Recommended Reading

DeMarco, J. P. (1996) Moral Theory: A Contemporary Overview Boston:Jones & Bartlett. Pp. 161-173.

Pojman, L. P. (1995) Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong Belmont, CA:Wadsworth. Pp. 105-32

Mill, J. S. [1861] (1962) Utilitarianism London:Fontana

Bentham, J. [1789] An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation in Mill (1962) pp 33-77. (Perry and Bratman, pp. 526-529.)

Singer, P. (1979) Practical Ethics Cambridge:CUP

Smart, J. J. C. & Williams, B. (1973) Utilitarianism: For and Against Cambridge:CUP

http://ethics.acusd.edu/

Bentham

Born London, 1748; son of Jeremiah, a scrivener; called to the bar 1768; died 1832 (preserved and clothed corpse on display in University College, London).

Mill

Born London 1806; son of philosopher, James Mill; Philosopher and MP; died Avignon, France, 1873.

Introduction

Remember that I said there were two main classes into which theories that take ethics as talking about something real can be assigned: the teleological and the deontological. Today we shall look at the most important current version of teleological theory, which is Utilitarianism.

Original Utilitarianism

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, amongst them the great John Stuart Mill. 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. Indeed, one of the things that we most often smile over when we read Bentham and Mill, is their enthusiasm for a ‘felicific 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.

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.

Some Problems

Nevertheless, people had problems with the Utilitarian view of morality, and there 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.)

3.                   Justice

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..

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 tha thte 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.

More Problems

There are many more objections to utilitarianism that this modification leaves untouched. Here are just a few.

1.                   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 happines 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.

2.                   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.

3.                   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.

Sketch of Some Reponses

This is an ongoing debate, and Utilitarianism is still considered a significant moral theory, so you will not be surprised to hear that there are responses to those objectsions. I will just sketch them here.

In response to the objection that U is a philosophy only fit for pigs, Mill made a qualitative distinction between types of pleasures. He did this on the grounds that 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. 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.

In response to the objection that U gives no satisfactory scope for a personal life, the RU can say that a rule allowing such scope is just the sort of rule that a RU system would support. This has been an objection much urged against Peter Singer’s recent campaign for utilitarian considerations to be put at the centre of the moral life.