Lecture 1: What is the Highest Good?

Question 1

What is Utilitarianism? (Quote)

Answer 1

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

Question 2

What is Utilitarianism?

Answer 2

The guiding principle of utilitarian normative ethics is the Utility Principle.
Following, Bentham, this principle is sometimes called the “greatest happiness principle”

Question 3

What claim does the utility principle rest on?

Answer 3

• Welfarism
  a. Hedonism
• Consequentialism
• Sum-ranking

Question 4

What does Welfarism mean?

Answer 4

the ultimate good is individual happiness

Question 5

What does hedonism mean?

Answer 5

the ultimate good is individual happiness

Question 6

What does consequentialism mean?

Answer 6

moral rightness is determined by consequences on individual welfare

Question 7

What does Sum-ranking mean?

Answer 7

Best consequences determined by the sum of the individual happiness

Question 8

Psychological hedonism?

Answer 8

Happiness is the ultimate motive that persons pursue

a theory about the motives of actions; about what is desired

Question 9

Ethical hedonism?

Answer 9

Happiness is the ultimate good

A theory about what is valuable or desirable

Question 10

Benthams Hedonism?

Answer 10

According to Bentham, pleasure and pain are uniform experiences and only quantity matters
Quantity of pleasure and pain varies with intensity of the experience, duration, probability that they will occur, and remoteness in time.

Question 11

What objection can be made to Bentham?

Answer 11

A “doctrine worthy only of swine”

Question 12

Counter example to Bentham’s hedonism?

Answer 12

Oyster example

Question 13

Oyster Example

Answer 13

Benthams hedonism implies that the life of an oyster that lives forever is better than that of Haydn
This can’t be right
So Bentham’s hedonism is false
So Quantity of pleasure is not the only morally relevant factor

Question 14

Hedonism in Mill’s Utilitarianism: Mill’s definition of happiness?
What is Mill keen to do?

Answer 14

Mill follows Bentham by defining happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain
Mill is keen to defend utilitarianism against the objection that hedonism renders it a “doctrine worthy only of swine”

Question 15

What does Mill think Hedonism should consist of?

Answer 15

Mill thinks that experiences do not reduce to a single quality of pleasantness or painfulness

He argues that the experience of pleasure and pain can take on different qualities

Question 16

What does Mill argue in accordance with pleasure?

Answer 16

According to Mill, there are higher and lower pleasures and the former is more valuable

Question 17

What are higher pleasures?

Answer 17

They engage higher human faculties

higher pleasures are different in kind from lower pleasures

Question 18

How do we establish that something is a higher pleasure?

Answer 18

Those who know both higher and lower pleasures will prefer the higher pleasures to the lower pleasures. E.g. Socrates and the fool

Question 19

Is there a tension between Mill’s claim that happiness consists of pleasure and pain and his claim that pleasure and pain are not of uniform quality?

Answer 19

Mill seems to think the two can be reconciled

Question 20

Objections to Hedonism: Happiness is elusive

Is happiness a self-defeating end?

Answer 20

Is happiness a self-defeating end?
- Paradox of (psychological) hedonism: happiness is achieved only if is not directly pursued
Mill: utilitarianism does not suggest that individuals ought to promote their own happiness

Question 21

Objections to hedonism:

Is happiness unattainable?

Answer 21

Mill is a reformer; general happiness is the standard for assessing progress in institutional reform

Question 22

Objections to Hedonism:
Happiness is subjective:
Metaphysical Claim

Answer 22

Metaphysical Claim: experience of happiness is subjective
- Sum-ranking principle can only be applied if the experience of happiness is the same for all individuals

Mill must claim that while there are different qualities of pleasure, and not all individuals necessarily experience the whole spectrum, our experience of pleasure of any one quality is the same

Question 23

Objections to Hedonism
Happiness is subjective
Epistemic claim

Answer 23

Epistemic claim: individuals are best judges of their happiness

• how do we know that the experience is the same?
• Mill’s test: all judgement of those who have experienced different qualities of happiness

Question 24

Objections to Hedonism

Against experientialism

Answer 24

Experience of happiness is not the only thing that matters

• Nozick experience machine
• we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them