Utilitarianism Notesheet

Utilitarianism

The gist

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

Reasons for acknowledging the Utilitarian principle

The great defence of Utilitarianism is J.S. Mill’s Utilitarianism, 1861.

John Stuart Mill

“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 1

The theory behind Mill’s Utilitarian principle

“that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends”

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.

GE Moore excoriated Mill for committing the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ at this point.

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.’

Issues

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 however 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)

“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)

The ‘ultimate good’

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

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

Mill argues there actually isn’t a conflict:

“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 potholers example

(Sterba, ed., Ethics: The Big Questions, Malden, MA, etc., 1998, Blackwells, p.143).

Another example: The magistrate and the threatening mob

(Sterba, ed., Ethics: The Big Questions, Malden, MA, etc., 1998, Blackwells, p.145).

Utility is impossible or too time consuming to calculate

Pillories special relationships as involving special pleading

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