Utilitarianism Overheads

Agenda

The gist

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

The theory behind Mill’s Utilitarian principle

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

The reason doesn’t amount to proof

Issues

Agenda 2: Issues

Why bother about other people’s happiness?

What is meant by happiness exactly?

The ‘ultimate good’

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

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

Utility is impossible or too time consuming to calculate

Pillories special relationships as involving special pleading

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

“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.

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

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.

The reason doesn’t amount to proof

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.’

Why bother about other people’s happiness?

One idea: The way to pursue your own happiness is to pursue everybody’s.

Another (Mill): "As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires [a person] to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator." (Utilitarianism, II.par18)

What is meant by happiness exactly?

Pleasure and the absence of pain

Mill: pleasures come in variety, and the different varieties are not all of equal worth.

“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 1)

The higher pleasures

“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 1)