It doesn't kill it -- it doesn't necessarily mean that utility is morally irrelevant, or unhelpful, or is entirely without merit. It does, however, point out that it may not be sufficient.
It leads us though Mill didn't see this clearly to seek some non-utilitarian property of pleasures by which to decide among the various pleasures that can accompany the enormous variety of human pleasures. It is difficult if not impossible to do the calculations required. How do you measure the happiness pleasure produced? Not everyone will be able to measure their happiness. Do the calculations range over 1 year, ten years, century, etc..?
How long? Do the calculations measure the happiness for a small group, entire country, the whole world? Do they consider only humans or non-humans who are sentient beings have awareness and feelings. Peter Singer is a world renown philosopher and Utilitarian who includes all sentient beings. Non-Humans as well as humans can feel pleasure and pain and so to avoid speciesism includes them in the calculations.
The theory can support opposing actions on different occasions as the correct or the good thing to do. Sometimes it supports lying, cheating, killing, stealing, etc The theory can support doing horrible, heinous acts, as long as they produce the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number of people. There is no act that is wrong in and of itself! Just as science was beginning to understand the workings of cause and effect in the body, so ethics would explain the causal relationships of the mind.
Instead, the fundamental unit of human action for him was utility —solid, certain, and factual. What is utility? It has these characteristics: 1 universality, because it applies to all acts of human behavior, even those that appear to be done from altruistic motives; 2 objectivity, meaning it operates beyond individual thought, desire, and perspective; 3 rationality, because it is not based in metaphysics or theology; and 4 quantifiability in its reliance on utility.
In the spirit of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham made a seemingly bizarre request concerning the disposition of his body after his death. He generously donated half his estate to London University, a public university open to all and offering a secular curriculum, unusual for the times. It later became University College London.
Critics insist he was merely eccentric. Bentham was interested in reducing utility to a single index so that units of it could be assigned a numerical and even monetary value, which could then be regulated by law. He intended utilitarianism to provide a reasoned basis for making judgments of value rather than relying on subjectivity, intuition, or opinion.
The implications of such a system on law and public policy were profound and had a direct effect on his work with the British House of Commons, where he was commissioned by the Speaker to decide which bills would come up for debate and vote. Utilitarianism provided a way of determining the total amount of utility or value a proposal would produce relative to the harm or pain that might result for society.
Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory. In consequentialism , actions are judged solely by their consequences, without regard to character, motivation, or any understanding of good and evil and separate from their capacity to create happiness and pleasure.
Thus, in utilitarianism, it is the consequences of our actions that determine whether those actions are right or wrong. In this way, consequentialism differs from Aristotelian and Confucian virtue ethics, which can accommodate a range of outcomes as long as the character of the actor is ennobled by virtue. For Bentham, character had nothing to do with the utility of an action. Everyone sought pleasure and avoided pain regardless of personality or morality.
In fact, too much reliance on character might obscure decision-making. Rather than making moral judgments, utilitarianism weighed acts based on their potential to produce the most good pleasure for the most people. It judged neither the good nor the people who benefitted. For him, utilitarianism reflected the reality of human relationships and was enacted in the world through legislative action. To illustrate the concept of consequentialism, consider the hypothetical story told by Harvard psychologist Fiery Cushman.
When a man offends two volatile brothers with an insult, Jon wants to kill him; he shoots but misses. Matt, who intends only to scare the man but kills him by accident, will suffer a more severe penalty than his brother in most countries including the United States.
Applying utilitarian reasoning, can you say which brother bears greater guilt for his behavior? Are you satisfied with this assessment of responsibility? Mill, on the other hand, believes that quality , not merely quantity, of pleasure matters and can therefore defend the claim that Socrates has the better life even by hedonistic standards.
Higher pleasures are those pleasures of the intellect brought about via activities like poetry, reading or attending the theatre. Lower pleasures are animalistic and base; pleasures associated with drinking beer, having sex or lazing on a sun-lounger. Justifying this distinction between higher and lower quality pleasures as non-arbitrary and not just an expression of his own tastes, Mill says that competent judges , those people who have experienced both types of pleasure, are best placed to select which pleasures are higher and lower.
Such competent judges, says Mill, would and do favour pleasures of the intellect over the base pleasures of the body. On this basis, Mill is open to the criticism that many people have both read books and drunk beer and that if given the choice would choose the latter. However, this focus on the outcome of individual acts can sometimes lead to odd and objection-raising examples. Imagine a case where a doctor had five patients requiring new organs to stop their death and one healthy patient undergoing a routine check.
In this case, it would seem that total pleasure is best promoted by killing the one healthy patient, harvesting his organs and saving the other five lives; their pleasure outweighs the cost to the formerly healthy patient.
Their view is that we should create a set of rules that, if followed, would produce the greatest amount of total happiness. In the transplant case, killing the healthy man would not seem to be part of the best set of utilitarian-justified rules since a rule allowing the killing of healthy patients would not seem to promote total happiness; one outcome, for example, would be that people would very likely stop coming to hospitals for fear for their life!
Therefore, if a rule permitting killing was allowed then the maximisation of total happiness would not be promoted overall. According to Mill, there is:. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. As such, the action would not be morally permitted. This fact would also help rule utilitarians overcome objections based on the treatment of minorities because exploitation of minority groups would, perhaps, fail to be supported by the best utilitarian-justified set of rules.
Yet, rule utilitarians face a troubling dilemma:. No longer focussing on the consequences of the action before them, the strong rule utilitarian appears to ignore the option to maximise total happiness in favour of following a general and nonrelative rule regarding how to act.
The strong rule utilitarian may be able to avoid problems based on treatment of minorities or a lack of absolute legal and human rights, but it is not clear that they survive these problems holding on to a teleological, relativistic utilitarian theory. Utilitarianism seems to be saved from troubling implications only by denying core features. In what cases would Act Utilitarianism and Weak Rule Utilitarianism actually provide different moral guidance?
This is something you should consider in the light of your own examples or previous examples in this chapter. Henry Sidgwick — is considered to have taken over the baton after Mill, and R. Hare — was perhaps chief advocate in the mid twentieth century. However, few contemporary philosophers can claim as much influence in public life outside philosophy as can the preference utilitarian, Peter Singer —.
His utilitarian theory is teleological, maximising, impartial and relativistic but he does not claim that the greatest good for the greatest number can be reduced to pleasure in either raw or higher forms. If you satisfy your preference to achieve a good qualification your life goes better in virtue of satisfying that preference.
If someone else desires to get a job rather than continue in education, their life goes better for them if they secure their preference and gain employment. Individuals, according to Singer, must be at the core of moral thinking:. There would be something incoherent about living a life where the conclusions you came to in ethics did not make any difference to your life.
It would make it an academic exercise. The whole point about doing ethics is to think about the way to live. My life has a kind of harmony between my ideas and the way I live. It would be highly discordant if that was not the case. This potentially leaves Singer open to the same issues that plagued Bentham.
Namely, regarding circumstances where partiality seems desirable, or when the preferences of the majority seem to threaten a minority group, or require us to sacrifice our integrity. Further, the problem of calculation also seems to be relevant, because it is not obvious how you could work out the preferences of others in at least some difficult moral cases let alone the preferences of animals, if they are also relevant.
Brandt, writing about the rationality of certain preferences, suggested that rational preferences were those that might survive cognitive psychotherapy. SUMMARY Utilitarianism remains a living theory and retains hedonistic and non-hedonistic advocates, as well as supporters of both act and rule formulations.
The core insight that consequences matter gives the theory some intuitive support even in the light of hypothetical cases that pose serious problems for utilitarians. The extent to which the different versions of Utilitarianism survive their objections is very much up to you as a critically-minded philosopher to decide.
Bentham, The Rationale of Reward , p. Brandt, Ethical Theory. Creative Commons - Attribution 4. Check if your institution has already acquired this book: authentification to OpenEdition Freemium for Books. You can suggest to your institution to acquire one or more ebooks published on OpenEdition Books.
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Thank you. We will forward your request to your library as soon as possible. OpenEdition is a web platform for electronic publishing and academic communication in the humanities and social sciences. Some of the questions they wrestled with include: What constitutes "the greatest amount of good"?
How is happiness defined? How is justice accommodated? In today's Western democracies, policymakers are generally proponents of free markets and some base level of government interference in the private lives of citizens so as to assure safety and security.
Although the appropriate amount of regulation and laws will always be a subject of debate, political and economic policies are geared primarily toward fostering as much well-being for as many people as possible, or at least they should be. Where there are disadvantaged groups who suffer income inequality or other negative consequences because of a utilitarian-based policy or action, most politicians would try to find a remedy. Utilitarianism holds that the most ethical choice is the one that will produce the greatest good for the greatest number.
As such, it is the only moral framework that can justify military force or war. Moreover, utilitarianism is the most common approach to business ethics because of the way that it accounts for costs and benefits.
The theory asserts that there are two types of utilitarian ethics practiced in the business world, "rule" utilitarianism and "act" utilitarianism.
An example of rule utilitarianism in business is tiered pricing for a product or service for different types of customers. In the airline industry, for example, many planes offer first-, business-, and economy-class seats. Customers who fly in first or business class pay a much higher rate than those in economy seats, but they also get more amenities—simultaneously, people who cannot afford upper-class seats benefit from the economy rates.
This practice produces the highest good for the greatest number of people. And the airline benefits, too. The more expensive upper-class seats help to ease the financial burden that the airline created by making room for economy-class seats. An example of act utilitarianism could be when pharmaceutical companies release drugs that have been governmentally approved, but with known minor side effects because the drug is able to help more people than are bothered by the side effects.
Most companies have a formal or informal code of ethics , which is shaped by their corporate culture, values, and regional laws. Today, having a formalized code of business ethics is more important than ever.
For a business to grow, it not only needs to increase its bottom line , but it also must create a reputation for being socially responsible. Companies also must endeavor to keep their promises and put ethics at least on par with profits.
Consumers are looking for companies that they can trust, and employees work better when there is a solid model of ethics in place.
On an individual level, if you make morally correct decisions at work, then everyone's happiness will increase. However, if you choose to do something morally wrong—even if legal—then your happiness and that of your colleagues, will decrease.
In the workplace, though, utilitarian ethics are difficult to achieve. These ethics also can be challenging to maintain in our business culture, where a capitalistic economy often teaches people to focus on themselves at the expense of others.
Similarly, monopolistic competition teaches one business to flourish at the expense of others. So, although utilitarianism is surely a reason-based approach to determining right and wrong, it has obvious limitations.
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