[Lesson Seven] Utilitarianism

INTRODUCTION
What makes an action right so that we have a moral obligation to perform it? Is it
that it “comes from the right place,” as it were - in other words, is
the  motive behind an action what endows the action with moral value? Or is it,
rather, the consequences of the action that determine its moral value?

Many people will want to say that the moral value of action depends upon the
motive behind the action, regardless of the action’s consequences. German
philosopher Immanuel Kant offered what is arguably the most rigorous philosophical
account of this ethical standpoint in history, and we will consider this account next
week. This position is often referred to as intentionalism.

Others, however, would point out that “the road to hell is often paved with good
intentions” - the purest motives, that is, can sometimes result in morally
objectionable outcomes. These people argue that the consequences of action
determine its moral value. In philosophy this position is
called consequentalism.  This week we will be considering a very popular
consequentialist ethical standpoint called utilitarianism.

In Western philosophy, intimations of utilitarianism first appeared in ancient times in

the works of Plato, around the 4th Century B.C.E. A more complete version of the
theory had been developed in China a little earlier, around the 5th Century B.C.E. by
Mozi and his followers (the Mohists), in opposition to the moral teachings of Kongzi
(a.k.a. Confucius). The theory as it is mostly understood, applied, and criticized in
modern Western ethics, however, was developed during the 18th and 19th
Centuries, in the works of Schaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, Bentham, J.S. Mill, and
Edgeworth.

HAPPINESS AS THE ULTIMATE GOOD AND THE PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY

One way to categorize things that are good is to ask, for each thing that we consider
good, whether it is good because it helps to secure something else that we consider
good or whether it is good in itself, independently of its relation to anything else.
The first kind of good thing, the thing that is good because it helps us secure another
good thing, is an instrumental good. The second kind, which is good in itself, is
an intrinsic good.

A hammer is an example of an instrumental good: it is good to the extent that it

helps us construct shelter, for example. Its goodness depends upon the goodness of
the things that it helps to secure through its use. It can also be bad - namely, when it
is used to secure bad things or states of affairs, such as bodily harm of a torture
victim.

Here is another example: someone who loves wisdom studies philosophy, because
studying philosophy makes her happy. In this example, studying philosophy is an
instrumental good (so is philosophy itself) to the extent that it secures another good
thing, happiness. Ask yourselves, however, whether happiness is
another instrumentalgood.

Does the goodness of happiness depend upon its usefulness in securing something
else? Many people say no, claiming that happiness is something that is pursued for
its own sake, not for the sake of some further good. In other words, happiness is
good in itself, independently of any uses to which it may be put. Happiness, in short,
is an intrinsic good.

We should bear in mind that today many people think of happiness as an

instrumental good. For example, it is considered an effective measure in avoiding
life-threatening diseases. For these people, healthy living seems to be an intrinsic
good, and this would make any and all means of achieving it, including happiness, an
instrumental value.

Critical reflection, however, reveals that this is an untenable standpoint. People tend
to value healthy living as a necessary condition for enjoying their lives or
living fulfillinglives, but these things - enjoyment and fulfilment - are attitudinal
varieties of ... happiness. Consequently, happiness in the form of joy or fulfilment
turns out to be the intrinsic good and healthy living is an instrumental good after all.

Most of us would question the value (or good) both of joyless healthy living and of
living healthily but in an unfulfilling way. The only exception to this is when healthy
living is itself a source of joy or fulfilment - only then we consider a life of healthy
living good. This still reduces healthy living to an instrumental good, however, since
it is a way of securing happiness as something good in itself. 
Just think of it this way: imagine that medication existed that could ensure a disease-
free life span of two hundred years. The only drawback is an unavoidable side-effect
of the medication: taking it makes it impossible to experience any sort of happiness
ever again. If it were the case that happiness is good merely as a means to securing
health, then people would take the medication without question, since it is a
comparatively better means of securing health than happiness is. Would you take the
medication?

There are good grounds for thinking that happiness, however it might be understood
or characterized, is in fact an intrinsic good for most people. This factual assertion is
foundational to utilitarianism, but it does not tell us everything we need to know
about this quite interesting moral theory. Utilitarianism identifies happiness as the
ultimate intrinsic good not only as a fact but also in a moral sense. What this means
is that securing happiness not only is in fact the ultimate aim of life, but that it
also ought to be the ultimate aim of life, and that everything we do ought
to promote happiness.

According to the most widespread form of utilitarianism (which, for reasons that will
become clear later in this lesson, is called act utilitarianism) there is only one basic
moral principle, the principle of utility:

An act is right, and so ought to be performed, if it secures the greatest happiness

for the greatest number of people (taking into consideration the agent’s own
happiness along with everyone else’s).

Another, more economical way of expressing the principle of utility:

An act is right, and so ought to be performed, if it secures maximum overall

happiness.

Or, even more economically expressed:

An act is right, and so ought to be performed, if it is optimific.

In the present context, “optimific” means “what secures the greatest happiness of

the greatest number.”

If you think that the morally right course of action is the one that makes the largest
number of people the most happy, then you are a utilitarian.
CONSEQUENTIALISM
Because utilitarianism makes the consequence of an action - specifically, whether or
not an action is optimific - the only relevant property when considering whether or
not the action is right or wrong, utilitarianism is correctly identified as a
consequentialist moral theory.

It is not the only such theory. There are at least two others: (1) ethical
egoism,according to which (as we have already seen) an act is right, and so ought to
be performed, if it promotes the greatest happiness of the agent him or herself,
regardless of what this means in terms of other people’s happiness; and (2) ethical
altruism,according to which an action is right, and so ought to be performed, if it
promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but without taking the
agent’s own happiness into account.

What distinguishes utilitarianism from these other kinds of consequentialism is that

it requires strict impartiality in the application of its moral principle. In the case of
ethical egoism, we are told that we ought to be partial to ourselves over others when
it comes to securing happiness, while in the case of ethical altruism we are told that
we ought to be partial to others over ourselves.

By contrast, for utilitarianism any given unit of pleasure in one person is worth no
more or less, from a moral point of view, than the same unit of pleasure in any other
person. Who these people are - ourselves, our parents, our siblings, our friends,
strangers, people we dislike, our enemies - makes no difference whatsoever when
adding up pleasure units so as to choose our course of action. Consequently,
utilitarianism might require that we ignore our own happiness or the happiness of
our loved ones if doing so secures the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

UTILITRAIANISM AS HEDONISM
Most utilitarians would accept the identification of happiness with pleasure and the
absence of pain (and unhappiness with pain and the absence of pleasure). Generally
speaking, therefore, utilitarianism tends to be hedonistic. The standpoint
of hedonism, as was discussed in Lesson One, is that pleasure is and ought to be the
ultimate aim in life.

This gives us occasion to consider a very important point concerning utilitarianism:

namely, that it attempts to derive its moral principle, the principle of utility, from the
fact that we, along with all other sentient creatures, pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
Another way of putting this is that it tries to derive normative claims, claims
concerning what people should do, from descriptive claims, claims concerning what
people in fact do.

This involves utilitarianism in what many moral philosophers condemn as the is-

ought fallacy: there is no logical warrant for deriving an ought-statement from an is-
statement. Doing so results in an invalid deduction: it is logically possible for it to be
both true that people pursue pleasure and avoid pain and false that people ought to
pursue pleasure and avoid pain.

We will be focusing on hedonistic utilitarianism in this lesson, but it should be noted

that not all utilitarians are hedonists. Some do not define happiness in terms of
pleasure but instead in terms of attitudinal states like bliss, joy, contentment, or
fulfilment (as we have already seen).

THE GREATEST HAPPINESS: QUANTITY OR QUALITY?

Some utilitarians characterize pleasure strictly in quantitative terms. According to
them, pleasure comes in determinate homogeneous units, and so to determine
which mode of conduct is morally obligatory according to the principle of utility, all
you have to do is determine which mode of conduct affords the greatest number of
these homogenous pleasure units across the greatest number of people.

"The greatest happiness," however, does not necessarily just mean the
greatest quantityof happiness. “Greatest” here may refer to quality as well as
quantity. J.S. Mill held that some pleasures are better than others, even if the former
come in comparatively lesser amounts or involve comparatively more pain than the
latter.
John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor. Helen was the daughter of Harriet Taylor and collaborated with Mill for
fifteen years after her mother's death in 1858. [Wikipedia]

Mill thought, for example, that modest amounts of intellectual pleasure

(contemplating pi [π], for instance), which are secured only through mental exertion,
are preferable to copious amounts of easily procured physical pleasure (consuming
large amounts of pie, for instance - a little bit of pi is worth more than a lot of pie).

What is the test for deciding which of two pleasures is of higher quality? If all or most
people with a knowledge of both pleasures prefer one over the other, even if the
one preferred comes in smaller amounts and involves more pain than the other,
then the one preferred is superior in quality to the other.

Mill differentiated between and ranked pleasures to undermine a common criticism

of utilitarianism: namely, that its implementation would result in the barbarization of
humanity. Utilitarianism endangers high culture, the argument goes, since it says
that we ought to secure the greatest pleasure of the greatest number, but the
majority is pleased by the basest things and finds high culture to be a pain. Most
people prefer darts at the pub to reading Plato, and so if we implement
utilitarianism, we will have scores of pubs but no copies of Plato. From Mill’s
standpoint, a unit of Plato pleasure is worth much more than a unit of pub pleasure. 

This position, while protecting high culture, has some problematic implications. What
if Plato-pleasure is assigned so much value that it is worth a colossal amount of
physical exertion? This might seem to justify putting a lot of people to work so that a
few people can enjoy Plato. Given the supposed strict impartiality of utilitarianism,
furthermore, it doesn’t matter who is doing the working and who is doing the
reading - making a majority work so that a minority can read at leisure is perfectly
compatible with the principle of utility, if you accept the strong comparative
valuation of high culture that Mill wants to promote.

UTILITARIANISM VS JUSTICE OR RIGHTS

There are other problems with strict adherence to the happiness algorithms of
utilitarianism.

If securing the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the only morally relevant
property of an action, then all sorts of conduct that we tend to consider immoral
from the standpoint of human rights or justice might be not only morally permissible
but morally obligatory, such as the persecution and even the extermination of
innocent human beings. If the greatest happiness of the greatest number depended
upon the unjust execution of an innocent human being, for example, then
utilitarianism would demand that the execution take place. We consider such actions
immoral, however, to the extent that we recognize human beings as having a right to
life, and forms of justice that can't be simply reduced to maximum happiness. 

Another example: utilitarianism might advocate refraining from prosecuting a

politician for a serious crime he or she has committed - say, murder - because such a
prosecution would result in general distress, a loss of faith in holders of political
office, and social unrest. This, however, is contrary to the principle of justice,
according to which people should receive what they deserve (in this case,
punishment for a crime). When it comes to these sorts of things, many people
believe that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is morally irrelevant; but
if this is true, then utilitarianism is untenable, since it identifies the greatest
happiness of the greatest number as the only thing that is of moral relevance.

Novelist Fyodor Dostoyevski, in his masterpiece entitled The Brothers

Karamazov, has two of the brothers, Ivan and Alyosha, effectively argue over
whether or not utilitarianism is a viable ethical theory. Ivan asks Alyosha: “What if
you were admitted to paradise, but you found out that its existence depended upon
the suffering of an innocent child? Could you live in paradise knowing that it
depended for its existence on such a thing?” (I am paraphrasing here). Alyosha
admitted that he could not live there, proving that he is no utilitarian, since
according to utilitarianism the suffering of one innocent child is morally right if it
secures the greatest happiness of the greatest number of other people.

More recently, science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a short story “The Ones
Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which makes the same point. The community of a
fictional place called Omelas has managed to overcome all of the sources of suffering
that we continue to struggle with - poverty, disease, etc. Eventually, it is discovered
that the prosperity of Omelas depends upon keeping a young child locked in a dark
cellar, alone. Some of the members of the community, upon finding this out, leave
town, despite the prosperity they enjoy there, presumably because they believe that
some things are wrong regardless of whether or not they are "optimific."

UTILITARIANISM VS COMMITMENT
Philosopher Bernard Williams offered a particularly interesting criticism of
utilitarianism. Utilitarianism, he remarked, commits an assault upon human integrity,
which is maintained through the pursuit of projects in keeping with our most basic
commitments. Let’s say that you have devoted your life to something, but you have
found out that securing the greatest happiness of the greatest number requires that
you completely abandon the object of your devotion. In such circumstances,
utilitarianism morally obliges you to do so.

Williams offers a good example of this: let’s say that you are chemist and a pacifist
who has had some trouble finding work. A friend tells you that the military wants to
hire a chemist to develop chemical weapons, and the only candidate is a chemist
who loves the thought of people dying by inhaling, drinking, or eating poisonous
compounds that he has developed. Your friend can put in a good word for you with
the hiring committee, which will almost certainly result in your being hired. Another
near certainty is that there would be less happiness in the world if the homicidal
chemist were given the job than if you were. According to utilitarianism, you are
morally obliged to take the job.

But you don't want to make chemical weapons; you feel it is wrong. This sort of
requirement utilitarianism makes on you to take the job, Williams thought, makes
nothing of the deep commitments we actually have, the ones that endow our lives
with a purpose and direction. We can be called upon to totally abandon our
commitments to satisfy the principle of utility.

The utilitarian moral requirement of engaging in morally reprehensible conduct to

prevent others from engaging in worse immoral conduct is highly susceptible to
exploitation. People can employ it with a view to leaving others with a false
impression concerning the moral value of actions. “If I don’t perform x,” it can be
argued by disingenuous selfish people, “which I admit will decrease the amount of
overall happiness and increase the amount of overall unhappiness in the world, then
someone else will, which will result in a comparatively greater decrease in overall
happiness and increase in overall unhappiness. Therefore, I am morally obliged to
engage in conduct x, since we ought always to act to secure the greatest happiness
of the greatest number.” It is a line of reasoning that obviously can be used to
morally justify anything.

UTILITARIANISM CONSIDERS HUMANS TOO ABSTRACTLY

The actual relationships between an agent and those who are significantly affected
by his or her act is morally irrelevant, according to utilitarianism. This implies that if
your mother and someone you do not know personally were both drowning in the
same river, and you could only save one; and if you knew, furthermore, that the
person you do not know will, if she lives, develop a cure for cancer, but your mother
will not do anything this important, then you are morally obliged to save the person
you do not know and let your mother drown.

Under such circumstances we are likely to save our mothers, but the question is
whether or not there is any moral justification for doing so. Are people with whom
we have personal ties or bonds ever deserving of special moral consideration? Is
behaving as if they are so deserving morally impermissible given the alleged moral
requirement of complete impartiality?

UTILITARIAN MORAL ONTOLOGY

An important question in moral philosophy is: What characteristic or characteristics must a being
possess to be considered a being deserving of moral consideration? Answering this question
establishes what is called a moral ontology. The term ontology combines the Greek
words on, which means “being,” and logos, which in the present context is best understood as
“theory” - hence, “moral ontology” signifies a theory of what counts as a moral being.
Utilitarian moral ontology includes all beings that have the capacity to experience pleasure or
pain - in short, all sentient beings. An implication of this that was apparent to and accepted by
early modern utilitarians like Bentham and J.S. Mill, and staunchly defended by modern
utilitarians like Peter Singer, is that non-human animals are deserving of moral consideration no
less than humans.

This is a very attractive aspect of the theory, as it is consistent with some of our strongest moral
intuitions concerning the moral treatment of non-human animals. There seems to be something
right about making the capacity to suffer (as opposed to intelligence, for instance) the property
by which a being gains membership in the moral community.

UTILITARIANISM REQUIRES TOO MUCH KNOWLEDGE AND TIME FOR

MORAL CHOICES
Utilitarianism implies that omniscience is a necessary condition of moral certainty in
relation to our conduct, for only if we were omniscient could we know (1) all of the
actions possible in any given situation, and (2) which one of those actions will in fact
secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number. As we are less than
omniscient, utilitarian moral choices necessarily involve guesswork.

What’s more, the moral value of our actions depends entirely upon whether or not
we manage to choose what in fact does secure the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, so the less we are able to know concerning the effects of our
actions, the more the moral value of those actions is a matter of luck.

Even assuming that we could somehow know everything we need to know to be able
to choose actions that do in fact secure the greatest happiness of the greatest
number, we would often need to be able to access and process this data in a very
brief span of time, since many situations that call for a moral decision do so with
urgency: for example, someone drowning in a river on whose bank you, an
experienced swimmer with a knowledge of CPR, are standing. Can utilitarianism
provide sure moral guidance in situations like this?

J.S. Mill offered a response to this objection. We can, he thought, rely upon
accumulated experience, not only our own but that of those who came before us,
concerning which actions and which kinds of actions tend to secure the greatest
happiness of the greatest number, so that we need not attempt to perform a
utilitarian calculation - to “reinvent the wheel,” as it were - every time we are faced
with a moral choice.

QUANTIFYING HAPPINESS
Although we can often roughly distinguish between very sad, sad, happy and very
happy states in ourselves, this is a very far cry from the precise pleasure-unit
arithmetic utilitarianism requires if it is to result in more than mere rough
estimations.

Some even deny that happiness or pleasure is really quantitative at all and, hence,
claim that it cannot be measured. Isn’t every pleasure qualitatively distinct from
every other pleasure and, hence, impossible to quantitatively compare with any
other pleasure? Can the pleasure you feel when reading a good book, eating a sweet,
meeting a friend after an extended time apart, and waking up after a restful sleep all
be reduced to quantities of interchangeable pleasure units?

If we cannot quantify pleasures, then the hedonic calculus upon which utilitarianism

is based is impossible. (The hedonic calculus is the counting up of pleasure units
secured through actions and the comparison of different quantities of pleasure units
across different actions for the purpose of moral decision-making.)

RULE UTILITARIANISM

Rule utilitarianism has been introduced to address some of the problems discussed

above. According to it, the principle of utilitarianism should be applied to general
rules of conduct, not particular actions. What we need to do is determine which
rules of conduct would promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number if
everyone followed them, and then follow them ourselves all the time.

Rule utilitarianism appears to resolve the time problem with original

utilitarianism (also called act utilitarianism to distinguish it from this new version),
as we would have a set of rules to follow without hesitation on most occasions. The
knowledge problem remains, however, since we still need more knowledge
concerning consequences (namely, the consequences of following given rules) than
we can possibly have to be certain we are behaving morally. Furthermore, it does
not at all address the problems with quantifying pleasure.
The most serious problem with rule utilitarianism, however, is that under certain
circumstances it must either ignore the principle of utility altogether or revert back
to original or act utilitarianism. Let’s say that you have somehow determined that if
everyone told the truth at every opportunity, the greatest happiness of the greatest
number would be secured. Assume, furthermore, that you are in a situation in which
you somehow know that lying will secure the greatest happiness of the greatest
number. Under these circumstances, you must, according to rule utilitarianism, tell
the truth, despite the fact that doing so will not secure the greatest happiness of the
greatest number.

How can rule utilitarianism be a version of utilitarianism at all, though, if it can

sometimes justify not securing the greatest happiness of the greatest number? The
suggestion that rule utilitarianism must allow for exceptions - that it must, for
example, allow for lying when the latter secures the greatest happiness of the
greatest number - is fatal to the theory, since this amounts to a total reversion to
original or act utilitarianism. Thus, under the conditions specified above, rule
utilitarianism can only either (1) distinguish itself from utilitarianism altogether, or
(2) revert back to classical or act utilitarianism.

DEONTOLOGY
Kantian moral philosophy is referred to as deontological, which means that it
emphasizes duty or obligation in its account of morality. (“Deontology” comes from
the Greek deon, which means “obligation” or “necessity.”)

According to Kant, an action must be done from duty to have any moral worth. He
identifies four kinds of actions in relation to duty:

1. Acting contrary to duty, from an inclination (i.e., a habitual desire) to

secure some particular pleasure.
2. Acting in accordance with duty, but only as a means of gratifying an
inclination to secure some particular pleasure that is independent of duty
and so could be secured by other means.
3. Acting in accordance with duty because doing so itself gratifies an
inclination to secure a particular pleasure - in other words, performing the
duty is itself pleasurable and this is what motivates one to perform the
duty.
4. Acting in accordance with duty regardless of all inclinations.
Only the last kind of action (number 4) counts as a moral will or motive and, hence,
possesses moral value for Kant. The rest are at best morally worthless and at worst
actually immoral.

Here are examples of each of these four kinds of conduct, in relation to the duty to
tell the truth:

1. Lying for financial gain.

2. Telling the truth for financial gain.
3. Telling the truth because being truthful makes one happy.
4. Telling the truth because it is one’s duty to tell the truth, and for no other
reason.

The only unproblematic example when it comes to assessing the moral worth of an
action is (1), whose moral worthlessness is easily discernible. The moral
worthlessness of (2) is not as clearly observable as that of (1), because the motive
could be concealed, but it is nevertheless beyond question, for if the motive behind
such conduct were clearly observable, it would be judged morally worthless.

With example (3), however, the moral worthlessness of the motive is less obvious:
Isn’t someone who finds happiness and for that reason seeks happiness in
performing his or her moral duty - in this example, truth-telling - a morally good
person?

Not according to Kant. The truth telling must be performed because it is a duty,
regardless of whether or not truth telling is a source of happiness. Acting in
accordance with a duty to tell the truth out of love for the truth is morally worthless,
Kant thought, while acting in accordance with a duty to tell the truth strictly because
it is one’s duty to do so, even if one has no feelings for or even hates the
truth, possesses full moral value. The person who does what is right because it is
gratifying to do so, on Kant’s view, is at best good-natured, but not moral.

Interestingly, Kant conceded that it is impossible to confirm whether or not an action

performed in accordance with moral duty is at the same time performed strictly
becauseit is in accordance with moral duty, and, therefore, that it is impossible to
confirm whether or not any action has moral value. The motives of others are not
directly observable; we must infer them from the available evidence.
This is not only problematic because it allows for the possibility of misinterpretation
of a person’s conduct; there is the additional problem that people often actively
deceive each other concerning their motives, so as to appear morally good rather
than narrowly self-interested or malicious to each other.

Add to this, finally, that people often are also prone to self-deception and repression
regarding their own motives in their need or desire to appear morally good rather
than narrowly self-interested or malicious to themselves as well as to other people.
Modern philosophers and psychologists have found many problems with applying
Kant's standards to real human behaviour.

For Kant, however, none of this has anything to do with morality itself: morality is
what it is, regardless of whether or not human beings have or even can conduct
themselves according to it. It is an absolute. It is also very important to keep in mind
that Kant was not saying that the absence of any personal inclinations is a necessary
condition for acting from duty. Inclinations may be either present or absent in people
engaged in conduct possessing moral value, and may even be satisfied by that
conduct; it is only that the moral value of the conduct in question depends upon its
not being engaged in just because it may satisfy some inclination or other.