Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is…

• A consequentialist moral theory  - morality is judged solely on the consequences of the action 

  • As opposed to intentionalism - the intention of the agent determines the morality of the action

• A hedonistic moral theory - pleasure, or the absence of pain, is the most important principle in determining the morality of a potential course of action.

  • Hedonism identifies the good with pleasure

  • Utilitarianism says that pleasure is the ultimate Good, the only thing of intrinsic value. All actions are ultimately done for the sake of pleasure.

  • Happiness/pleasure is intrinsically good - good for its own sake not because of what other goods it leads to

  • Morally good actions are those that produce the greatest amount of happiness and the minimum amount of pain, for the greatest number of people

  • Happiness = pleasure and the absence of pain

• Discusses morality using terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’

  • Suggests a spectrum of goodness/badness

• Psychological Hedonism - each person is solely motivated by their own happiness (Bentham) 

• (Moral) Hedonism - each person should be motivated by their own happiness 

• Utilitarianism - each person should be motivated by the general happiness

• Psychological hedonist - (and a moral hedonist) 

• Act Utilitarian - Each action is individually judged as right or wrong depending on the extent to which the actual consequences of that action created pleasure/absence of pain for the majority of people. 

• Quantitative hedonist - there is no better or worse type of pleasure, so all that matters is quantity of pleasure, rather than quality of pleasure. 

• Came up with the felicific calculus

• His beliefs are:

  • Whether an action is right/good or wrong/bad depends solely on its consequences

  • The only thing that is good is happiness

  • No individual’s happiness is more important than anyone else’s

  • ‘Every individual in the country counts for one; no individual for more than one’

• The “principle of utility” is the principle that actions are to be judged by their usefulness in this sense: their tendency to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness

• The principle by which you judge actions ... as good to the extent that they tend to maximise happiness for the greatest number, and bad to the extent that they tend to maximise unhappiness for the greatest number.

•  Utility -  Bentham means ‘usefulness’ in bringing about happiness.

• Aka hedonistic or utility calculus

• Method of quantifying happiness to determine the morality of actions

• Was intended for use at a legislative level (as bentham was a psychological hedonist so believed people will only try to bring themselves pleasure/maximise their own pleasure)

• Lawmakers ensure that what is beneficial to the individual is beneficial to the group 

  • e.g. I may want to take your money as it will bring me happiness. But if this is illegal then I will not want to take your money as I'll go to prison (my happiness won’t be maximised). So laws ensure happiness for the group.  

• According to Bentham, ‘quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry’

• Looks at:

  • Intensity: how strong the pleasure is

  • Duration: how long the pleasure lasts

  • Certainty: how likely the pleasure is to occur

  • Propinquity: how soon the pleasure will occur

  • Fecundity: how likely the pleasure will lead to more pleasure

  • Purity: how likely the pleasure will lead to pain

  • Extent: the number of people affected

• It's impractical to compare pleasures -

  • How do you decide between a longer-lasting dull pleasure and a short-lived but more intense pleasure?

• Quantity isn’t necessarily the only important factor

  • Some pleasures might be ‘superior’ to others

  • A small quantity of superior pleasures> a large quantity of bad quality pleasures

Felicific calculus and quantitative hedonism can result in unintuitive conclusions

• For example, imagine a scenario where a nasty murder has taken place and an angry crowd is baying for blood. In other words, it would make the crowd happy to see the perpetrator apprehended and punished for his crimes.

• But what if the police can’t catch the murderer? They could just lie and frame an innocent man instead.

• If the crowd believes the murderer has been caught (even if it’s not really him) then they would be just as happy whether it was the actual perpetrator or not.

• And let’s say the crowd is 10,000 people. Their collective happiness is likely to outweigh the innocent man’s pain at being falsely imprisoned. After all, there are 10,000 of them and only one of him (hence, tyranny of the majority).

• In this situation an act utilitarian would have to say it’s morally right to imprison the innocent man. In fact, it would be morally wrong not to!

• So Utilitarianism pays absolutely no notice to individual rights/liberties - cannot account for human rights which is counter intuitive

A quantitative approach arguably makes utilitarianism a ‘doctrine of swine’ in that it reduces the value of human life to the same simple pleasures felt by pigs and animals (Mill responds to this)

• Roger Crisp’s thought experiment)

  • An angel gives you a choice:

  • You can choose to live a full, active and successful human life. Or you can choose to live a mildly pleasant oyster's life. To make the choice more difficult, the angel tells you that if you choose Haydn's life, it will last just 77 years. But if you choose the oyster's life, you can have it for as long as you like

  • Mill says people will choose Haydn because quality of pleasure is preferable to quantity of pleasure (although Bentham would favour the life of the oyster)

• Nozick asks us to imagine a machine capable of simulating any experience we might desire. He gives us the opportunity to connect ourselves to the machine for the rest of our lives in order to feel the pleasure felt when we experience whatever life we have programmed the machine to simulate. 

• Nozick doesn’t think that people will choose this option, suggesting that human beings value something more than pleasure, criticising psychological and moral hedonism.

• People wish for the cause of pleasure to be real - pleasure or happiness on its own won’t suffice.

• We don’t wish to experience ‘false’ pleasures even if we would never discover that the root of our happiness is false. 

• We value states of affairs over pleasure

• This is problematic for psychological hedonism as it disproves the theory that people are solely motivated by their own happiness and problematic for moral hedonism as if most people aren’t motivated solely by their own pleasure, it's counter-intuitive to assume that they should be. 

• However, one might argue that people will only choose not to enter the machine as they believe that by choosing not to experience ‘false’ pleasures, they will become happier. The reason people choose not to enter the machine is that they associate truth with pleasure and so pleasure is still intrinsically good and the ultimate goal. 

Act utilitarianism - acts are judged as good or bad depending on the extent to which that individual action  brings about the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

This is Benthamite utilitarianism. 

• The end justifies the means 

  • e.g. killing an innocent person to avoid the death of 10 innocent people (trolley problem)

  • Moral integrity is often compromised (bernard williams’ jim and the indians)

• Its impractical to follow

  • It’s often impractical to work out beforehand how much happiness each action might bring. 

  • Following rules or principles is the only feasible way to make moral decisions

• Tyranny of the majority - 

  • As a result of the end justifies the means 

  • e.g. Jeremy Kyle show - millions delight in the life of an individual being destroyed

• As no individual’s happiness is more important than anyone else’s, you shouldn’t value friends/family

  • That £10 you spend buying your mum a birthday present made her happy, sure, but it would have made a poor farmer in Mozambique happier. 

  • So, buying your Mum a birthday present was morally wrong according to utilitarianism.  

  • The time you spent with your friends made them happy, but volunteering at the local soup kitchen would have increased the greatest good for the greatest number more effectively. 

  • So, you acted wrongly by spending time with your friends because this did not maximise the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

Qualitative Hedonist - distinguishes between higher and lower pleasures

• People experience higher pleasures of thought, feeling, and imagination always prefer them to the lower pleasures of the body and the senses. 

• Higher pleasures are more valuable than simple pleasures

• Defends utilitarianism from the  ‘doctrine of swine’ objection,by arguing that humans prefer higher pleasures over lower pleasures because they value dignity – and dignity is an important component of happiness. 

• Supported by Roger Crisp’s  Haydn and the oyster:

  • In his book analysing Mill’s Utilitarianism, Roger Crisp presents the thought experiment of Haydn and the Oyster, which goes as follows:

  • An angel gives you a choice:

  • You can choose to live a full, active and successful human life. Or you can choose to live a mildly pleasant oyster's life. To make the choice more difficult, the angel tells you that if you choose Haydn's life, it will last just 77 years. But if you choose the oyster's life, you can have it for as long as you like

  • Mill says people will choose Haydn because quality of pleasure is preferable to quantity of pleasure (although Bentham would favour the life of the oyster)

‘’It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

• How do we know  what pleasures are higher?

  • Ask those with adequate experience of both and who are capable of enjoying both - the pleasure favoured by the most is ‘higher’

  • One pleasure is only higher if it is chosen over the greater quantity of another 

  • A higher pleasure is better and favourable even if it results in less pleasure

• Higher pleasures:

  • MENTAL PLEASURES

    • Poetry

    • Learning

    • family/friends 

    • Love 

    • Music

  • DISTINCTLY HUMAN

• Lower pleasures:

  • PHYSICAL PLEASURES

    • Eating

    • Drinking

    • Sport

    • Sex

  • ANIMALISTIC

• This distinction is snobbish/elitist

  • Saying reading poetry results in a higher quality of happiness than watching football is elitist 

  • Mill presents this subjective distinction as objective and true for everyone when it just isn’t    

• Strays too far from hedonistic utilitarianism

  • If a higher pleasure which sometimes actually results in less pleasure is favourable, then surely we’re no longer seeking to maximise pleasure

  • The idea of maximising pleasure (central to the principle of utility) is by definition to do with quantity 

• Too complicated

  • One of utilitarianism strengths is its simplicity

  • Adding another element to consider just complicates things

Mill says that the principle of Utility is a first principle and thus cannot be proven

So he claims we can put forward arguments which suggest that what utilitarianism claims is true, although this can’t be proven.

He tries to ‘prove’ that happiness is the ultimate good 

• Step 1
  Just as the only evidence that something is visible is that it can actually be seen, the only evidence that something is desirable is that it is actually desired. Each person desires their own happiness, therefore each person’s happiness is desirable.

• Step 2
  If each person desires their own happiness, then the aggregate of all persons desire the general happiness. Therefore the general happiness is a good/desirable

• Step 3
  (general) Happiness is the ultimate good. Although people are motivated by certain things other than happiness as an end in themselves (eg. love, money, friends), they only want these things because they have come to associate them with happiness. Thus, happiness is still ultimately the ONLY good, because the other goods are only goods by virtue of their association with happiness.

• Step 1

  • Mill uses the word ‘desirable’ in two different senses in the same argument. First he uses it as if it means ‘capable of being desired’, then he uses it as if it means ‘worthy of being desired’

  • If desirable, in the final conclusion, has the same meaning as the one in the second premise, then all the argument has proved, is that it’s possible to desire happiness, not that happiness should be desires

  • Or, if desirable is taken to mean ‘worthy of being desired’ in both cases, then the analogy with ‘visible’ does not work

  • He is guilty of equivocation (using a term with more than one meaning misleadingly)

• Step 2

  • Fallacy of the composition:

  • If everyone in the world wants to be the richest person in the world, that’s not the same as saying that everybody being the richest person in the world would be desirable for everybody in the world?

  • making the mistake of thinking that something that applies to each part of something, will automatically belong to the whole.

  • So just because each person wants their own happiness, it doesn't mean each of us also wants the general happiness

• Step 3

  • People can desire other things than happiness, and even at times when it won’t bring them happiness.

  • E.g someone loves money because, with it, they can buy a lot of things which makes them happy. The only reason they want money is for the happiness it brings them. It’s a means to an end. However with time, they start to associate money with the happiness it brings them, and therefore, it becomes something that they desire, even when it wouldn’t bring them happiness.

  • ALSO nozick's machine

Rule utilitarianism: we should follow general rules that maximise pleasure and minimise pain (even if following these rules doesn’t maximise pleasure in every specific instance)

• Mill recommends using certain rules as a guideline when making moral decisions-  ‘secondary principles’. 

• These secondary principles allow us to maximise happiness more effectively than just applying the principle of utility directly to individual actions - the most effective way of maximising utility is following secondary principles/rules

• These are rules which experience has shown tend to produce the greatest happiness 

  • e.g we should not kill others 

• Mill believes that people following these rules will bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people MORE EFFECTIVELY THAN people trying to decide for each individual action 

• If two secondary principles clash then we need to revert to the utility principle (the primary principle) to determine which of the rules to follow

Rule utilitarianism allows us to overcome issues of act utilitarianism (tyranny of the majority, difficulty in calculation) 

• The belief that we ought to keep to a rule no matter what the consequences of breaking it may be in a particular circumstance.

• The following of the rule gives an act its moral status (while the rule itself gets its moral status form whether or not it tends to bring about utility) 

• So an act that doesn’t maximise utility in this case is morally right if it follows a rule which tends to maximise utility

• This can lead to counter-intuitive actions, where moral principles or rules are kept to at the cost of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people

  • e.g. if ‘dont lie’ is a rule, then it's morally wrong to lie to save a friend's life

• The belief that you should make exceptions to rules if this would maximise happiness in that particular case.

•  Secondary principles (rules) that tend to maximise utility only need to be followed to if they would maximise utility in that particular case.

If we have a moral duty to check in each particular case whether breaking the moral rule would maximise utility then weak rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism

• On this model (suggested by Philosopher Richard Hare) , act utilitarianism is the judge, while rule utilitarianism is the principle of deliberation for humans (most of the time) 

  • So we retain the underlying principle of act utilitarianism - the idea that in retrospective judgement, the moral value of an act is determined by the amount of pain or pleasure that it creates 

  •  but we acknowledge that on the whole, if humans follow rules that are designed to maximise utility, utility will be maximised to a greater extent than if people always used act utilitarianism in determining their behaviour.

• A form of non-hedonistic utilitarianism that argues that what we should maximise is not pleasure, but the satisfaction of people’s preferences (desires)

• The best policy will be that which maximises the satisfaction of preferences over their dissatisfaction.

• Suggests that our preferences coincide with what is good for us

• Avoids Nozick's criticism, 

• Is compatible with democracy - it's easier to know how many preferences you have satisfied, than to know how much you have maximised pleasure

• Less complicated to work out what the right action is 

• Less counterintuitive conclusions than hedonistic:

  • According to preference utilitarianism, a husband who cheats on his wife (without her knowledge, and without this affecting her happiness negatively) is acting immorally, because she would prefer not to be cheated on and lied to. 

  • A hedonistic utilitarian may struggle to explain why such an action is immoral, and might instead have to acknowledge that the husband’s infidelity can only be immoral if the wife is made unhappy by it. This seems counterintuitive to some.

• People might have bad preferences due to ignorance/incompetence

  • Ignorance: e.g. I have a preference for some food which unbeknownst to me is carcinogenic.

  • Incompetence: e.g. a person in an illness refuses water when they need it.

• It is difficult to weigh up preferences

  • Preference utilitarianism needs something equivalent to the felicific calculus.

  • Imagine some people are for, and some against, building a proposed airport, then what is the morally right thing to do?

  • Is it a question of numbers, or does strength of preference make a difference?

• Move from actual to informed desires. It is not the satisfaction of any preferences that improves welfare, but the satisfaction of the preferences of fully informed competent agents. 

  • Were I fully informed about the food I would no longer prefer it, for I have a settled preference for good health which has priority over my preference for gastronomic pleasure. 

  • Were I not ill I would want to drink the water. 

• This position allows for error but still holds that whether something is good for a person depends ultimately on what they would want or value. 

• What is good for us is still determined ultimately by our preferences.

• All preferences made by informed agents are those which would maximise happiness as by ‘bad preference’ we tend to mean ‘preference that doesn’t result in pleasure’. 

  • In this way, preference utilitarianism is at its core a version of hedonistic utilitarianism and so cannot avoid criticisms regarding happiness being the ultimate goal.

The theory fails to capture the importance of what are often called adaptive preferences, that is preferences that have been changed to fit circumstances. The point is of particular importance in considering the effects of deprivation on well-being. One response to deprivation is cut one’s aspirations accordingly, to stop wanting what you can’t have.

‘A thoroughly deprived person, leading a very reduced life, might not appear to badly off in terms of the mental metric of desire and its fulfilment, if the hardship is accepted with non-grumbling resignation’.

• Should we respect the preferences of the dead? (say a writer expressed a preference for their last work not to be published). Hedonistic utilitarianism would say that the work should be published if it would bring people happiness 

• Should we count the preferences of animals as well as humans? How can we, since animals cannot express preferences? So hedonistic utilitarianism seems better able to account for our moral duty towards animals

• e.g. what if I would prefer not to have you tell someone my secret but that person would prefer to know my secret

• Response: you just need to weigh up each preference to see which should be satisfied?

• Nozick’s experience machine - we value things other than happiness  

  • Nozick asks us to imagine a machine capable of simulating any experience we might desire (even pain, both higher and lower pleasure). He gives us the opportunity to connect ourselves to the machine for the rest of our lives in order to feel the pleasure felt when we experience whatever life we have programmed the machine to simulate. 

  • Nozick doesn’t think that people will choose this option, suggesting that human beings value something more than pleasure, criticising psychological and moral hedonism (in line with Mill's proof which begins with psychological hedonism so the machine disproves the proof of utilitarianism).

  • This also criticises qualitative hedonism as both higher and lower pleasures are simulated in the machine, yet the assumption is that we will not enter the machine

  • People wish for the cause of pleasure to be real - pleasure or happiness on its own won’t suffice.

  • We don’t wish to experience ‘false’ pleasures even if we would never discover that the root of our happiness is false. 

  • We value states of affairs over pleasure

  • This is problematic for psychological hedonism as it disproves the theory that people are solely motivated by their own happiness and problematic for moral hedonism as if most people aren’t motivated solely by their own pleasure, it's counter-intuitive to assume that they should be. 

In the context of Nozick’s thought experiment:

One might argue that people will only choose not to enter the machine as they believe that by choosing not to experience ‘false’ pleasures, they will become happier. The reason people choose not to enter the machine is that they associate truth with pleasure and so pleasure is still intrinsically good and the ultimate goal. 

Felicific calculus and quantitative hedonism can result in counter-intuitive conclusions

• For example, imagine a scenario where a nasty murder has taken place and an angry crowd is baying for blood. In other words, it would make the crowd happy to see the perpetrator apprehended and punished for his crimes.

• But what if the police can’t catch the murderer? They could just lie and frame an innocent man instead.

• If the crowd believes the murderer has been caught (even if it’s not really him) then they would be just as happy whether it was the actual perpetrator or not.

• And let’s say the crowd is 10,000 people. Their collective happiness is likely to outweigh the innocent man’s pain at being falsely imprisoned. After all, there are 10,000 of them and only one of him (hence, tyranny of the majority).

• In this situation an act utilitarian would have to say it’s morally right to imprison the innocent man. In fact, it would be morally wrong not to!

• So Utilitarianism pays absolutely no notice to individual rights/liberties - cannot account for human rights which is counter intuitive

  • Unlike act utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism has no struggle in justifying the importance of human rights

    • A rule utilitarian could easily argue that enforcing the right to life through rules such as ‘do not kill’, would tend to maximise utility. An act utilitarian on the other hand often ends up condoning situations where fundamental human rights are disregarded.

• When do consequences end?

  • Which action is morally better, spending an afternoon picking litter in the park, or spending an afternoon visiting your grandmother in an old persons’ home?

  • A utilitarian, being a consequentialist, needs to look at the consequences of each action. 

  • Let’s say on the litter picking afternoon, someone saw you and felt inspired to help, but when picking the litter happened to get some dog poo on their hand which put them in a bad mood. The person then went home and, being in a bad mood, had a go at their wife. Their wife left the house in a huff, but got hit by a car while crossing the road and sustained life altering injuries.

  • So according to utilitarianism, it was an immoral action to go litter picking (counter-intuitive and unfair to condemn someone with good intentions)

• Average or Total happiness?

  • Given that we need to maximise happiness -  “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”

  • Are we talking about total or average happiness?

  • E.g. is sustaining a population of 1,000 relatively happy people each with better than a population of 500 extremely happy people (the first case has a higher total happiness, the second has a higher average happiness)

• Distribution of happiness

  • If you win the lottery is it better to give 5 people (of equal socio-economic backgrounds) a car or 1 of the 5 a house?

    • Although arguably the first is better because their families will also benefit maximising the greatest happiness of the greatest number (higher fecundity) 

• Whose happiness counts?

  • Our criteria for who is a ‘person’ and therefore worthy of being treated morally, should only depend on their capacity to feel pain and pleasure.

  • Animals are capable of feeling pain and so Singer considers them persons

  • With Preference utilitarianism, do the preferences of dead people count?

• ‘Every individual in the country counts for one; no individual for more than one’

• Utilitarianism seems to ask us to be impartial - we should aim to maximise happiness at all times, so when maximising utility would require us to let a family member die in order to maximise happiness, this is what we should do.

  • e.g. one should donate their sons heart and liver so that 2 strangers can live

  • This is very counterintuitive

• Rule utilitarianism can say that it is morally preferable, in certain situations, to prioritise family members and loved ones when making moral decisions, because as a rule, people acting out of love for family and friends, will tend to maximise utility.

• Bernard Williams argues that utilitarianism requires us to do things that undermine our personal integrity.

• His argument looks like this:

  • P1: Personal integrity requires there are things (X) that you would not do

  • P2: Using a utilitarian framework, it is always possible to create a scenario whereby X is the right thing to do

  • C: Therefore utilitarianism undermines our personal integrity

• e.g. Jim and the Indians thought experiment

  • Essentially Jim is given the opportunity of killing one person in order to spare the lives of others or else all of them will be killed

  • Act Utilitarianism says it's immoral not to kill the one

  • This goes against Jim’s personal integrity

  • Rule utilitarianism says he doesn’t need to kill them

Intentions of the individual

• Utilitarianism disregards the intention of the person carrying out the action. This is problematic because it goes against our moral intuitions.

  • For example:
    Person A visits their grandma once a week and helps her with some chores, and keeps her company. Although this is time consuming and tiring, they do it anyway, out of a sense of duty.

  • Person B also visits their grandma once a week, helping out in the same way, but they do it because they hope they will be left money in the will. 

  • An (act) utilitarian would have to conclude that the two actions are morally equivalent.

  • This is counterintuitive

• One response is that although they are morally equivalent, person As actions are more praiseworthy than those of person B

• But then these concepts are meaningful if they aren’t linked with morality