Utilitarianism

• 1. Introduction

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  Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that grows out of one sentence from Jeremy Bentham: "Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure." From that claim, the theory builds a simple rule for living. The right action is the one that does the most to raise well-being and lower suffering for everyone it touches. The slogan that sums it up is the greatest good for the greatest number.

  The idea has travelled far from its starting point. Thinkers have used it to shape welfare economics and to argue about justice. They have turned it on the crisis of global poverty, on the ethics of raising animals for food, and on the need to avoid risks that could end humanity.

  This documentary follows the idea through its forerunners, its founders and its many revisions. Three questions keep returning along the way. Can happiness really be counted and added up? Whose happiness is counted, and does it matter that every person is separate? And how much can a moral theory ask of an ordinary person before it asks too much?

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• 2. Before Bentham

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  The Chinese philosopher Mozi proposed an early consequentialist system that sought to maximize benefit and eliminate harm. His version aimed at communal goods such as political stability, population growth and wealth. It did not aim at the happiness of each individual. In ancient Greece, Aristippus and Epicurus defended forms of hedonism, while Aristotle named eudaimonia as the highest human good. Augustine later wrote that "all men agree in desiring the last end, which is happiness."

  In the 8th century, the Indian philosopher Śāntideva wrote that humanity should stop the present and future suffering of all sentient beings and bring about their happiness. Thomas Aquinas explored happiness at length in his Summa Theologica. During the Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote political philosophy that carried consequentialist ideas.

  The modern theory took shape in the 18th century, and Francis Hutcheson supplied a key phrase in 1725. In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, he argued that an action's virtue grows with the number of people it makes happy. The best action, he said, brings the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers. The first three editions even carried mathematical algorithms for computing the morality of actions. Hutcheson later dropped them because they "appear'd useless, and were disagreeable to some readers."

  John Gay, in his 1731 essay Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality, gave the idea a religious foundation. Some scholars credit him with the first systematic utilitarian ethics. Gay reasoned that God, being infinitely happy himself, could have had no purpose in creating mankind except their happiness. God's will therefore became the immediate test of virtue, and human happiness the test of God's will.

  David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, from 1751, took a more secular line. Hume observed that in every moral dispute, public utility is the consideration kept chiefly in view. When people find that a belief about morality rests on false appearances, he wrote, they adjust their sentiments and redraw the boundaries of good and evil.

  William Paley carried Gay's religious version to a mass audience with The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy in 1785. The book became a required text at Cambridge. Schneewind writes that utilitarianism first became widely known in England through Paley's work. Paley also tackled an obvious objection, that the hand of an assassin might sometimes be useful. His answer was that a single act has a particular bad consequence and also a general one, the breaking of a useful general rule.

  How large Paley once loomed is visible in a title from 1874. Thomas Rawson Birks called his book Modern Utilitarianism or the Systems of Paley, Bentham and Mill Examined and Compared.

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• 3. Bentham's Calculus

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  Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was printed in 1780 but not published until 1789. He may have decided to release it after seeing the success of Paley's book. It was not an immediate hit. His ideas spread mainly through Pierre Étienne Louis Dumont, who translated selections from Bentham's manuscripts into French as Traité de législation civile et pénale in 1802. Hildreth later rendered that book back into English as The Theory of Legislation. By then, large portions had already been retranslated for Sir John Bowring's edition of Bentham's works, issued in parts between 1838 and 1843.

  The principle of utility, as Bentham stated it, approves or disapproves of any action by its tendency to increase or reduce the happiness of the party concerned. He insisted that it covered every action whatsoever. That meant not only private conduct but every measure of government.

  In Chapter IV, Bentham set out a method for weighing pleasures and pains that came to be called the hedonic calculus. A single pleasure or pain is measured by its intensity, its duration, its certainty or uncertainty, and its nearness or remoteness. An act must also be judged by what follows it. Fecundity is the chance of being followed by more sensations of the same kind. Purity is the chance of not being followed by the opposite kind. Finally comes extent, the number of people affected.

  Bentham denied that any of this was strange. In his view, people already reason this way whenever they see their own interest clearly. Rosen warns that modern descriptions of utilitarianism can look like a crude straw man, and he points out that Bentham cared a great deal about rules. His seminal work is about the principles of legislation, and in Chapter VII he writes that the business of government is to promote society's happiness by punishing and rewarding.

  That concern with law raised a hard question about when, if ever, breaking a law could be justified. In The Theory of Legislation, Bentham separated evils of the first order from evils of the second. First-order evils are the immediate harms. Second-order evils spread through the community as "alarm" and "danger." He pictured a starving beggar who steals a loaf from a rich man's house. Weighed on first-order effects alone, the loaf might do more good than harm. The case for punishment rests, Bentham said, on the second-order evil.

  The person raised to carry this cause forward was John Stuart Mill.

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• 4. Mill's Higher Pleasures

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  In 1861, John Stuart Mill remarked that he had reason to believe he was the first person to bring the word utilitarian into use. He said he had not invented it. He had adopted it from a passing expression in John Galt's 1821 novel Annals of the Parish. Mill seems not to have known that Bentham had already used the word in a letter to George Wilson in 1781, and again in a letter to Dumont in 1802. Mill's book Utilitarianism first appeared in 1861 as three articles in Fraser's Magazine. It was reprinted as a single volume in 1863.

  Mill had been brought up as a Benthamite, yet he broke with Bentham on a central point. Critics had long mocked hedonism as a doctrine worthy only of swine, and Aristotle himself, in the Nicomachean Ethics, had said that equating the good with pleasure suits a life for beasts. Mill answered that it would be absurd to weigh every other thing by quality as well as quantity while judging pleasures by quantity alone. Some pleasures, he argued, are simply better than others.

  His most quoted line makes the point: "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." To decide which pleasure is higher, Mill appealed to competent judges, people who know both. If they strongly prefer one, and would not trade it for any amount of the other, that pleasure is superior in quality. Where the judges disagree, the majority view stands.

  Mill also gave a practical reason for choosing intellectual pursuits. Petty pleasures bring short-term happiness, and then boredom and depression creep in. Intellectual pursuits keep offering chances to improve one's life as knowledge accumulates.

  Chapter Four of Utilitarianism contains the argument that has drawn the most fire. Mill wrote that the only proof an object is visible is that people see it, and the only proof a sound is audible is that people hear it. By the same pattern, the only evidence that something is desirable is that people desire it. Since each person desires their own happiness, the general happiness is a good to all persons taken together.

  Critics have accused Mill of three fallacies: the naturalistic fallacy, equivocation on the word desirable, and the fallacy of composition. Such charges began in his own lifetime and lasted well over a century. Necip Fikri Alican answered all three in Mill's Principle of Utility: A Defense of John Stuart Mill's Notorious Proof, published in 1994. It is still the only book-length treatment of the subject. Hall in 1949 and Popkin in 1950 offered a lighter defence. They noted that Mill opens the chapter by saying questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof in the ordinary sense. On their reading, he only offers considerations that might lead a reasonable person to accept the principle.

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• 5. Sidgwick and Moore

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  Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics has been called the peak of classical utilitarianism. His goal was to ground the theory in common-sense morality and to dispel the worry that the two were at odds. For Sidgwick, ethics concerns which actions are objectively right. The philosopher's job is less to create new knowledge than to organize what people already know.

  He identified three methods for determining right conduct. The first is intuitionism, which relies on moral principles that are self-evident to the person who grasps them. The other two are forms of hedonism, in which rightness depends only on the pleasure and pain that follow. Egoistic hedonism counts only the agent's own well-being. Universal hedonism, which is utilitarianism, counts everyone's.

  Sidgwick tested common-sense principles against criteria such as clear wording, mutual consistency and expert agreement. Most failed. A few abstract ones passed, such as the principle that "what is right for me must be right for all persons in precisely similar circumstances." Another is that one should be equally concerned with all temporal parts of one's life. These abstract principles all fit utilitarianism, which gave Sidgwick a partial harmony between intuition and consequences. Lesser duties, like keeping promises, can collide with one another, and he thought such clashes could be settled by weighing consequences.

  Full success eluded him, because he regarded egoism as equally rational. It could be reconciled with utilitarianism only through religious assumptions, for example a personal God who rewards and punishes in the afterlife. Without them, Sidgwick admitted a "dualism of practical reason," a "fundamental contradiction" in our moral consciousness.

  The label ideal utilitarianism was first used by Hastings Rashdall in The Theory of Good and Evil in 1907. It is more often tied to G. E. Moore. In Ethics, published in 1912, Moore rejected the view that pleasure is the only thing worth maximizing. He asked readers to compare two worlds with exactly equal pleasure. One contains knowledge, love, the appreciation of beauty and moral qualities. The other contains nothing but pleasure. Moore held that the first is plainly better.

  He conceded that neither side of this argument can be proved. Anyone who took the opposite view, he said, would in his judgment be self-evidently wrong.

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• 6. Rules, Levels and Motives

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  Mill defended the use of rules with a sea-faring comparison. Nobody argues that navigation is not founded on astronomy just because sailors cannot stop to calculate the Nautical Almanack. They go to sea with the figures already worked out, and so, he said, do all rational creatures on the sea of life.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, philosophers made rules the center of debate. Smart in 1956 and McCloskey in 1957 began by calling the two camps extreme and restricted utilitarianism before settling on the prefixes act and rule. An anthology editor described the theory's growth as a dialectical process of formulation, criticism, reply and reformulation. The dividing line is simple. For the act utilitarian, an action is right if it maximizes utility. For the rule utilitarian, it is right if it conforms to a rule that maximizes utility.

  Urmson's influential article argued that Mill justified rules on utilitarian grounds, and scholars have debated that reading ever since. The evidence is mixed, and Mill probably never meant to draw the distinction. A letter included in a collection of his writings published in 1977 leans toward act utilitarianism. In it, Mill says the right test is the natural consequences of the particular act, not what would follow if everyone did the same.

  A sharper objection is that rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism. Whenever breaking a rule would produce more good, the rule can be patched with a sub-rule for that exception. Repeat the patching often enough and the rules become a way of chasing the best outcome case by case.

  R. M. Hare took up this problem in Principles in 1973. He accepted the collapse for rules that can be as specific as we please, and proposed limiting how specific they may be. The result was two-level utilitarianism. At the critical level, someone who plays God or the ideal observer uses specific reasoning to decide which general principles to teach. At the intuitive level, people follow those general principles in daily life, since human nature and human ignorance make fine calculation unreliable.

  In Moral Thinking, published in 1981, Hare gave the two levels memorable names. The "archangel" has perfect knowledge and no bias, and always thinks critically. The "prole" cannot think critically at all and simply follows the rules absorbed through teaching and imitation. Hare stressed that nobody is purely one or the other.

  Robert Merrihew Adams moved the same logic inward in 1976 with motive utilitarianism. Here the utility calculation selects motives and dispositions, and those then dictate actions. Adams drew on Sidgwick's remark that happiness is better attained if we limit how consciously we aim at it. He concluded that right action by act standards and right motivation by motive standards can conflict. Fred Feldman denied that this conflict is necessary, and offered a variant of act utilitarianism that avoids it.

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• 7. Preferences, Pain and Wealth

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  John Harsanyi proposed preference utilitarianism in 1977 in Morality and the Theory of Rational Behaviour. The idea is to promote actions that fulfil the preferences of the beings involved. R. M. Hare, Peter Singer and Richard Brandt are also linked with it. Harsanyi listed his debts: Adam Smith's impartial but sympathetic observer, Immanuel Kant's demand for universality, the classical utilitarians, and Bayesian decision theory.

  Harsanyi dismissed hedonism as resting on outdated psychology, since it is far from obvious that everything people do aims at pleasure and away from pain. He also rejected ideal utilitarianism, because it is not true as an observation that people's only purpose is to have mental states of intrinsic worth. His chosen principle was preference autonomy: the ultimate test of what is good for a person is that person's own wants.

  He added two caveats. People sometimes hold irrational preferences, so Harsanyi separated manifest preferences, shown in behaviour, from true preferences, the ones a person would have with full information and careful reasoning. Only the true ones count. Antisocial preferences such as sadism, envy and resentment must also be excluded. Someone who bears ill will remains in the moral community, he argued, but not with his whole personality.

  Karl Popper took a different turn in The Open Society and its Enemies in 1945. He argued that "maximize pleasure" should give way to "minimize pain." Trying to maximize people's happiness, he warned, must lead to totalitarianism. Suffering makes a direct appeal for help, while a man who is doing well makes no equivalent call. One should demand, he wrote, "the least amount of avoidable suffering for all."

  The term negative utilitarianism came from R. N. Smart, in a 1958 reply to Popper. Smart argued that the principle would require finding the quickest and least painful way to kill all of humanity. In 2019, Simon Knutsson answered that classical utilitarianism faces roughly equally strong versions of that argument. Its logic could imply killing existing beings to replace them with happier ones.

  A more economic offshoot appeared in Richard Posner's Economic Analysis of Law in 1973. Wealth maximization grew from the potential Pareto improvements of Nicholas Kaldor, John Hicks and Tibor Scitovsky. A change is acceptable if the winners could in principle compensate the losers, even when no compensation is paid. Willingness to pay serves as the common measure. Critics reply that richer parties can outbid poorer ones. Supporters answer that taxes and transfers can deal with fairness, leaving the law to pursue efficiency.

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• 8. The Case Against

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  The sharpest objection to adding up happiness arrived with John Rawls's A Theory of Justice in 1971. It says utilitarianism ignores the distinction between persons. Thomas Nagel made a similar point in 1970, complaining that consequentialism treats separate people's desires as those of a "mass person." David Gauthier put it more bluntly: individuals have wants, not mankind. Richard Ryder spoke of the "boundary of the individual," which neither pain nor pleasure may cross.

  Alastair Norcross replied with a case from The Simpsons cast. Homer must choose between saving Barney from a burning building or saving both Moe and Apu. Surely, Norcross said, saving the larger number is better because it is the larger number. John Taurek disagreed and held that numbers are morally irrelevant, since nobody feels five times the loss when five people die. Derek Parfit criticized Taurek in 1978. Iain King offered a middle path based on empathy, which he says works only one-to-one, because we can imagine ourselves in only one other mind at a time.

  An early charge was that calculating takes so long the chance to act will have passed. Mill replied that mankind has had the entire past duration of the human species to learn the tendencies of actions. Naming a final destination, he said, does not forbid landmarks and direction-posts on the road. Hardin added that philosophers should be embarrassed to have taken the objection seriously. He quoted Lord Devlin's warning that a clerk who read every form to the point of comprehension would bring commercial life to a standstill. Smart called the shortcuts "rules of thumb."

  Others attacked the idea that well-being is the only thing of intrinsic value. Thomas Carlyle sneered at "Benthamee Utility," which turned the world into "a dead brute Steam-engine." Karl Marx, in Das Kapital, mocked Bentham for taking the English shopkeeper as the normal man and applying that yard-measure to past, present and future. Pope John Paul II called utilitarianism "a civilization of things and not of persons."

  Shelly Kagan states the demandingness objection with unusual candor. Given the actual state of the world, he says, a life spent promoting the good would be "a severe one indeed." Strangers count exactly as much as friends, family or self. Peter Singer accepts the demand and asks why distance or community membership should change our obligations, noting that few could watch a child drown while many ignore avoidable deaths of children in Africa or India.

  Others try to soften the theory. Michael Slote proposed satisficing consequentialism, in which an act is right if its consequences are good enough. Samuel Scheffler suggested an agent-centered prerogative, letting us weigh our own interests more heavily. Robert Goodin recommended treating utilitarianism as a guide for public policy rather than personal conduct. Harsanyi argued that people value freedom from burdensome obligations, so a utilitarian code would ask for far less than moral perfection.

  W. D. Ross conceded a duty to promote the aggregate good but said it stands beside others, such as keeping promises and making amends. Roger Scruton pointed to Anna Karenina, torn between Vronsky and her duty to her husband and son. Imagine her reasoning that satisfying two young people and frustrating one old one wins by a factor of 2.5 to 1, and ask what that says of her moral seriousness. Rachael Briggs adds a measurement worry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: there may be no good answer to whether an ascetic monk's life holds more good than a happy libertine's.

  One of the oldest complaints concerns special obligations, and it was first addressed by William Godwin, a friend of Bentham. In Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, he imagined saving either the illustrious Archbishop of Cambray or the archbishop's chambermaid. Even if the chambermaid were his wife, his mother or his benefactor, Godwin held, the archbishop's life would still be more valuable. Whether love can ever tip a scale built for strangers is a question the theory's defenders and critics still argue over.

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