.             And secondly, Kant’s theory was what we call a deontological theory, by which we just mean that it is based on an idea of duty. A person’s will is good if it is their intention to do their duty – and their duty is determined by reason according to the Categorical Imperative.

Most people are reasonably happy with the first feature. They can see why we might say such a thing, although it doesn’t usually stop them from continuing to describe actions or events as being good action or events. On the other hand, people almost always object to the idea that they should do their duty no matter what the outcome of this might be. For example, suppose that you’re hiding a Jew from the Nazis in some occupied European country. If a Nazi comes to the door and asks you ‘Do you have a Jew in the house?’ almost everyone will say that you should tell a lie. And they believe this because the consequences of telling the truth in this circumstance are felt to be just too evil. That’s a pretty extreme situation, but when I’ve asked in tutorials about trivial cases – like your girlfriend asking for your honest opinion about some expensive new outfit – the same sorts of considerations of different possible outcomes for different actions have been put forward as relevant in deciding what to do.

The point of all this is that almost everyone, in some circumstances anyway, will accept that consequences are important in moral thinking. You’ll remember that in last week’s lecture I went over the distinctions that are often drawn amongst various kinds of moral theory. Some are said to be ‘virtue theories’ that are mostly concerned with the character of the actor, and some are called ‘deontological theories’ that are only concerned with the duties that are involved, and the third category I described as the ‘teleological theories’, that are only concerned with the outcomes of various actions.

In today’s lecture we’re going to look at a moral theory that goes by the name of Utilitarianism, which represents the purest form of this last category. The two classical sources of utilitarian moral philosophy are Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). I’ll making a few general observations about Utilitarianism and then we’ll briefly examine the outlines of Bentham’s version before turning to an examination of Mill’s more complex and refined version.

Background

But first I’ll give you a bit of background, but not too much. For many of the previous theories the environment that shaped the theories was pretty alien to modern people and so I thought I had to show you a fair bit of that environment before you could properly sympathize with those theories. For example, to know what Plato was talking about it really does help to know what the political system was in Plato’s time and some of the unfortunate history associated with it – you’ll recall that I talked about the conquest of democratic Athens by oligarchic Sparta and connected that to Plato’s critique of the democratic system. And for the Stoics and Augustine I talked about the decline of the ideal of the city state and the troubles of the collapsing Roman Empire and the influence of Jewish ethical ideas transmitted through the new Christian religion. And for Hobbes I talked about the very unpleasant effects he observed to follow from the overthrow of the English king and suggested that this may have had a lot to do with the very inflexible political doctrine that he devised. And so on for the others. For Bentham and Mill on the other hand not too much of this sort of thing will be necessary because we’re now moving into the really modern period and we are much closer to the society in which these ideas arose. 

Bentham

Bentham, of course, would still be counted as a man of the Enlightenment (which you can think of as being the 18^th C. AD.) Remember this was the time of the American and French Revolutions and their declarations of rights. This was when people were claiming that there were certain moral boundaries around persons that were there just because we’re humans, and these are somehow similar to the sorts of legal boundaries that are erected around persons by the civil society – for their own protection – but without there being any equivalent legislator or enforcer in the moral realm. Bentham’s pretty famous for thinking that all such talk is misguided – and was much more inclined to the somewhat Hobbesian view that rights were mereley conventions instituted for their practical effects. Thus he says in a famous passage that

That which has no existence cannot be destroyed -- that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense, -- nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle.

So much for terrorist language. What is the language of reason and plain sense upon the same subject? That in proportion as it is right or proper, i.e. advantageous to the society in question, that this or that right -- a right to this or that effect -- should be established and maintained, in that same proportion it is wrong that it should be abrogated[.][1]

We won’t actually have too much to say about Bentham’s views on these matters, but it’s interesting to see that the whole idea of rights was the subject of attack from the very beginning.

Mill

Now Mill was intentionally brought up as the intellectual successor of Bentham. His father, James Mill, was a close friend and follower of Bentham and he made Benthan the godfather of his son. Obviously, then, our Mill was part of a slightly different world from that of Bentham. Mill was active during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, and this was in England , where the new forces of industry first arose. There are a couple of significant points about this that may give a clue to the motivation that lay behind the development of some of Mill’s ideas.

In the first place, the Industrial Revolution produced a huge dislocation in society. Many of the features of English life that had seemed fixed by God turned out to be not so. The wealth of the new factory owners led to a deal of churning in the ruling elites – large numbers of newly rich people who would not previously have been of any account were raised to positions where their demands to have a say in the running of the country could not be ignored. The new economy focused even more intensively upon the cities and the rural focus of the preindustrial culture could not be preserved. One consequence of this was that various agitations for an equitable arrangement of the franchise occurred. Representation in parliament at the time was along strange traditional lines, and electorates were not determined according to population as they are these days. Many towns had only one or two electors, for example. More importantly, the flood of people to the towns and the factory centres led to an uprooting of people from their traditional social environments with a consequent tendency to crime and social disturbances. Poverty in the towns may not actually have been much worse than the poverty in the countryside previously, but to concentrate so many poor so visibly made their plight less tolerable, both to the concerned middle class and to the poor themselves who began to develop a class consciousness and to take collective action for their advantage. Trade unions arose, and cooperatives, and other forms of collective enterprise. There were also cultural reactions to this uprooting of old lifeways, and one of the most important of these was the rise of so-called Romanticism. It’s this sort of reaction that lies behind a lot of the poetry of the period. It’s basically an aesthetic reaction, that thinks things were all much more natural and harmonious and organic in the preindustrial period, and why can’t we all go back to that Eden before it was spoiled by the ‘dark, satanic mills’.

The other point to make is that this all occurred when the principles of economic liberalism espoused by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations were as close to universally accepted amongst the industrialists as they would ever be. This is the period – if any such ever existed – that we could call the period of laisser faire capitalism. Ideological movements in opposition to the general tendencies tended to be directed against this liberalism. This is the period when Comte, and Saint Simon, and Engels and Marx were forming their ideas of various forms of Socialism.

Mill’s ideas can be seen as an attempt to move forward the liberal and enlightenment project by finding ways to answer these various criticisms that didn’t involve a return to a fantasyland past or the elimination of liberties that had been hard won over the past several centuries.

The Utilitarian Thesis

Utilitarianism as a philosophical tendency can in some respects be traced back just about as far as philosophy goes, but as an actual doctrine it is credited to Jeremy Bentham (who coined the word in 1781) and his successors. Bentham himself noted his debt to Hume – as should we all – and it is certain that the nature of utilitarianism is just the type of thing that would appeal to Hume, for the utilitarian is what we call an ethical naturalist. He believes that moral facts are determined entirely by natural facts. To be specific, he believes that what makes an act a good act is some natural fact about the act; what makes a state of affairs a good state of affairs is some natural fact about the state of affairs; and so on. The natural fact that utilitarians take as being significant for morality is the happiness of persons. For Bentham, this is more or less a bare assertion (p. 526):

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.

Mill, on the other hand, has an actual argument to demonstrate, he thinks, that everything that is good is so because it is a form of pleasure. It is not, he admits, a proof, because he doesn’t think that fundamentally normative propositions are apt for proofs. Rather, it’s a set of considerations that might strongly suggest that hapiness is the source of good.

The only evidence we have, says Mill, that something is intrinsically desirable, is that we observe that people desire it just for itself. Mill compares this with the idea that the only evidence we have for something being visible is that some people see it (Utilitarianism, iv, 3). Mill claims that we have no evidence that people ever actually desire anything intrinsically other than pleasure or the absence of pain. In every other case, when people say that they desire, fine food, companionship, art, drink, virtue, etc. it can be seen that their desire is only for those things as a means to an end, and the end that they have in mind is their own pleasure. This argument has been criticised, of course, most often as relying upon an ambiguity in the word desirable; but the invalidity of any argument tending to establish that conclusion need not be seen as fatal to utilitarianism, since the claim could still be made that pleasure really is the only good. And this claim could be treated as a simple hypothesis of the same sort as scientific hypotheses. It claims to state an empirical truth about the world.

In any case the upshot of their cogitations is the following thesis – the Utilitarian thesis:

UT:          What is good is what conduces to the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Which gives rise in the obvious way to the Utilitarian principle.

UP:          Always act to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

(The phrase ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ Bentham saw in Joseph Priestley’s 1768 pamphlet, Essay on Government)

You can imagine how this principle might be welcomed as providing clarity and guidance in the otherwise vague and obscure world of moral evaluation. We are hereby provided with a principle and a single criterion that any act or state of affairs or etc. needs to be measured with respect to. The outcome of any such consideration, there is no immediate reason to doubt, could be as objectively establishable and as unarguable as any physical measurement.

Moreover, the principle appeals to our intuition that such a principle should be impartial. The form of Utilitarianism championed by Benham was purely quantitative, in that the particular form that these hedons appeared in (or to which they were due?) was irrelevant. One form of pleasure was exactly commensurable with any other form of pleasure. Similarly, the pleasures and pains of every person were exactly commensurable. One hedon for a peasant could be set against one hedon for a nobleman. The felicific calculus would take no notice of the person to which those units attached.

Finally, we really do think that morality has something to do with making life better for people. At least, we in the English-speaking world do. There are some who think that such a view of morality or of life itself is somehow demeaning. For example, Nietzsche, the famous philosopher and lunatic, said (Twilight of the Idols)

                Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that.

The Benthamite Version

So much for the general story. Now let’s look at some details in the modern development of this idea, beginning with Bentham. Bentham defended his utilitarian ideas in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He held that judgments of right or wrong, when they are meaningful at all and not merely expressions of individual sentiment, must appeal to the “principle of utility.” This is how he sums up the principle: 

By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves, or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness.[1]

Bentham thus describes a way of judging the moral character of acts in terms of their potential to increase general happiness, but how does he conceive of happiness?

Like several of the ancient/classical period philosophers that we’ve looked at, Bentham has a robustly hedonistic account of happiness. One condition is happier than another to the extent that it involves a greater preponderance of pleasure over pain. He also proposed a way of calculating this preponderance: a “hedonic calculus.” Bentham proposed that one might measure pleasures along seven dimensions, each one of which is assigned a numerical measure (positive for pleasure, negative for pain):

1.        intensity

2.        duration

3.        certainty or uncertainty

4.        propinquity or remoteness (whether the sensation is ready to hand or a long-term effect)

5.        fecundity (how likely it is that the sensation will yield further sensations of the same kind)

6.        purity (how likely it is that the sensation will be followed by sensations of the opposite kind)

7.        extent (how much the sensation is shared)

Indeed, one of the things that we most often smile over when we read Bentham and Mill, is their enthusiasm for a ‘felicific calculus’ or a ‘hedonic calculus’ that they imagine as an actual process by which the specific units of happiness or utility, called ‘hedons’ or ‘utils’, that are the consequence of some moral choice or other, are summed and compared with the hedons and utils of other choices. The outcome of this felicific calculus will give you the answer to your moral questions in just the same way that summing the debits and credits in your accounts will tell you whether you are in funds overall, or in queer street. The idea is that the sum of each such measurement would correlate with expected balance of pleasure and pain consequent upon a proposed action. Of course this is a very difficult calculation to make in practice, and normally we can only expect a quick and dirty approximation to it; however, according to Bentham, it represents the rational benchmark for judgments of good and bad consequence.

Some Initial Problems

There are many ways of criticising Bentham’s proposal for a hedonic calculus. First, it is unlikely that each dimension is measurable in the way that, say, duration or fecundity are measurable. Second, there is no obvious way of establishing a common measure between the various dimensions. How to measure the relative contributions of propinquity or certainty or duration? Is a mild but long lasting pleasure greater than a brief but intense one? But these are all merely technical problems with the felicific calculus itself. It is barely possible, I suppose, that some amazing brain-reading device could be devised that could answer those questions satisfactorily for the Benthamite. There are problems with utilitarianism which seem to go deeper than that. Here are several classic criticisms of it which you may find fairly telling.

1.                    The Assumption of Sufficient Knowledge

In attempting to come to a conclusion regarding some choice of possible acts the Utilitarian holds that the proper procedure is to sum the positive hedons (units of happiness/pleasure) that are the result of the act and to subtract the negative hedons (think of them as units of unhappiness/pain) that are consequences. This assumes that the calculator has the capacity to know what the outcomes of any action are going to be. But sometimes this is just not plausible, and it is entirely conceivable that the best efforts of the moral agent are not sufficient to determine the proper course of action. But best efforts butter no parsnips in the Utiitarian scheme of things, and the actor’s choice of action, which led to suboptimal outcomes, is morally bad to a degree that depends only upon how suboptimal the results were. Does this seem right?  

Imagine the situation of Mrs Hitler’s gynecologist. Is he to be praised because he sucessfully delivered a happy, bouncing little Adolf into the world. Or is he to be condemned for facilitating the deaths of millions?

2.                    Practicality

Even disregarding the implausibility of this assumption of sufficient knowledge, there is a problem with the practical demands that are made on a moral actor. An actor faced with making a decision about how to act has to carefully consider all the possible outcomes, weight them all by the likelihood of their occurrence, assign values (in hedons) to them, and do all this in real time. It seems hardly possible. The moral actor who really did attempt to weigh all their decisions by the felicific calculus would never reach a decision before other events, like the slow heat death of the universe, overtook them.

This is most apparent when one considers how far into the future these considerations have to be extended. Is it only the immediate effects that are important, or is it only as far as the immediate purpose behind the action, or is it 100 years or 1 million? There seems no reason not to extend the significant period into eternity.

Of course, people just don’t freeze up in their attempts to make moral decisions, and the reason for that is, the utilitarian may claim, is that we apply rules of thumb to help us make these calculations. They will tend to claim that these rules of thumb become known to us through our socialization. The rules become the property of a society that has come to a particular understanding of how to evaluate some moral choices. They may even claim – though I’m not aware without looking it up of any who do make this claim – that these rules of thumb have become innate in us through the operation of evolutionary pressure. We’re able to make such rapid moral calculations because those of our ancestors who got the correct moral answer

Formed more stable communities. (Just as those of us whose ancestors developed heuristics for approximate dynamic parabolic calculations are able to throw spears more accurately and catch more food.)

Actually, as far as these first two criticisms go, the more general utilitarian answer is that, generally, we aren’t supposed to use it. Bentham writes “It is not to be expected that this process [the hedonic calculus] should be strictly pursued previously to every moral judgment.”[1] So, the principle of utility defines what we ought to do, but we generally can’t use it to decide what to do. But how does this makes sense?  We can distinguish between a standard of right action and a moral decision procedure. For most of us, most of the time, the principle of utility cannot be used as a decision procedure. However, it operates as a standard of right action according to utilitarians. Say we decide how to act by consulting our intuitions about what is right. This is fine, says the utilitarian, provided that our intuitions about what is right are the best guide we have available to maximized utility. If it isn’t a good guide, the principle of utility will tell us this. And then we are obliged to find better short-cut methods of determining which action will bring about the best consequences.

3.                    Justice

Let’s continue with the critique. It also seems that the Utilitarian reasoning would conflict with some of our deepest intuitions about what is just or not. There are many famous examples that are used to make this point. Here’s one from Gilbert Harman. Suppose, for example, that a doctor has 5 patients that all need different transplant operations but they are going to die because there are no available donors. Then a chap walks in for his yearly physical. He’s in perfect health and has just the right organs to supply the other 5 patients. According to the utilitarian calculus the doctor’s course of action is quite clear: he must lie to the healthy patient and get him into the operating room where he can be cannibalised for spare parts. He’ll die, but the evil that he experiences is more than outweighed by the good that the other 5 experience. You probably don’t think that that is the right thing to do no matter what the final result is. There are similar examples with the authorities knowingly punishing innocent people in order to preserve the peace. Or is it allowable to torture a suspect whom you are sure knows where a bomb is planted that is going to explode in an hour somewhere where it will kill dozens? There’s also a scene in a novel by Dostoevsky where a fellow is asked: if you could save the world by killing an innocent girl, would you do so?

By the time we get to this last example, our automatic rejection of the utilitarian principle is probably less firm. There’s an old saying that the ends don’t justify the means; but if the ends are sufficiently important sometimes we simply do think that they justify some means. This is particularly the case in wars, but it occurs all the time. It is all very easy to make the ‘principled’ decision not to practise torture when you’re in a comfy university tutorial room, but things may look very different if you’re a policeman in Israel and you know that things are going to get bloody.

4.                    The ‘Pig Philosophy’

Recall Nietzsche’s dismissal of happiness as a goal in life. This, in a more moderate way, has been criticised by sane people too. The criticism can take two different forms.

The first form can be explained best by giving an hypothetical example. If the greatest happiness of the greatest number is going to be taken to be the measure of all goodness, then shouldn’t we think that being hooked up to a happiness machine is about the best form of existence that a human can aspire too. What more could be wanted than to have pleasure perpetually piped into one’s brain with not the slightest possibility of pain. And yet people think that this is not the best way to exist. They would say that it is better to experience real pleasures than to have these fake pleasures – even if the pleasures, qua pleasure, are indistinguishable by the pleasured. Is it really less pleasurable for Arnie in ‘Total Recall’ to be convinced that he is making love to a total babe than for him to be really making love? If not then where is the moral difference? Nowhere, according to the Utilitarians. Somewhere, according to most other folks.

From another point of view, the utilitarians originally, did not distinguish the pleasures of one person from another, not did they distinguish different types of pleasures. But this has the consequence that the pleasures of listening to a symphony, or reading a book, or contemplating Truth, or any of those ‘higher’ activities are no better or more worthy than the pleasures of gluttony or piggishness. Many beg to differ. And if Utilitrarianism has the consequence that it is no better to be ‘Socates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied’ then so much the worse for Utilitarianism.

5.                    Fairness

We should also worry about the fact that Utilitarianism doesn’t seem to care about how the hedons are distributed. Suppose you had a society of 4 people, and you had a choice of actions or rules that would result in the following distributions of hedons:

According to their felicific calculus all of the choices are exactly morally equivalent, since they all result in 4 hedons overall. But many would tend to think that the distributions themselves are significant morally – particularly if we have no other information about the moral situation.  

6.                    Lifestyle

And lastly, for us, there is the objection that taking Utilitarianism seriously means that all our life will be subordinated to the service of others. How can we justify that trip to Cairns to go scuba-diving when there are children starving in some third-world hell-hole that we have good reason to believe could be helped by our contributions? Taken to its obvious conclusion this would have us spending all our time on social-improvement projects to the complete exclusion of the pursuit of those things that we find give our own life meaning.

Mill’s Version

Let us now look at how the theory of utilitarianism was developed by that other great classical utilitarian – John Stuart Mill. 

John Stuart Mill’s two most important contributions to philosophical ethics are Utilitarianism and On Liberty. Utilitarianism is a defense of the position against the many criticisms to which it had been subjected since Bentham and other early utilitarians – including John Stuart’s father, James Mill – first articulated the position. In the process of defending classical utilitarianism, Mill works out an important and interesting modification of the theory. He states the principle of utility in much the way Bentham had:

The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals Utility or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in the proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to promote the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.[1]

This is to be an impartial standard. No person’s happiness counts for more than anyone else’s. An action is right or wrong depending on how it alters the happiness of all affected by it. Mill also makes the moral character of actions independent of the motives or will that underlies them. If a person saves a drowning man, says, Mill, it is a right action whether or not the person did it from noble motives. Motives and intentions only have an indirect influence on consequences of an action. In that respect Mill follows the lead of Bentham.

In order to solve the ‘Pig’ problem Mill moves away from Bentham’s view that the only morally relevant distinctions between kinds of pleasures were all quantitative, Mill draws a qualitative distinction between higher and lower pleasures. Higher pleasures are not greater, or more intense, or more stable, reliable and long-lasting than lower pleasures (these latter three aspects being Epicurus’s reasons for giving pleasures of the mind a preference over pleasures of the body). Higher pleasures are intrinsically superior to lower pleasures. What this means is that higher pleasures are those that would be preferred by any competent judge; and a competent judge is someone who, without being influenced by a moralistic preference for one sought of thing over another, has experience of both kinds of pleasures. those who have been in a position to sample both kinds of pleasures – say, both attendance at a performance of Hamlet and attendance at women’s mud wrestling – report that the first, more refined, pleasure is to be preferred. Thus it is allowable for the calculation of hedons to give greater weight to qualitatively better hedons than to qualitatively worse hedons. 

This is how Mill puts matters

If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.[2]

He concludes (Pojman, L. Ethical Theory pp. 166 f.)

Life … [is] not a life of rapture; but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasure, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.

Happiness is a matter of having greater and superior pleasures. And these turn out to be, largely, the pleasures of the mind. Happiness is not, then, closely correlated with contentedness. On Mill’s account, the happier of two people will quite likely be the less content and the less satisfied with their life:

Whoever supposes that this preference [for higher pleasures] takes place at a sacrifice of happiness – that the superior being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior – confounds the two very different ideas of happiness and content. It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. … 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.[3]

Mill’s version of utilitarianism makes judgments of right action even harder to come by than Bentham’s version. But he also insists upon the principle as the standard of rightness, not a decision procedure. He writes: “it is a misapprehension of the utilitarian mode of thought to conceive it as implying that people should fix their minds upon so wide a generality as the world, or society at large.” (Utilitarianism, Chapter II) Mill thinks that the commonsense or traditional rules of morality: keep promises, respect basic rights, etc. have the effect of maximizing utility over the long haul and it is therefore these principles – Mill calls them “secondary principles” that we should consult when deciding how to act.

Classical Utilitarianism has had many, many critics over the centuries. And it has been modified and elaborated in many ways as a result. Today, there is a bewildering variety of forms of utilitarianism, including objective and subjective versions (do actual consequences count or only foreseeable ones?); aggregative and pluralistic versions (is there one basis for good consequences, e.g. happiness, or preference satisfaction, or are there many bases for judging a consequence good or bad, e.g. happiness, knowledge, friendship, beauty, etc.?). There is also an important distinction between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism.

Act- and Rule-Utilitarianism

Those sorts of objections, and many others, have led some to adopt a modification of the original form of Utilitarianism. That original form we now describe as Act-Utilitarianism because it is stated in the form of a calculus that must be performed for each act independently. Thus the rule for evaluation of moral choices may be stated as:

AU:         An act is right if and only if it results in as much good as any available alternative.

The modification of this rule results in a form of utilitarianism that we call Rule-Utilitarianism which does not consider each act separately, but rather considers each act as being the consequence of following a rule. It is the rule rather than the act which is then taken to be the subject of moral calculation. Thus the rule for evaluation of moral choices may be stated as:

RU:         An act is right if and only if it is the consequence of following a rule that, with other rules, if followed would lead to as much happiness as any other rules.

We can see how this might be supposed to solve the problems above. The problem of practicality  we have already seen is supposedly to be avoided by the application of rules of thumb; now those rules of thumb (heuristics) become the rules which are actually required to be followed. There is no need to ‘make do’ with following rules as opposed to performing the correct act, the correct thing to do is just to follow the correct rule. The problem of justice, it might be thought can also be solved by this rule-following version, because there is an assumption that the rules to be followed are going to be the sorts of rules that will demand that the just course of action will be followed. Note in this case that if that happens it will be a mere coincidence, because the notion of ‘justice’ still has no place in the utilitarian scheme of things. It is perfectly possible, I suppose that a rule that appears to be completely at variance with our notions of justice could be approved by the utilitarians. Finally, the implausibility of sufficient knowledge, can be ameliorated by the rule version, because the rule version does not try to claim that the best outcome will always result from the application of any rule; only that overall the outcome will be better than the outcome from following other rules. It will be assumed that this sort of calculation of general/statistical data can be more tractable than any calculation of particular data; possibly in the same way that we’d be confident that a calculation of gas concentrations in different parts of a room after a gas bottle is opened is possible whereas we could not hope to determine where any particular gas molecule will end up. 

Just for an example, we might note that for an act-utilitarian there doesn’t seemto be any really good reason always to keep your promises. If you promise to repay a rich friend money that they loan you as soon as you get paid, they may give you the money and you’ll be ahead – very happy. But why would you actually repay them when you did get paid. You would then suffer the pain of giving away money and they – being rich would not be made much happier by getting the money. On the other hand, if you kept the money you would be very happy and they would be only a little put out. So that’s the choice you should make. The rule-utilitarian, by contrast, asserts that by following the rule ‘keep your promises’ happiness in society in the long run, and generally, is greater, because people are able to rely on each other for cooperation, and so on. And so if you were a RU you would repay the money and never mind how unpleasant you find it.

There is considerable scholarly dispute over whether Mill is an act utilitarian or a rule utilitarian, or perhaps neither. Mill himself did not use these terms or make clear distinctions between these different kinds of utilitarianism. His text is not completely clear on the issue, thus the room for scholarly debate.

Liberty

Let us turn from a discussion of utilitarianism to Mill’s views on freedom and autonomy, or as Mill calls it, “liberty.” What are Mill’s views about liberty? His essay On Liberty is one of the great statements of the liberal tradition, which emphasizes the rights and autonomy of individuals over the interests of the state or the community in general. Mill is concerned to protect individuals from coercive state regulation and control and from the tyranny of the majority in public opinion. The basic principle that Mill appeals to is now come to be called the “Harm Principle.” Here is Mill’s statement of it:

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. To justify that, the conduct form which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part of which merely governs himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.[1]

Mill is introducing a distinction between the private sphere of our lives and the public sphere. In the public sphere, we should only have our freedoms restricted to avoid harm to others. The private sphere includes “That portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only through their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation.”[2] The private sphere should be completely free from government or community interference. Thus we should have freedom of association, freedom of expression and thought, ambition, taste, life-style.

Mill emphasizes the significance of freedom of thought and expression. Censorship is a considerable evil. He writes “If all of mankind minus one where of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing the one person than he if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”[3]  Here is his justification:

…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.[4]

This is a utilitarian style of defense. Note that the value of freedom of expression is in the good that it does, not in the intrinsic worth or moral significance of freedom itself.

Is Mill’s Harm Principle compatible with utilitarianism? We have seen above Mill’s utilitarian justification of it when concerned with freedom of thought and expression. It is a contentious issue whether this justification succeeds. What about the general application of the Harm Principle? The main effect of the principle is to rule out the permissibility of paternalistic laws or regulations. But might not general happiness be often promoted by such laws? Mill’s response is to suggest that the damage done by paternalistic laws exceeds any possible benefit. We need to consult secondary principles because we cannot apply the utility principle directly (see the discussion above). In public life, we need to follow principles that are clear, easy to follow, not easily fudged and not open to abuse. Mill holds that the Harm Principle is the best of all available such principles, from a utilitarian point of view. When governing bodies decide what is in the interests of individuals, they are apt to misjudge the matter. People are generally the best, most reliable judges of their own good. Or governing bodies may substitute their own political interests for individual interest. For example, taxes on cigarettes may be advanced as paternalistic regulation (in essence we are fining people for smoking). However, someone might argue that the taxes are really a revenue measure. If so, then the Harm Principle may have been violated on no good utilitarian grounds. To avoid these ever present possibilities, it is important that the Harm Principle operate as an exceptionless principle. Or so Mill thinks.