Utilitarianism

I

Introduction

Utilitarianism (Latin utilis, “useful”), in ethics, the doctrine that what is useful is good, and consequently, that the ethical value of conduct is determined by the utility of its results. The term “utilitarianism” is more specifically applied to the proposition that the supreme objective of moral action and the foundation on which all morality should be grounded is the achievement of the greatest happiness or satisfaction for the greatest number. This objective is also considered to be the ultimate criterion for evaluating all social institutions as good or bad. The utilitarian theory of ethics is generally opposed to other ethical doctrines in which the final arbiter of right and wrong is either some inner sense or faculty—often called conscience (as in intuitionist theories of ethics)—or else some fundamental ethical principle based on reason (as in the ethics of Immanuel Kant). Utilitarian ethics is likewise at variance with the theological view that right and wrong depend on the will of God, and with the hedonistic view that it depends on the pleasure produced by an act for the individual alone who performs it. The utilitarian theory of legislation is opposed to natural law theory, which states that the criterion for evaluating laws as good or bad is whether they conform to certain natural laws that are given by God or whether they conform to the principles that would be freely chosen by individuals who were banding together to form a state in the first place.

II

Work of Paley and Bentham

Utilitarianism was enunciated in its most characteristic form by the British theologian William Paley in his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) and by the British jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). In Paley’s work, utilitarianism is combined with both individualistic hedonism and theological authoritarianism, as illustrated in his definition of virtue as the “doing [of] good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness”. Bentham clarified the utilitarian theory and used it as the foundation, not merely of a moral system, but also of legal and political reforms. He maintained the necessity of sacrificing smaller interests to greater interests, and so posited as the ethical goal of human society the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Bentham sought to illustrate the doctrine of utilitarianism by comparing it to the doctrine of asceticism on the one hand and to the theory of sympathy and antipathy on the other. Asceticism he defined as the principle that pleasure should be forfeited, and pain incurred, without expectation of any recompense. The theory of sympathy and antipathy he held to be based on the “principle which approves or disapproves of certain actions, not on account of their tending to augment the happiness, nor yet on account of their tending to diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question, but merely because a man finds himself disposed to approve or disapprove of them: holding up that approbation or disapprobation as a sufficient reason for itself, and disclaiming the necessity of looking out for any extrinsic ground”. In his exposition of the theory of utilitarianism, Bentham sought to devise a scale of pleasures and pains, rating them in terms of their intensity, purity, duration, propinquity or remoteness, certainty, fruitfulness, and the extent to which pleasure and pain are shared among fewer or more people.

III

After Bentham

Other notable exponents of utilitarianism were the British jurist John Austin and the British philosophers James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill. Austin set forth a strong defence of the utilitarian theory in his Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832). James Mill interpreted and popularized the theory in a number of articles contributed for the most part to the Westminster Review, a periodical founded by Bentham and others to promote the spread of the utilitarian philosophy. John Stuart Mill, who made utilitarianism the subject of one of his philosophical treatises (Utilitarianism, 1863), is the ablest champion of the doctrine after Bentham.

Mill applied utilitarianism to morality in a far more detailed way than Bentham. In addition, he contributed to the theory by recognizing distinctions of quality, in addition to those of intensity, among pleasures. Thus, whereas Bentham maintained that the “quality of pleasure being equal, push-pin [a child’s game] is as good as poetry”, Mill contended that some pleasures are “higher” or more valuable than others. The higher pleasures are those associated with activities that realize specifically human capacities, for example, art, science, and philosophy. The lower pleasures are those that human beings share with animals. Mill dramatized this distinction between different kinds of pleasures with his statement that it is “better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. When Mill spoke, therefore, of the greatest happiness of the greatest number as the criterion of morality, what he meant by “greatest happiness” was not simply the greatest amount of a single kind of pleasure and the least amount of pain, as found in Bentham’s works and in his own earlier formulations. In the calculation of the total amount of happiness produced by an action, higher pleasures would weigh much more heavy than lower pleasures.

The British philosopher Henry Sidgwick, a contemporary disciple of Mill, gave a comprehensive presentation of Mill’s utilitarianism in his Methods of Ethics (1874). Somewhat later, the British philosophers Herbert Spencer and Sir Leslie Stephen, the former in his Data of Ethics (1879), the latter in his Science of Ethics (1882), sought to synthesize the utilitarian theory with the principles of biological evolution as expounded in the works of Charles Darwin. Both the American philosopher and psychologist William James and the American philosopher, psychologist, and educator John Dewey were influenced by utilitarianism. Dewey substituted intelligence for pleasure, or happiness, both as the supreme value and as the most reliable method of achieving other desirable values.

After a period in the early 20th century when utilitarianism was eclipsed by intuitionist theories of morality, it was revived in the second half of the century. When efforts to found morality or legislation on conscience, pure reason, or God’s will run into difficulties raised by scepticism, utilitarianism seems a natural grounding. Versions of utilitarianism are still defended by many philosophers today, in spite of the wide variety of attacks that have been made against it.

One objection to utilitarianism is that happiness is impossible to measure. To avoid this problem, modern utilitarianism is usually formulated in terms of “desire-satisfaction” or “preference-satisfaction” rather than happiness. Another objection is that utilitarianism justifies any action, no matter how seemingly bad, if the action produces more happiness than unhappiness overall. So, for example, it might be argued that the utilitarian could condone the killing of a terminally ill person in order to transplant that person’s various organs into a number of people who might otherwise die slow and painful deaths. A response to this is to distinguish “act” utilitarianism from “rule” utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism holds that the utilitarian criterion is to be applied directly to individual acts: an act is right or wrong depending on whether doing that particular act would create more happiness overall than doing anything else. Rule utilitarianism, on the other hand, states that the utilitarian criterion is to be applied to whole systems of social rules: an act is right or wrong depending on whether it is allowed by a system of social rules that, if conformed to by everyone, would produce more happiness overall than any other system of rules. Rule utilitarianism therefore evaluates a whole system of social rules—a social morality—by how much happiness it produces, whereas act utilitarianism attempts to evaluate each individual action in the same way. It is argued that although act utilitarianism would justify killing the ill person in the example to utilize that person’s organs, rule utilitarianism would not, since a system of social rules that condoned such action would lead to widespread insecurity and unhappiness in the long run.