Utilitarianism

March 2, 2022 | SARA BIZARRO

Consequentialism is the idea that we can determine the moral worth of an action by looking at its consequences. One of the most well-known forms of consequentialism is utilitarianism. According to utilitarianism, the consequences that are important to judge an action are the happiness produced. This idea that happiness should be maximized is also called the Principle of Utility.

The first utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) said “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” Happiness in turn is defined as that which increases pleasure and avoids pain. Bentham also said: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two surveying masters pain and pleasure it is for them alone to point out what we ought to do as well as to determine what we shall do, on the one hand, the standard of right and wrong and on the other, the chain of causes and effects are fastened to their throne, they govern us is all in all we do and all we say and in all we think.” Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation.

This idea that pleasure is the ultimate good is not new, Epicurus was a Greek philosopher credited with being one of the first hedonists. However, Epicurus did not promote a lascivious life, on the contrary, he was known to have said that in order to maximize pleasure, we should eat “barley cakes and water”: “Give me a barley cake and a glass of water and I am ready to rival Zeus for happiness.” What he meant by this is that over time, a life of moderation would produce more pleasure than one of excess.

This type of hedonism can be called psychological hedonism and is the idea that people like pleasure and they don’t like pain, therefore this is the main source of motivation for their actions. This way of understanding human action could lead simply to selfishness, how can this be the basis for a moral theory? Jeremy Bentham struggled with this issue, but there is a distinction between psychological hedonism and ethical hedonism. Ethical hedonism is the idea that everyone is motivated to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, and therefore we need to respect others when we pursue our own pleasures and avoid pains because if our pursuit affects other people we need to consider their interests as well. Ethical hedonism claims that what is good is what causes pleasure and what is bad is what causes pain, not just for ourselves, but also for everyone affected by our actions. Each person counts as one and no more than one.

Bentham, like Epicurus, thought that some pleasures can lead to pain and some pains may be necessary, for instance, overindulgence can lead to all kinds of physical ailments that are painful, and going to the dentist may be necessary in order to prevent further problems with one’s teeth - but any unnecessary pain should be avoided. Bentham created what he calls a felicific calculus, where we would have units of pleasure, hedons, and units of pain dolors. These should be measured the following using the following guidelines:

Intensity: how strong is the pleasure?

Duration: how long will the pleasure last?

Certainty or uncertainty: how likely or unlikely is it that the pleasure will occur?

Propinquity or remoteness: how soon will the pleasure occur?

Fecundity: the probability that the action will be followed by sensations of the same kind.

Purity: the probability that it will not be followed by sensations of the opposite kind.

Extent: how many people will be affected?

One of the main conclusions of the utilitarian calculus was that if certain pleasures and pains affect yourself and no one else, you should go ahead and calculate the best actions. When your actions do affect others, then their pleasure and pain should be taken into consideration as well, you proceed with the calculus the way you did for yourself and you apply it to all others affected. The idea of the felicific calculus is not very “snobbish”, since whatever you think gives you pleasure is what you should pursue, whatever that pleasure is. Bethan made the game of push pin famous when he said that it was as good as poetry. The game of push pin consists of pushing pins on a table to try to cross your opponent's pin. Here is what Bethan says about this:

“Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnishes more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few. The game of push-pin is always innocent: it were well could the same aways be asserted of poetry. Indeed, between poetry and truth, there is a natural opposition: false morals, fictitious nature: the poet always stands in need of something false. When he pretends to lay his foundations in truth, the ornaments of his superstructure are fictions; his business consists in stimulating our passions and exciting our prejudices. Truth, the exactitude of every kind, is fatal to poetry. The poet must see everything through colored medium and strive to make everyone else to do the same. It is true, there have been noble spirits, to whom poetry and philosophy have been equally indebted, but these exceptions do not remove the mischiefs which have resulted from this magic art. If poetry and music deserve to be preferred before a game of push-pin, it must be because they are calculated to gratify those individuals the are most difficult to be pleased.” (The Rationale of Reward, Jeremy Bentham, Etienne Dumont · 1830 206-207)

I will return to this issue of the value of poetry later, but summing up Bentham’s Utilitarianism, it is a very down-to-earth philosophy that claims that the greatest pleasure of the greatest number is the measure of right and wrong.

Since what is valued in this theory is the absence of pain and the pursuit of pleasure, utilitarians tend to include animals as worthy of moral recognition. Bentham said regarding animals:

“The day may come when the non-human part of the animal creation will acquire the rights that never could have been withheld from them except by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being should be abandoned without redress to the whims of a tormentor. Perhaps it will someday be recognized that the number of legs, the hairiness of the skin, or the possession of a tail. Boundary around Penal Jurisprudence are equally insufficient reasons for abandoning to the same fate a creature that can feel? What else could be used to draw the line? Is it the faculty of reason or the possession of language? But a full-grown horse or dog is incomparably more rational and conversable than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. Even if that were not so, what difference would that make? The question is not Can they reason? or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?”

143 Principles of Morals and Legislation Jeremy Bentham 17.

However, eating animals, Bentham thought, was ok:

“There is very good reason why we should be allowed to eat such non-human animals as we like to eat: we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. They have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery that we have; and the death they suffer at our hands usually is and always could be speedier and thus less painful than what would await them in the inevitable course of nature. There is also very good reason why we should be allowed to kill ones that attack us: we would be the worse for their living, and they are not the worse of being dead.”

It is an interesting question whether animals are not the worse of being dead, on the one hand, and on the other hand, if the only alternative to eating animals is to leave them out in the wild suppering - we know have farm sanctuaries that are alternatives to keeping farm animals - which are obviously not well suited for thriving and surviving in the wilderness, because just like pets they have been bread to be domesticated and most are not suited for a life of wilderness.

Besides arguing for legal protection for animals, Bentham also argued for individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression equal rights for women, the right to divorce and decriminalization of homosexual acts. All this using the simple utilitarian calculus as a technique to measure pleasures and pains!

Bentham and James Mill started a movement that was known as the philosophical radicals and they published a periodical called The Westminister Review. John Stuart Mill was the son of James Mill and became one of the best know utilitarian thinkers. John Stuart Mill was raised to be the perfect utilitarian child, his education was planned by his father and Bentham. However, when he was in his 20s he suffered a mental crisis that he started to overcome when he read a particularly emotional scene in Marmontel’s “Memoirs” when he: ”relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them—would supply the place of all that they had lost.” After this Mill improved and started slowly recovering his taste in music which had been of great solace before that episode, and in poetry.

Happiness, Mill decided, cannot be the main goal one has in mind at every step, because as soon as one thinks of it, nothing is enough. Instead, a person must be completely engaged and involved in an activity, and happiness naturally arises. These activities should include culturally engaging interests such as music and poetry, that even though they seem to not be of any “practical purpose” have the ultimate purpose of making life worth living, and therefore have a very high utilitarian value indeed. Mill did not agree with Bentham that push-pin was as good as poetry, and definitely did not share the distrust of poets that seems to have been mysteriously attached both to Plato and to Bentham.

John Stuart Mill, therefore, returns to Aristotle, arguing that the sensual simple pleasures are not enough for human beings. He hypothesizes that there are higher and lower pleasures and that the way to distinguish between these, is that anyone who has experienced both, would prefer the higher pleasures. He said: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."

John Stuart Mill also argued that there are certain rules that must be respected, and cannot be violated, such as what he called “the harm principle”. Here is how he defines it in the book On Liberty: “That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” This means that for Mill we cannot interfere with the freedom of individuals to maximize well being of themselves or others, only to prevent harm to others.

This is an example of how Mill made a clear distinction between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism means that each action should be decided in order to maximize happiness, while rule utilitarianism argues that we should endeavor to create rules that maximize happiness over time. It is entirely plausible that if we simply look at how each particular action will maximize happiness, we can be led by a chain of side effects to a state where happiness is diminished, such as when for instance we consistently coerce people to act in certain ways to promote the greatest good. Mill suggested that we can only coerce to prevent harm, and not to achieve the greatest good - his argument being that what is good is always under discussion, and what is considered the greatest good in one era, may very well not be considered the greatest good in another.

There are some obvious advantages of utilitarianism. First, consequences are observable, while intentions are not, and even though we may have some difficulties in foreseeing what consequences follow from our actions, there are some actions that can be observed to very often lead to negative consequences, therefore there is a clear visible reason for avoiding those actions. Utilitarianism also seems to have cut through the prejudices of the 19th century, it created a platform from which to argue for freedom and equality of men and women, for rights such as the right to divorce, and the decriminalization of homosexual acts. Utilitarianism also allows us to include nonhuman animals in our moral concerns, since they also suffer, they avoid pain, and pursue pleasure, just like humans. Finally, and perhaps the most important advantage is that utilitarianism allows us to gauge moral progress: a society where people suffer less is better, and we can judge whether our ideas are working or not by the happiness or unhappiness produced.

There are also some weaknesses of utilitarianism, especially if we have a positive utilitarian view such as Bentham’s. The first is the “no rest” objection, we could always be doing something to maximize well being, and most of the things we do to make ourselves happy, could probably be better redirected to help others: for instance, the Starbucks objection - all the money we spend at Starbucks would probably alleviate pain if given to the Malaria Foundation, would we not indulge then? Should we always sacrifice ourselves to others? Wouldn’t that lead to a more miserable would? What about if an innocent person is sacrificed for the well-being of the group?

An example of this is given by T. M. Scanlon, in the book What We Owe to Each Other. Imagine Jones is working in the transmitter room during the broadcasting of a World Cup Final. There is an accident and a heavy piece of electrical equipment falls on Jones. He is in horrible pain because he is being continually suffering painful electrical shocks, but he will not suffer any permanent damage from this. Meanwhile billions of people are watching and they would all have been quite upset if the game is interrupted. Should we interrupt the game or let poor jones suffer until it’s over? If the amount of pleasure and pain can be aggregated (which seems like it has to be if we really think the greatest pleasure is the measure of right and wrong), then Jones’ pain won’t add up to the pain of billions of people missing the game, therefore, we could sacrifice jones for the group.

Another issue of how to distribute pleasures and pains in order to maximize them is brought up by philosopher Robert Nozick in an example called the “utility monster”. Imagine there is a monster that is much better at maximizing pleasure than you are, should we give all our resources to the utility monster? One may argue that in reality, this doesn't happen, there is a Diminishing Marginal Utility of Wealth, that is when I have had 10 slices of pizza, one more is not going to give me much more pleasure (and $100 dollars is indifferent to Bill Gates.) However, we may be utility monsters when compared to the elderly or the disabled, since they need a lot more resources to increase ever so slightly they're well being. Should we then only allocate resources to the young?

Another problem is that utilitarianism does not seem to have a particular preference for truth, if lying will increase happiness, there is no reason not to do it. Robert Nozick gave the example of an experience machine, imagine we could go in an experience machine and experience exactly what we experience in reality, do we have any reason to prefer reality? Nozick argued that from a purely utilitarian perspective we do not. We can take this further and think of an experience machine that maximizes pleasure, would a utilitarian be committed to building these machines, if it is much easier to maximize pleasure this way? It seems like they would.

All these problems seem to make it difficult to defend any positive utilitarian position since it is difficult to see what maximizing pleasure means if we can’t aggregate pleasures and pains and since we do not always want to maximize the pleasure at the cost of victimizing a person or a section of the population. Furthermore, we value truth and reality, even if it is sometimes harsher than a possible virtual or propagandized reality, and pure utilitarianism would not be able to advocate for this. Finally, it is also hard to imagine ourselves as calculating machines, trying to maximize pleasure at all times, and as John Stuart Mill said in his Autobiography, that type of thing can lead to misery, happiness as a constant goal defeats itself since it makes the activities secondary, and we can only reach happiness when the focus is in the pleasure of the activities themselves, not simply on what they lead to.