CH. 12 John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism

Question 1

Utilitarianism

Answer 1

UTILITARIANISM:

• DEONTOLOGICAL MORAL THEORIES – the rightness or wrongness of an action is based on its nature, not on the consequences that follow from it.
• CONSEQUENTIALIST THEORIES – the effects of an action are all that matter; our only duty is to ensure that the effects are maximization of the GOOD.
• The “GOOD“ is whatever has INTRINSIC VALUE – whatever is valuable for its own sake.
  
  • ​Includes such things as pleasure, happiness, virtue, knowledge, autonomy, and the satisfaction of desires.
• In consequentialist ethics, then, the ends (the results) justify the means (the actions).
• UTILITARIANISM is the foremost CONSEQUENTIALIST theory
  
  • Where the only thing of intrinsic value is well-being, governed by the proposition that the rightness or wrongness of an action is to be judged by its impact on the people involved.
• JOHN STEWERT MILL (1806-1873) is the theory’s greatest champion of a utilitarian applying the ideal creed to reality.
• PHILOSOPHER-REFORMER – JOHN STEWERT MILL’s father, James Mill, a philosopher in his own right. was a strong proponent of the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (English philosopher and intellectual father of the theory), and he was determined to raise John Stuart according to utilitarian principles.
• When he became an adult, JOHN STEWERT MILL remained a utilitarian, but he left behind many of the less desirable features of Bentham’s theory.

Question 2

Mill’s Utilitarianism

Answer 2

MILL’s UTILITARIANISM:

PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY: Right actions are those that result in greater overall well-being (or utility) for the people involved than any other possible actions.

• We are duty-bound to maximize the utility of everyone affected, regardless of the contrary urgings of moral rules or unbending moral principles.
• In contrast, some moral theories (Kant’s, for example), moral rules are absolute, allowing no exceptions even in exceptional cases.
• In utilitarianism, there are no absolute prohibitions or mandates (except for the principle of utility itself). There is only the goal of maximizing well-being.
• Thus utilitarianism is not bothered by unusual circumstances, nor is it hobbled by conflicting moral principles or rules that demand a uniform response to extraordinary situations.

“There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences.”

—Robert Ingersoll

TWO TYPES OF UTILITARIANISM:

• ACT-UTILITARIANISM – Focuses on specific acts. The idea that the rightness of actions depends solely on the overall well-being produced by individual actions.
  
  • An act is right if in a particular situation it produces a greater balance of well-being over suffering than any alternative acts; determining rightness is a matter of weighing the effects of each possible act.
    
    • FLEXIBLE to the situation.
• RULE-UTILITARIANISM – Focuses on rules covering kinds of acts. Avoids judging rightness by specific acts and focuses instead on rules governing categories of acts.
  
  • It says a right action is one that conforms to a rule that, if followed consistently, would create for everyone involved the most beneficial balance of well-being over suffering.
    
    • We are to adhere to the rules because, in the long run, they maximize well-being for everyone considered—even though a given act may produce bad effects in a particular situation.
      
      • INFLEXIBLE to the situation.
• EX: Suppose a person is terminally ill and suffering horrible, inescapable pain, and she asks to be put out of her misery.
  
  • An ACT UTILITARIAN might conclude that euthanasia would be the right course of action because it would result in the least amount of suffering for everyone concerned. Allowing the current situation to continue would cause enormous pain and anguish for everyone involved. Administering a lethal injection to her, however, would immediately end her pain and prevent future suffering. Her family would grieve for her but would at least find some relief—and perhaps peace—in knowing that her torture was over. There would, of course, also be possible negative consequences to take into account. In administering the lethal injection, her physician would be risking both professional censure and criminal prosecution. If his actions were to become public, people might begin to mistrust physicians who treat severely impaired children, etc.
    
    • On balance, the ACT UTILITARIAN might say, greater net well-being (positive amounts of well-being minus negative influences on well-being) would result from the mercy killing, which would therefore be the morally right course.
• On the other hand, a RULE UTILITARIAN might insist that more net well-being would be produced by consistently following a rule that disallowed euthanasia.
  
  • The argument would be that permitting mercy killings would have terrible consequences overall—increases in involuntary euthanasia (mercy killing without the patient’s consent), erosion of respect for the medical profession, and a weakening of society’s abhorrence of homicide. – NOTE– Says who? No proof this would be the case. TJB
    
    • For the RULE UTILITARIAN, the facts of the case may be difficult to ascertain, but the procedure for discerning the morally right course of action is theoretically simple: determine which action best maximizes well-being.

DEONTOLOGY vs. UTILITARIANISM

• DEONTOLOGY – states that there are inviolable moral rules that do not change depending on the situation.
  
  • Deontology is about duty. You do what’s right because it’s the right thing to do.
    
    • ​The ENDS can NEVER justify the MEANS.
• UTILITARIANISM – states that aggregate welfare or “good” should be maximized and that suffering or “bad” should be minimized. REGARDLESS of Rules.
  
  • Utilitarianism (rule or otherwise) is about the consequences. You do what’s right because it leads to better consequences.
    
    • The ENDS JUSTIFY the MEANS.
• If deontology and rule utilitarianism have some overlap in what rules there are, they’re still not the same because it matters WHY you’re supposed to follow the rules.
  
  • EX: If Kant had met a rule utilitarian that agreed on Kant’s every duty, he would still say that this particular utilitarian was not acting morally because they were acting that way for the wrong reasons.
    
    • EX: Why do we have rules that don’t permit us to torture innocent people even when it could save thousands of lives?
      
      • Kant: We must treat that innocent person not as a means to an end, but as an end in herself. (one version of the Categorical Imperative)
      • Rule Utilitarian: Well, you know… Most of the time torturing doesn’t yield those kinds of positive consequences so the rule will end up making up for this loss of potential good consequences.

The classic version of utilitarianism was devised by Bentham (1748 - 1832) and given more detail and plausibility by Mill.

• CLASSIC UTILITARIANISM is HEDONISTIC in that the utility to be maximized is pleasure, broadly termed happiness, the only intrinsic good.
  
  • A right action produces more net happiness (amounts of happiness minus unhappiness) than any alternative action, everyone considered.
• Bentham and Mill had different ideas about what happiness entailed.
  
  • Bentham thinks that happiness is one-dimensional: it is pleasure, pure and simple, something that varies only in the amount that an agent can experience.
    
    • The moral ideal would be to experience maximum amounts of pleasure, as does the glutton or the debauchee.
  • Mill thinks that pleasures can vary in quality as well as quantity. For him, there are lower and higher pleasures—the lower and inferior ones indulged in by the glutton and his ilk and the higher and more satisfying ones found in such experiences as the search for knowledge and the appreciation of art and music.
    
    • Mill famously sums up this contrast by saying, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

Question 3

Bentham Vs. Mill

Answer 3

JEREMY BENTHAM – His answer to the problems he saw was a moral theory he called utilitarianism, spelled out in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789).

• His utilitarianism made human happiness the crux and measure of a good society.
• His famous utilitarian formula sums it up: the goal of actions should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

MILL vs. BENTHAM

• BENTHAM’s VERSION OF UTILITARIANISM – Bentham advocated that the pleasures and the pains differ in quantity and not in quality. He said that pains and pleasures can be computed mathematically.
• MILL’s VERSION of UTILITARIANISM – But Mill said that pain and pleasure can’t be measured arithmetically they differ in BOTH QUANTITY and QUALITY only.
  • Bentham’s utilitarianism was criticized for being a philosophy “worthy of only swine”. While Mill argued that the ‘higher quality of human pleasure was a critical differentiator that made humans human.

IMPORTANCE OF EQUALITY in MILL’s UNITILITARIANISM:

• ​When promoting happiness, we must not only take into account the happiness of everyone affected but also give everyone’s needs or interests equal weight. Mill explains:

[The] happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.

Moral even-handedness is an attractive feature of utilitarianism.

• Impartiality is a fundamental characteristic of morality itself.
• Despite our differences in social status, race, gender, religion, and wealth, we are all equal before the moral law.

BOTH Bentham and Mill took moral EQUALITY seriously, crusading for social changes that were based on strict adherence to the IMPARTIALITY PRINCIPLE.

CLASSIC UTILITARIANISM – Emphasis is on maximizing the total quantity of net happiness, NOT ensuring that it is rationed in any particular amounts among the people involved.

• This means that an action resulting in one thousand units of happiness for ten people is better than an action yielding only nine hundred units of happiness for those same ten people regardless of how the units of happiness are distributed among them.
• Classic utilitarians do want to allocate the total amount of happiness among as many people as possible (thus their motto, “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”).
  
  • But maximizing total happiness is the fundamental concern whether everyone gets an equal portion or one person gets the lion’s share.

This is how Mill defends his brand of utilitarianism:

John Stuart Mill:Utilitarianism:

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.

• To MILL, happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.
• “Pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.”
• “To suppose that life has no higher end than pleasure—no better and nobler object of desire and pursuit—they designate as utterly mean and groveling; as a doctrine worthy only of swine, to whom the followers of Epicurus were, at a very early period, contemptuously likened.
• “When thus attacked, the Epicureans have always answered, that it is not they, but their accusers, who represent human nature in a degrading light; since the accusation supposes human beings to be capable of no pleasures except those of which swine are capable.”
• “If this supposition were true, the charge could not be gainsaid, but would then be no longer an imputation; for if the sources of pleasure were precisely the same to human beings and to swine, the rule of life which is good enough for the one would be good enough for the other.”
• “The comparison of the Epicurean life to that of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast’s pleasures do not satisfy a human being’s conception of happiness.”
• “But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.”
• “It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others.”
• What makes one pleasure more valuable than another? Of two pleasures, if there be one 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.
• If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a great amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.
• 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. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.
• They would not resign what they possess more than he for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however undesirable in their own eyes.
• A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence.
• We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness. But its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or another, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them.
• Whoever supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness—that the superior being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior—confounds the two very different ideas, of happiness, and content. It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied;
• And a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify.
• It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
• But it is by no means an indispensable condition to the acceptance of the utilitarian standard; for that standard is not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether;
• Utilitarianism, therefore, could only attain its end by the general cultivation of nobleness of character, even if each individual were only benefited by the nobleness of others, and his own, so far as happiness is concerned, were a sheer deduction from the benefit. But the bare enunciation of such an absurdity as this last, renders refutation superfluous.
• They say it is exacting too much to require that people shall always act from the inducement of promoting the general interests of society. But this is to mistake the very meaning of a standard of morals, and confound the rule of action with the motive of it. It is the business of ethics to tell us what are our duties, or by what test we may know them;
• but no system of ethics requires that the sole motive of all we do shall be a feeling of duty; on the contrary, ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are done from other motives, and rightly so done, if the rule of duty does not condemn them.
• Questions about ends are, in other words, questions about what things are desirable. The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all other things being only desirable as means to that end.
• The only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it: and so of the other sources of our experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable, is that people do actually desire it.
• If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was so.
• No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good: that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness, has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality.

Question 4

Utilitarianism and the Golden Rule

Answer 4

UTILITARIANISM AND THE GOLDEN RULE:

• To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.
• His own happiness and the practice of such modes of conduct, negative and positive, as regard for the universal happiness prescribes: so that not only he may be unable to conceive the possibility of happiness to himself, consistently with conduct opposed to the general good, but also that a direct impulse to promote the general good may be in every individual one of the habitual motives of action, and the sentiments connected therewith may fill a large and prominent place in every human being’s sentient existence.