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Utilitarianism

The gist

“Act so as to cause the maximum happiness to the maximum number of people.”

What do you think of this as a piece of advice?

This is the way to live, you are told. Whenever you have have a choice of action do your best to work out what causes the most happiness and do that.

What reasons might you have for believing the Utilitarian principle, for taking it to be your guide?

The great defence of Utilitarianism is J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, first published in 1861, in a periodical.

Here is a fuller characterisation by Mill of Utilitarianism:

“The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”
J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter 2

The theory behind Mill’s Utilitarian principle

There is a theory underlying this principle of right action. It is not easy to be sure what the theory is, but here is Mill’s statement of it:

“that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends” (Mill, Utilitarianism, Ch 2)

So the claim is: you should pursue maximum happiness because happiness is the only thing that is desirable for its own sake. (Lots of other things are desirable, but only because they yield happiness.)

(So, if someone wants to have a good meal, it can only be because they want happiness, and see eating well as a way of getting happiness. If somebody wants power, it can only be because they think they will get happiness from wielding power.)

Mill’s arguments for the claim that you should pursue happiness

He thinks that if he can show that happiness is the one thing that is desirable in itself, he has shown that happiness is indeed the one thing we should pursue.

So his task is to show that happiness is indeed the one thing that is desirable.

How does he attempt to show this? By claiming that when you study what we know of human beings you will find that happiness is indeed the one thing that everyone desires.

It’s like visibility, he says: the way to tell whether something is visible is to see if people actually do see it. In just that way, the only way to tell if something is desirable is to see if people actually do desire it.

GE Moore excoriated Mill for committing the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ at this point. Moore saw him as going straight from fact to value, which Moore thought had to be a straightforward error. Moore saw Mill as wanting us to draw from the fact that people desire happiness the value that happiness is desirable.

(You sophisticated persons, persuaded by thoughts of promises and roles, may say No to Moore on this point: all we have done, you may say, is discover a third example which reveals the so-called naturalistic fallacy to be no fallacy at all… If it is a fact that something is desirable, you may insist, it follows directly that we ought to desire it.)

The reason doesn’t amount to proof

Mill himself says it doesn’t amount to proof, proof at least in a narrow sense. But in a phrase that has become famous – like many phrases of this lucid and brilliant writer – Mill says that ‘considerations may be presented capable of determining the intellect either to give or withhold its assent to the doctrine; and this is equivalent to proof.’

MacIntyre suggests Mill is not relying on any deduction of value from fact. The point he is trying to make is this: if anyone tries to say ‘happiness is not the one and only thing desirable’ s/he is open to the following retort: Why, isn’t happiness the one and only thing that you desire?

By studying people the world over and throughout time you will conclude Mill claims that everyone does indeed have happiness as their one and only goal. So when anyone claims that it may not be the one and only thing to be desired, they are open to the retort, well it is for you, and it is for everyone else. Mill claims this may not be proof, but it is support, and as strong support as you could demand.

Issues

Why bother about other people’s happiness?

Even if it is true that an individual should pursue happiness (and only happiness) why should they seek to maximise happiness in general - as distinct from happiness for themselves?

It is relevant that Utilitarianism was articulated in the Modern period as the criterion by which laws and social institutions were to be judged. (by Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)). If the good of each individual resided in the achievement of happiness, then you could understand people saying that social arrangements should aim for maximising happiness for as many people as possible (however that is disambiguated).

But if the problem is not What social arrangements should we have? but How should I live? it is not at all obvious that if happiness is my aim I should strive for the maximisation of everybody’s happiness. Why shouldn’t it be to maximise the happiness of myself?

Bentham is not obviously consistent in his answer to this question, but one clear thing that he says is: the way to pursue your own happiness is to pursue everybody’s. That is to say, it is prudent to pursue everyone’s happiness. Maximising happiness for everyone will maximise it for you.

To the same question. J.S.Mill says rather taughtly that other people’s happiness will bring happiness to you. This is perhaps the same as what we’ve just noticed Bentham saying.

But Mill also says:

"As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires [a person] to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator." (Mill, Utililitarianism, Ch 2)

So here Mill seems to be saying a person has no reason to treat him or herself as a special case: if the rule is to maximise happiness it’s no good maximising your own happiness at the expense of other people’s. You have to maximise happiness for the whole system, of which you are just one part.

You may ask: where on earth does this come from?

Is it some kind of appeal to rationality? – you have no reason to prioritise your own interest and so cannot rationally work for your own happiness at the expense of anybody else’s?

But what answer can be given by utilitarianism to the question: why should I behave rationally?

The only answer would have to be: by behaving rationally you maximise happiness.

Dare we ask: Who’s happiness? Mine or everyone’s?

If we say Everyone’s we are left with no answer to the question: But why should I be interested in that?

Summary

Two answers to the question Why should I work for the happiness of everyone?

1. Because that way you maximise your own happiness.
2. Because you have no reason to prioritise your own happiness over other people’s.

The ‘ultimate good’

What would it be for for Mill to be wrong about our ‘ultimate good’? He says it is happiness. Can we think of what it would be like for people to pursue happiness, but for the ultimate good to be something else?

Prompt: Can you think of a scenario in which Mill was manifestly wrong – ie where people pursued happiness OK but where in fact the ‘ultimate good’ was something else?

This highlights the question: what does ‘ultimate good’ mean?

If there were a Creator you could give sense to ‘ultimate good’. God might want us all to turn out to be artists. Then if we wasted our time chasing happiness maybe the criticism might be that we were not pursuing our ultimate good - ? Do you think? (I know this isn’t very convincing!)

Think of the feeling you get when you discover your partner in bed with someone else. Could that be the ‘ultimate good’?? How might we make sense of that suggestion?

What if we take seriously the claim that we are the product of blind evolution? Could natural selection have given us an ultimate good? Survival suggests itself. It could have hardwired into us a single goal for all our behaviour: all the computation determining what actions we undertake might be calculations that worked out what option would maximise our survival chances. This surely gives a possible sense to ‘ultimate good’.

Supposing this was the case. What would be its bearing on morality? What would it tell us about how we ‘ought’ to behave?

It wouldn’t say anything would it?

This would be because that view of the human being, the biological view, would not have any room for morality. It would imply that there was no such thing.

(We might have duties as a cobbler or a seamstress, but not as a human being.)

Is a principle of action based on feeling (eg pleasure) demeaning?

Critics have often said that utilitarianism is somehow demeaning, that it takes a very ‘low’ view of human beings and their capacities, potential, dignity. Put the Utilitarian claim that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote pleasure alongside the Kantian position that 'the moral call upon human beings is to exercise their autonomy as rational beings, and act as citizens of the kingdom of ends' - and you get the sense in which Utilitarianism might be pilloried as base and degraded.

But is this charge sustainable, or just a rhetorical trick? Mill says it isn’t sustainable. When Utilitarianism puts ‘pleasure’ on the pedestal, and says this is what moral actions aim at, it does not have to mean pleasure of the least complicated kind.

There are several varieties of pleasure, and, what is more, says Mill, some pleasures are more valuable than others:

“If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a 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.” (Mill, Utilitarianism, Ch 2)

So, three claims: there are different varieties of pleasure, some varieties are more valuable than others and the way to see which is to see which varieties are actually preferred by those who have experience of all.

Mill thinks a life that employs the higher faculties is more valuable than one that doesn’t:

“Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties.” (Mill, Utilitarianism, Ch 2)

And he thinks this is because those who choose it judge that it is this type of life that yields the most pleasure.

The big difficulty with Utilitarianism: Justice is said sometimes to conflict with it.

Is there no conflict between the Utilitarian principle and justice? Mill argues there isn’t, and summarises his argument in this way:

“It has always been evident that all cases of justice are also cases of expediency: the difference is in the peculiar sentiment which attaches to the former, as contradistinguished from the latter. If this characteristic sentiment has been sufficiently accounted for; if there is no necessity to assume for it any peculiarity of origin; if it is simply the natural feeling of resentment, moralised by being made coextensive with the demands of social good; and if this feeling not only does but ought to exist in all the classes of cases to which the idea of justice corresponds; that idea no longer presents itself as a stumbling-block to the utilitarian ethics.” (Mill, Utilitarianism, Chapter V)

The difficulty is often put by sketching a dramatic scenario. There are plenty of horrible real world situations to draw on, where harming an innocent person is thought by some to be defensible because that way though one person suffers many more people benefit. The ‘punishment’, torture, execution of innocent people is often resorted to in war or armed struggle, and is often defended on the grounds that much greater suffering is thereby avoided and so the Utilitarian principle served ...

The example I want to put is not drawn from these immensely serious and currently high-profiled situations, which I think are often too grave to be a decent topic for abstract theoretical classroom discussion, but they will be in our minds, and you indeed might prefer to think in terms of them.

But let me at any rate put a fantasy example, one discussed by Nielsen (Sterba, ed., Ethics: The Big Questions, Malden, MA, etc., 1998, Blackwells, p.143).

A group of potholers are trapped in a cave, with the water rising, as a result of the person at the front, of portly build, getting stuck in the entrance. He gets his head out OK, but his body then gets stuck.

Happily for him, though the water is building up behind him, his head’s being out means that his life is not threatened by the rising water.

Unhappily for him, the party behind him has with it a stick of dynamite and the thought that there are thirty of them about to drown and just one of him (though of course quite a big one of him).

It is said by some that it would be morally corrupt for the persons trapped inside the cave to think of blasting the entrance clear, even though a Utilitarian calculation would suggest that that is exactly what they should do. The Utilitarian (it is argued) would have to calculate that thirty lives saved at the expense of just the one would certainly produce more happiness than one person surviving with thirty being lost.

What reply does the Utilitarian have to this objection?

Another example:

The magistrate and the threatening mob

“A magistrate is faced with a very real threat from a large and uncontrollable mob of rioters demanding a culprit for a crime. Unless the criminal is produced, promptly tried, and executed, they will take their own bloody revenge on a much smaller and quite vulnerable section of the community (a kind of frenzied pogrom). The judge knows that the real culprit is unknown and that the authorities do not even have a good clue as to who he might be. But he also knows that there is within easy reach a disreputable, thoroughly disliked, and useless man, who, though innocent, could easily be framed so that the mob would be quite convinced that he was guilty and would be pacified if he were promptly executed. Recognising that that he can prevent the occurrence of extensive carnage only by framing some innocent person, the magistrate has him framed, goes through the mockery of a trial, and has him executed.” Nielsen, in Sterba, p.145.

One response to this: the Utilitarian could agree that this would be wrong, because of its long term corrupting effect on the courts and the consequential disbenefit to large numbers of people.

Utility is impossible or too time consuming to calculate

You can never complete the calculation of benefit, and certainly not within the time scale of a real-world decision.

Pillories special relationships as involving special pleading

The principal is counter-intuitive in allowing no special consideration to family, intimates and friends.

END

CREDITS

Eating: The Oyster Eater 1882 by James Sidney Ensor
Thanks to Tigertail Virtual Museum

Dustjacket of Biggles Special Case Thanks to Biggles.info

Summum bonum Thanks to The Hindu