CH. 8 Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill Flashcards
Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill
UTILITARIANISM: BENTHAM and MILL:
- Cultural relativism, skepticism, subjectivism, and determinism all threaten to disrupt our ordinary moral views.
- Introduced by Jeremy Bentham and developed further by John Stuart Mill.
JEREMY BENTHAM (1748-1832)** – Founder of **UTILITARIANISM, creed known as the greatest happiness principle. When we make a moral decision, the right action is the one that does most to maximize what he calls utility.
UTILITY – The balance of pleasure over pain.
- Is understood first in terms of happiness.
- Happiness, as generally understood, is not quite the same thing as pleasure.
- Happiness or unhappiness seems to take place for an extended period, whereas pleasures and pains are often much shorter experiences.
- Where only one person is involved, utilitarianism approves of whatever maximizes the balance of pleasure over pain for that individual.
- When more than one person is involved, we add together the different pleasures and pains of different people.
- This raises questions about how to measure and compare pains and pleasures.
UTILITARIANS – Have to consider the effects of an action on the pleasure and pain of everyone who is affected by it and then pursue the option that is expected to yield the greatest sum total of pleasure over pain. Doing so, they believe, will generate the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
ARGUMENT BY ELIMINATION – Attempts to eliminate all competitors.
Bentham considers only three moral positions:
One, of course, is his own utilitarian view. A second is what he calls the PRINCIPLE OF SYMPATHY AND ANTIPATHY**, which approves or disapproves of actions purely on the basis of a person’s attitudes. And a third is the **PRINCIPLE OF ASCETICISM.
- Which is the mirror image of utilitarianism.
- That we should maximize pain rather than pleasure.
Read Bentham as being driven by three fundamental convictions – First, he believed that morality requires everyone to be treated as an equal: “Everyone is to count for one, no- one for more than one.”
- Second, Bentham believed that ultimately the only things in the world that matter are the pleasures and pains of sentient creatures.
- Third, Bentham was convinced that morality, and good governance, has to be based on firm principles.
SINISTER INTERESTS – Those in power will often be tempted to advance their own interests rather than follow the common good.
- He argued that firm, reliable principles are needed to guard against this type of corrupt use of power.
PRiNCIPLE OF “CAPRICE” – Rely on the third conviction, asserting the importance of firm principles.
Elimination of Asceticism
ELIMINATION OF ASCETICISM:
PRINCIPLE OF ASCETICISM – Which demands maximizing pain over pleasure.
- Those who seem to advocate it, so he suggests, are really defending another view: that mortifying your flesh on earth improves your chances of going to heaven and enjoying a blissful afterlife. The pain is worth the pleasure.
- But this is merely a form of the utilitarian view, albeit one held by those who believe in a religious doctrine about life after death and what they need to do on earth to enter heaven rather than hell.
- Bentham’s real targets are the RELIGIOUS MORALISTS – those who wish to suppress earthly pleasures based on what Bentham regards as a false and pernicious religious doctrine.
- In arguing against the principle of asceticism, he was attacking some version of severe religious puritanism.
- In fact, we should see utilitarianism as opposed to a whole range of moral theories based on or influenced by religious views that see virtue in the practice of less- demanding kinds of self-denial.
- Customary and religious moralities contain rules that, in Bentham’s view, lead to the denial of pleasure or the imposition of harm for no good reason.
- Bentham considered the principle of asceticism, and its milder forms in which customary or religious moral rules lead to great pain, not pleasure, to be wholly irrational.
- Bentham points out that the principle of asceticism is really a personal code of conduct rather than a theory of morality.
Elimination of the Principle of Sympathy and Antipathy
Elimination of the Principle of Sympathy and Antipathy:
- I can say that morally the right thing to do is to help my friend. But equally I could say that morally the right thing is to meet my cousin. If someone questions me, I can give my reasoning. But within certain limits I can twist what I say to fit my decision, whatever it is, and no one can confidently say that I have made a mistake. There is no formula that anyone else, or even me myself, can follow to check my reasoning.
PRINCIPLE OF SYMPATHY and ANTIPATHY – It is liable to misuse, even corruption, because it has no principle or formula for decision making, no mechanism of accountability.
PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY** – Provides a rigorous framework, unlike the methods used by some of Bentham’s philosophical predecessors, who were known as **MORAL SENSE THINKERS.
CLARIFYING UTILITARIANISM
CLARIFYING UTILITARIANISM:
Split the theory into two parts:
- THEORY OF The GOOD – Theory of the good tells us what sort of things in the world are good (and bad).
- THeORY OF THE RIGHT – Theory of the right focuses on our actions, telling us which actions are right and wrong.
UTILITARIANISM – Is the theory that the right thing to do is always to bring about as much good as possible.
- Sometimes the right thing to do might be to bring about less good than we could have done, at least when we understand the term good as Bentham defines it. Therefore let’s look first at Bentham’s theory of the good in order to understand what is at stake
Bentham’s Theory of the Good
BENTHAM’S THEORY of THE GOOD:
Things Bentham considers good and bad – Happiness or pleasure is generally good or that unhappiness or pain is bad.
Distinguished many varieties of pleasure: From the relatively innocent, including the pleasures of sense (such as enjoying the fragrance of a rose) to the much more questionable, such as the pleasures of being malevolent.
- Bentham also makes the important claim that pleasure or happiness is the only thing that is good, and pain or displeasure the only thing that is bad.
Measuring Happiness
MEASURING HAPPINESS – How can we even compare pains and pleasures against each other?
- In his book he attempts to explain How to measure pleasure and pain.
Six features by which, according to Bentham, we can measure individual pleasures and pain:
(1) Intensity
(2) Duration
(3) Certainty – Or uncertainty
(4) Propinquity – Or remoteness, meaning distance in time
(5) Fecundity – Explained as its likelihood of being followed by other pleasures.
(6) Purity – Its chances of not being followed by the opposite (i.e., that a pleasure will not be followed by a pain).
REMOTENESS – Are controversial.
- Should we discount future pleasures and pains in the sense of giving them less weight in our calculations?
- Arguably, including remoteness violates the idea that everyone—including future people—is to count as one.
- Some types of comparison of pleasure and pain are easy. A pain that lasts two days must surely be worse than one of the same intensity that lasts two minutes. Accordingly, we can rank one as worse than the other. This is known as an ORDINAL SCALE – putting different items into an order of better or worse.
- First, it seems, we need to make what are known as CARDINAL MEASUREMENTS being able to put numbers on different pleasures and pains,
We need numbers. And not only that, but we need to be able to compare one person’s pleasure or pain with another; this is known as the problem of INTERPERSONAL COMPARISONS OF UTILITY.
- The difficult question is how to measure intensity.
- it seems we can do some sort of measurement of happiness just by talking to people and asking questions about how they feel.
- Remember that Bentham replaced the notion of happiness and unhappiness with pleasure and pain at least partly on the grounds that these are more precise,
- We might be able to measure pleasure and pain precisely enough to apply utilitarian theory and then choose to act in a way that maximizes the balance of pleasure over pain.
- Require a degree of intuitive
UTILITARIANISM AND EQUALITY FOR WOMEN
UTILITARIANISM AND EQUALITY FOR WOMEN:
1861 Bentham published An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.
- John Stuart Mill published Utilitarianism (1861/2001).
- Mill was brought up to be a philosophical disciple of Jeremy Bentham, whom he regarded as his godfather. (In turn, Mill would later be godfather to one of the 20th century’s most important philosophers, Bertrand Russell [1872–1970]—antireligious philosophers.)
The Subjection of Women
The SUBJECTION OF WOMEN – Mill applied Bentham’s ideas on the moral importance of individual happiness in order to propose liberating social reform.
The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill – Influential work on women’s equality.
- Catalogues the pervasiveness of male domination, especially within conventional marriage, and examines its detrimental effects on human happiness.
He insisted that women had a right to equality. But he also appealed to utilitarian arguments, and here we can pick out four –
- These arguments all hold that utilitarianism demands the liberation of women because their subjection is detrimental to human happiness.
First, Mill argues that it is bad for men to grow up falsely believing in their superiority over women.
Second, by excluding women from employment in professions such as law and medicine, society is shunning half the potential talent pool.
Third, the utter economic dependence of wives on their husbands gave husbands a duty to adopt safe, conventional lifestyles.
Finally, women in subjection lose, so argued Mill, “the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment,” as well as suffering “the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life” which “dries up . . . the principal fountain of human happiness”
Arguments one and three claim that men are worse off if women are subjugated, for they will become arrogant and make conservative choices.
- Argument two claims that society as a whole suffers if half its talent goes unused.
- And lastly, argument fourfinally, an argument that concentrates on women’s interests— suggests that women will be much happier if they have a full range of opportunities and greater freedom.
- Female happiness is part of the general happiness. The utilitarian theory therefore encourages, even demands, liberation from oppression.
- Mill’s important book On Liberty (1869), which again argues that creating the conditions to encourage and enhance individual liberty advances collective happiness.
- For Mill, utilitarianism inspired his life’s work of arguing for the radical reform of Victorian institutions that had narrowed and constrained human lives into conventional and frustrating patterns.
- Utilitarianism, for Mill, unlocks human potential.
JUSTIFYING UTILITARIANISM
JUSTIFYING UTILITARIANISM – [P]leasure and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; . . . all desirable things . . . are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.
Mill’s “Proof”
MILLS “PROOF” – 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.
- The proof seems to fall into two halves.
- The first half is meant to show that happiness is desirable.
- The second, Mill said, attempts to show that “general happiness . . . [is] a good to the aggregate of all persons,” a comment he seemingly intended to be another way of stating the utilitarian principle.
ARGUMENT BY ANALOGY – Just as the only proof that something is visible is that people see it, the only proof that something is desirable is that people desire it.
- Mill has just set out what we could call the logic of visibility. He is suggesting that the logic of the terms visible and desirable are similar enough that what we say about visible should, by analogy and with suitable adjustments, apply equally to desirable. If so, then he must next show that people actually desire happiness. But this step he takes to be so obvious that it barely needs further elaboration. And so it would follow that happiness is desirable, and the first stage of the argument is complete.
- This stinging criticism is that the terms visible and desirable simply are not analogous. Visible means “capable of being seen.” If the analogy is to hold, then desirable should mean “capable of being desired.” But it doesn’t. Normally when we use the term desirable, we mean “ought to be desired.”
- Just because someone desires something, this does not prove that it is desirable.
- It turns out that what the alcoholic desires is undesirable because it is likely to defeat more substantial or important desires: to stay sober and healthy. This example, then, shows only that desires can conflict. Something desired turns out to be undesirable only because it conflicts with a more substantial desire.
- Something that is desired is desirable, unless its satisfaction would conflict with a weightier desire.
- The view that actions can be undesirable only if they are in some way harmful is at the center of the utilitarian doctrine. So possibly Mill could be accused of using the utilitarian theory itself in his argument for the utilitarian theory. This, we saw, is known in philosophy as Begging the question – Means you are assuming what you are setting out to prove.
- If an argument does beg the question, then it proves nothing.
- Another similar way of putting the criticism is to say that Mill has used a CIRCULAR ARGUMENT.
- An opponent of Mill could argue that an action can be desirable in ways other than by being desired. For example, an act that no one desires could still be judged as desirable for being in accordance with the will of God or the ancient traditions of our society.
- Mill’s “proof” is perhaps more of an illustration of the utilitarian view rather than an argument for it.
Aggregating Happiness
AGGREGATING HAPPINESS:
- Was only the first step in a two-stage argument.
- The first tries to show that happiness is desirable.
- And so if this stage of the argument does anything at all, it establishes what we referred to earlier in the chapter as the UTILITARIAN THEORY OF THE GOOD – That happiness and only happiness is good.
- Show that the correct moral theory is the one that maximizes total or aggregate happiness, which also incorporates the UTILITARIAN THEORY OF THE RIGHT.
- This is what the second step attempts.
- Mill suggests that once it is established that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, then it follows that the general happiness is to the good of the aggregate of all persons.
- Utilitarianism has to cope with the facts of life: that sometimes to make one group happy, others will have to suffer.
Kant (who we will discuss in detail in later chapters) pointed out that if each one of us pursues our own happiness, the result is much more likely to be the annihilation of society than harmony because our wills are likely to conflict.
- Approving of utilitarianism merely on the grounds that we like it. Yet this was exactly what Bentham found wrong with the principle of sympathy and antipathy.
- What do we say to someone who says that they don’t like utilitarianism? This is why the proof of utilitarianism is so important
