Moral Philosophy - Utilitarianism

Greatest happiness for the greatest number.

Quantitative Hedonic Utilitarianism

Measures pleasure via the Felicific Calculus (intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent)

All pleasures are equal, like push-pin and poetry are equal.

Branch of ethics that focuses on determining how people should behave in order to achieve morally desirable outcomes. It provides guidelines for evaluating the rightness or wrongness of actions based on principles and values.

Moral theory that determines the rightness of an action based on its overall consequences for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people. It does not have any rules and anything is justifiable if it leads to the greatest happiness.

A moral theory that states an action is right if it leads to the greatest overall happiness for the most people in the long term, based on following general rules rather than evaluating each individual action separately such as ‘Do not kill’ or ‘Do not betray your integrity’.

Consequentialism looks at the outcome of an action to decide whether it is morally correct.

Hedonic is of a person that thinks that all and only pleasure is intrinsically valuable, and all and only pain is intrinsically not valuable.

Qualitative Hedonic Utilitarianism

Says that not all pleasures are equal and measures them via designating them into Higher or Lower pleasures.

Higher pleasures are human exclusive such as socialising or intellect.

You would not trade this pleasure for another pleasure even if it would cause you some discomfort.

Example: going to the gym may be painful, but it will make you happier, and generally look better, and you would chose this over staying at home binging food whilst watching tv.

Lower pleasures are not human exclusive; they can be felt by animals too.

Example: Sex, or eating food.

Non-hedonic Utilitarianism

Focuses on maximising people’s preferences even if it does not maximise pleasure.

Desire ≠ Preferences (what we want after reflecting on all facts)

Allows for a diversity of preferences such as pleasure or pain.

Example: carrying out wishes of the dead. It cant increase the happiness of that person, but let’s say a dead person wanted their money to go to the local shelter, then there is a moral obligation to do so.

A method developed by philosopher Jeremy Bentham to measure the pleasure or happiness produced by an action or decision. It involves assessing the intensity, duration, certainty, and propinquity of pleasure, as well as considering the extent of pain or unhappiness. The goal is to maximize overall happiness and minimize suffering.

Most people value reality/ truth over delusion.

Unfair

Does not take individual rights into account

Tyranny of the Majority

Asks people to betray their integrity

Does not take the moral status of particular relationships into account

The objection of intentions

In this thought experiment, Nozick asks us to imagine being plugged into a machine where you would only feel pleasure and no pain

You would not be able to unplug from the machine, and you would not know you are in the machine.

Most people would not accept the offer if given to them as they value reality and truth above all.

This challenges Hedonic Utilitarianism as Mill and Bentham value pleasure over everything else.

Act Utilitarianism says that we should do whatever maximises happiness for GHGN.

Anything is justifiable if it leads to GHGN… even torture/ killing innocent people for fun?

Possible response: Rule Utilitarianism - we should follow general rules which lead to GHGN in the long term.

How would we resolve a conflict where half of society would like to live in a communist society, but the other half would not.

A democratic solution? where the preferences of the majority are chosen over the minority could be a way to solve this, but it could lead to tyranny of the majority.

What criteria do we apply? Are we assessing total aggregate pleasure? (Bentham) Or the greatest happiness? (Mill) Or maximum satisfied preferences? (Singer)

How do we measure pleasure and happiness when they are subjective?

How do we know the consequences of any action or policy will be when the future is uncertain? How far into the future do we need to calculate?

How do we decide which beings to include? Only humans or sentient beings too?

We value our family and friends more than strangers, but Utilitarianism does not account for this.

For example, in the trolley problem, lets say the 1 person is your most loved one, and 5 strangers. Utilitarianism says that e should kill our most loved one to save the 5, but we value our loved ones more.

Utilitarianism is too demanding and therefore not a correct moral theory.

By focusing on our consequences of actions, Utilitarianism cannot make sense of the importance of motives.

Even if 2 acts have the same consequence, one is normally regarded as worse than another. For example, a driver that accidentally kills 3 people is morally better than someone who intentionally kills 3 people.

Surely the intentions of an act matters as one is an accident and the other is murder.

Utilitarianism focuses solely on GHGN. It fails to recognise the importance of a person’s integrity. For example, Jim finds himself in a moral dilemma, he must kill 1 person to save another 19 people, if he does not then all of them die.

Utilitarianism would obviously say that Jim should kill the 1 person, however, Jim has a strong moral objection to killing someone, therefore utilitarianism is not a correct moral theory.

Imagine a society of 1 million people where 95% of the population like enjoy seeing innocent people tortured.

In such a society, Act Utilitarianism would justify taking an innocent person and torturing them on live TV for the amusement of the 95%.

Torturing this one person would cause that one person a great deal of unhappiness, but the other 950,000 would outweigh that with their happiness.

So, utilitarianism would not condemn torturing this innocent person - utilitarianism would say that its wrong NOT to torture him.

In other words, torturing that person IS a good thing as it leads to GHGN.

We know that torturing innocent people is just wrong, regardless of the outcome.

Utilitarianism says that moral philosophy is about maximising happiness, but examples like the previous one show that there is more to moral philosophy than this.

Some things are just wrong even if they would increase the happiness for a large majority.

Although the previous example is a consequence of Act Utilitarianism, Rule Utilitarianism could argue the rule ‘‘do not punish innocent people’’ leads to greater happiness in the long run as people would live in constant fear if they are next to be tortured.

Let’s say you are in a situation where you have to break a rule. For example, there is an axe murderer that knocks on your door and is looking for your friend who is in the house with you, he asks you, ‘do you know him and his whereabouts?’

You can either lie, which goes against a rule, or tell the truth and get that person killed, which goes against a rule'.

Rule Utilitarianism would ask us to refer to Act Utilitarianism to calculate the overall happiness of each rule being broken.

But then it brings up the issues that are connected to Act Utilitarianism as it goes against general moral rules… it is tortological.

Rule utilitarianism could argue that we should stick to these rules no matter what as eventually it would lead to a happier society if no one broken these general morally accepted norms.

We know that pleasure is not the only good as demonstrated in Nozick’s pleasure machine, but preference utilitarianism can avoid people being forced in the machine as we should maximise and prioritise preferences over pleasure. If someone would prefer not to go into the machine, then it is ok.

What would we do in the case of conflicting moral preferences? If half of society wanted to go into the pleasure machine, and the others did not want to go?

If you resolve this with going with the greatest number, then you come back to the issue of tyranny of the majority.

Bentham says that an action is right regarding the ‘‘tendency which it appears to have’’ to maximise happiness. So, we only need to have reasonable expectation of what the consequences are based on past outcomes.

Mill also says that a moral decision is correct as long as you follow the general rules of rule utilitarianism

Pleasure is subjective

The objection no longer stands as even subjective feelings can be measured. For example, doctors asking patients to rate pain / 10.

Doctors will admit that it is not perfect, but accurate enough to understand a situation.

Rule Utilitarianism can solve this issue as we should be following general rules such as ‘‘do not kill’’ and ‘‘do not kill innocents’’.

The objection still stands as either it leads to rule fetishism where you cannot steal or lie to even save a life.

Or, it collapses back into Act Utilitarianism where breaking the rules is ok if it leads to the greatest happy.

One can be a utilitarian and embrace his moral feelings via rule utilitarianism by following rules such as ‘‘Do not betray your integrity’’.

Mill argues that a characters decisions and overall character does determine their future actions.

Motives matter as Mill argues that having a good character helps you become happier.

Therefore, motives and characters do matter ethically, but not intrinsically, but only insofar as they result in good consequences in line with consequentialism.

Most people do not have the opportunity to help a multitude of people so its good to focus on those people in our lives. However, these days we have extensive charities around the world so Mill’s response seems outdated.

The objection does not stand as Singer points out that there have been experiments at bringing up children without parents and it has not gone well.

So, if people did not value family more than random people, then people would be less happy.

Therefore, perhaps the happiness we gain from family is worth the unhappiness caused by the exclusion from our consideration who are not family.

In conclusion, none of utilitarianism is a convincing account of moral action.

Focusing solely on consequences leads to act utilitarianism to ignore preferences and moral principles such as justice which can lead to the tyranny of the majority.

But, following rules too strictly can lead to situations where the rule utilitarianism ignores obvious and avoidable negative consequences.

Since both Act and Rule Utilitarianism can be shown to lead to morally undesirable outcomes, neither theory provides a convincing account of moral action.