Utilitarianism Flashcards
Basic form:
Greatest happiness for the greatest number - do that which brings about the most pleasure for the most amount of people or other creatures, because it’s the most useful end. This is known as the greatest happiness principle. Actions that follow it are ‘good’ regardless of what the action is, therefore it’s teleological and relativist
Jeremy Bentham:
1748-1832, accepted founder of utilitarianism, social reformer and barrister, so expert at law and of social issues, he helped reform prisons and advocated for making sexual assault illegal, and he figured utilitarianism was the best way to run a society. His approach was seen as quantitative, because it mainly focused on number - known as act utilitarianism
Hedonism and Greek context:
The idea that ‘good’ is what makes people happy is hedonistic, and the greeks who thought this called it eudaimonia, best translated as well-being. Plato and Aristotle thought ‘good’ equated with happiness, whereas the Epicureans thought it was closer to pleasure. Sometimes these things go together, sometimes not. Pleasure is more sense based and basic, whereas happiness is a result of actions that can be pleasurable or not
The Hedonic Calculus:
Bentham wanted everyone in the society to be equal, so he developed the hedonic calculus based on 7 elements - duration, intensity, certainty, extent (amount of people affected), remoteness (sooner is better than later), richness (the more likely it is to create more pleasures or repeat), and purity (least amount of pain). Give everything a score out of ten for the pleasure (hedons) and the pain (dolors) to see which is more ‘good’ to utilitarianism. The ‘quality’ other than that is unimportant - rock paper scissors is equal to a symphony
John Stuart Mill:
Student of Bentham, thought happiness was more important than pleasure - not just gratification, but being fulfilled and living well, and there’s different qualities for different pleasures - doing ‘smarter’ things like studying philosophy of listening to Bach is better pleasure than playing darts or spending time with loved ones (which is bullshit). Equally though, a lot of Romans got pleasure from seeing a few people being eaten by lions - according to Bentham’s form, the people should die for entertainment. Anyone who disagrees hasn’t experienced the higher pleasures - a pig may be content to stay a pig, but a man would never choose to become one
Rule Utilitarianism:
Mill’s form of utilitarianism is known as rule utilitarianism, because he believed that rules could be made from previous decisions to help society function better - even if it benefits you to lie in one situation, it would be bad in most others, so not lying can be a rule, because it’s better long-term cause then we can trust people, but these can still sometimes be broken in weak rule utilitarianism unlike in strong. We also should all aim at general happiness, as that should increase our own by extension, so the group can come before the individual.
The Harm Principle:
Basically, ‘your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins’ - you have control over yourself, but not others. You should always avoid harm over gaining happiness.
Henry Sidgewick:
Argues against quality of pleasure, thought the decisions were intuitive, had hope for the future having better morals (I’m really sorry dude), thought justice was treating similar cases similarly - whatever we deem right for ourselves, we deem right for others in the same situation, act utilitarian
G.E. Moore:
Ideal utilitarian - aesthetic experiences and friends are the main goal, not happiness or pleasure.
Peter Singer:
Preference utilitarian - more recent, concerned with whether an action fits the preferences of those involved - all preferences are equal, regardless of what they are, agreed with keeping the universalisability of rule utilitarianism - more radical than it sounds, cause if you had £1000, you should always donate it to charity cause that fulfils the most preferences - also it’s pretty hard to know All preferences for sure, and some people Can’t express them, e.g. a newborn
Sir Karl Popper:
Negative utilitarian - we should act to minimise suffering rather than to increase pleasure, links to Buddhism, can be argued that it leads to mass euthanasia. It prevents the otherwise acceptable benevolent dictatorship. He defended ‘piecemeal social engineering’ rather than large, state run affairs - unfortunately it’s not really possible to eradicate suffering with small isolated patches of improvement
Strengths:
Straightforward, clearly applicable, consequentialist, looks beyond the individual perspective
Weaknesses:
The concept of happiness is too broad - that can just be reworked to the goal of the individual, therefore everyone does whatever they want, without a clear definition of happiness utilitarianism is pretty useless, we can’t always know what will cause the greatest happiness, if the action fails, it’s suddenly bad, too easy to set aside the rights of the individual for the greater good or predicted happiness of the individual by the state
