Utilitarianism

I. The greatest happiness principle

Utilitarianism is the doctrine that what is good is what promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It also claims that happiness can be measured in terms of pleasure and pain. A classical statement of the Utilitarian creed is provided by J.S. Mill.

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. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded — namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain. [J.S. Mill: from Utilitarianism.]

A thorough examination of this passage will reveal every difficulty faced by Utilitarianism, which we will outline below.

II. Benevolence

Utilitarianism is not a form of ethical egoism, since it requires us to regard another person's pleasure and pain as important as our own. A utilitarian is not an ethical egoist. Utilitarianism claims to make an appeal to the sentiment of universalised benevolence. This is illustrated by J.J.C. Smart's defence of utilitarianism.

The utilitarian's ultimate moral principle, let it be remembered, expresses the sentiment not of altruism but of benevolence, the agent counting himself neither more nor less than any other person. Pure altruism cannot be made the basis of a universal moral discussion because it might lead different people to different and perhaps incompatible courses of action, even though the circumstances were identical. When two men each try to let the other through a door first a deadlock results. Altruism could hardly commend itself to those of a scientific, and hence universalistic, frame of mind. If you count in my calculations why should I not count in your calculations? And why should I pay more attention to my calculations than to yours? Of course we often tend to praise and honour altruism even more than generalized benevolence. This is because people too often err on the side of selfishness, and so altruism is a fault on the right side. If we can make a may try to be an altruist he may succeed as far as acquiring a generalized benevolence. [J.J.C. Smart: An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics.]

Utilitarianism could be regarded as a form of altruism, but utilitarians reject this because they equate altruism with always putting other people first, and they regard their own pleasures and pains as having equal say in any decision. There is no obligation in utilitarianism not to consider your own pleasures and pains, which a thorough going altruist might regard as essential. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory, and is to be contrasted with deontological theories, such as that of Kant. However, this in itself might involve the utilitarian in a form of contradiction — since each utilitarian is under a duty or obligation to consider only the consequences!

It can be argued that the appeal to benevolence undermines the appeal of utilitarianism. A utilitarian is under an obligation to consider everyone's pleasures and pains equally. Logically, this could entail a situation in which one would recognise that some personal sacrifice was essential. J.J.C. Smart writes that utilitarianism could be asserted on either subjective or objective moral grounds, but this fudges a fundamental issue as to why one should accept utilitarianism as a rule for the conduct of life. Utilitarianism does not generally arise in the context of an objectivist meta-ethics. In other words, it appeals because it fits with a materialist interpretation of reality. If one is a materialist what other source of ethical feelings could there be than pleasure or pain? But ethical egoism is premised on the same grounds. There is no logical force from within utilitarianism that can force a ethical egoist to abandon his egoism in favour of benevolence.

III. Justice — Act and Rule Utilitarianism

One problem for utilitarianism concerns justice and the issue of punishment. Punishment involves inflicting pain, and inflicting pain is thought to be bad in itself — certainly for the utilitarian. Inflicting pain in punishment must be the lesser of two evils, and necessitated by some moral principle. However, the utilitarian can justify punishment on these lines.

In general there are four ways in which people seek to justify punishment: (a) retribution; (b) deterrent; (c) prevention and (d) reform. The last three of these principles are consequentialist in nature, and can be adopted by the utilitarian. However, using these principles alone, and accordance with the utilitarian principle, in may be possible to justify inflicting “too much” pain. For example, the utilitarian might have to accept the “punishment” of an innocent man in order to appease the masses. (Countries apply this principle too. For example, Britain and France allowed Nazi Germany to invade Czechoslovakia in 1983 in order to avoid a full-scale war; they employed utilitarian principles in order to justify this act of political appeasement.) It is not difficult to construct examples in which the utilitarian is seemingly forced to accept the use of “punishment” disproportionate to any crime committed. This is illustrated by the following extract from J.J.C. Smart's book on Utilitarianism.

McCloskey Paradox

It is not difficult to show that utilitarianism could, in certain exceptional circumstances, have some very horrible consequences. In a very lucid and concise discussion note, * H. J. McClosky has considered such a case. Suppose that the sheriff of a small town can prevent serious riots (in which hundreds of people will be killed) only by 'framing' and executing (as a scapegoat) an innocent man....

However, unhappy about it he may be, the utilitarian must admit that he draws the consequence that he might find himself in circumstances where he ought to be unjust. Let us hope that this is a logical possibility and not a factual one. In hoping thus I am not being inconsistent with utilitarianism, since any injustice causes misery and so can only be justified as the lesser of two evils. The fewer the situations in which the utilitarian is forced to choose the lesser of two evils, the better he will be pleased. One must not think of the utilitarian as the sort of person who you would not trust further than you could kick him. As a matter of untutored sociological observation, I should say that in general utilitarians are more than usually trustworthy people, and that the sort of people who might do you down are rarely utilitarians.

The utilitarian places no primary value on the individual as such — the collective or public good always comes first. An individual only counts insofar as he contributes to the collective good. All individual rights, if they exist, are derived from the public good, defined as the greater happiness of the greatest number. Thus, utilitarianism appears to conflict with intuitive notions of justice.

In this situation the utilitarian would appear to have just three options: (a) to acknowledge the failure of the utilitarian principle, and therefore reject it either as the whole explanation of moral principle, or even as a part; (b) To reject our intuitions regarding justice as incorrect, and argue that it would be moral and right to sacrifice individuals for public welfare in general; (c) To attempt to show by a further argument that the conflict between justice and utilitarianism is false.

One such reinterpretation of the utilitarianism results in the distinction between act and rule utilitarianism. In act utilitarianism every action is appraised on its own merits. For example, when considering a particular course of action, it will be regarded as good if its consequences are better than the other alternatives. Hence, the sacrifice of an individual may be considered to be a necessary “evil” if the general consequences are better than any other alternative would allow. In rule utilitarianism it is claimed that every particular action falls under a general principle or rule, and it is not individual actions that should be tested, only the rules. It is then claimed that there is a general rule that we should no punish the innocent, and that the punishment should fit the crime. These rules are adopted because they, and no others, do in fact maximize happiness. So it is claimed that utilitarianism requires us to adopt rules, and these rules embrace our intuitions regarding justice, and hence there is no conflict between utilitarianism and justice.

The system of normative ethics which I am concerned to defend is ... act-utilitarianism. Act-utilitarianism is to be contrasted with rule-utilitarianism. Act-utilitarianism is the view that the rightness or wrongness of an action is to be judged by the consequences, good or bad, of the action itself. Rule-utilitarianism is the view that the rightness or wrongness of an action is to be judged by the goodness or badness of the consequences of a rule that everyone should perform the action in like circumstances....

David Lyons has argued that rule-utilitarianism ... collapses into act-utilitarianism. His reasons are briefly as follows. Suppose that an exception to a rule R produces the best possible consequences. Then this is evidence that rule R should be modified to allow this exception. Thus we get a new rule of the form 'do R except in circumstances of the sort C'. That is, whatever would lead the act-utilitarian to break a rule would lead the Kantian rule-utilitarian to modify the rule. Thus an adequate rule-utilitarian would be extensionally equivalent to an act-utilitarian. [Comment: ignore Smart's reference to Kant here. Kant was not a utilitarian of any kind. Kant believed in duty as the highest principle of ethical life. The extract is from J.J.C. Smart: An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics.]

As J.J.C. Smart indicates, there is an obvious counter-argument to rule-utilitarianism, that in fact it reduces to act-utilitarianism. This is because at any given time one can change the rule under which one is acting. For example, if a particular act has consequences that lead to greater happiness for the majority, then it would seem to follow from the utilitarian principle that one should act in that way even if it is contrary to the normal sense of justice. Perhaps this explains why the Americans chose to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. Normally, it is contrary to the rules of justice to annihilate in an instant a civilian population, but the American leadership must have felt that this was an exception that proves the rule. They were probably following utilitarian considerations. Every rule permits of exceptions and this may allow for abnormal unjust cases.

The general difficulty utilitarianism has with our normal intuitions regarding justice is that it makes justice dependent on empirical considerations. If it turns our that according to the laws of nature a rule that permits frequent “unjust” acts to occur will lead to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, then so be it. If you regard justice as applying to all individuals regardless of circumstances, then you cannot be a utilitarian, and although rule utilitarianism is a plausible attempt to accommodate the concerns of justice, in the final analysis any rules that are adopted just happen to be those that promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

IV. Intentions

Another problem that utilitarians have is that of intentions. We tend intuitively to regard intentions as good, but utilitarians regard intentions as good only in so far as they lead to good consequences. They argue that our regard for “good intentions” is that in fact good intentions generally produce good consequences, so we value the good intentions for the consequences and not as things valuable in themselves. However, this can be debated, and is another instance of how some moral intuitions cannot be rendered compatible with the utilitarian principle.

V. The calculus of pleasure and pain

Utilitarians also face the problem of providing a practical method (a “calculus”) for measuring the value of consequences of actions. There are two related problems here. (1) Firstly there is the problem of predicting the future. The utilitarian requires that the future is at least foreseeable to a high degree of probability. Some utilitarians (for example, J.J.C. Smart) seem to regard nearly all consequences as predictable, and also state that in the long run the consequences of any individual action may be minimal. However, this can be disputed. If the outcomes of actions cannot be predicted, this would seem to render any ethical system that depended on evaluating consequences useless. We might be forced back to considering the rightness or wrongness of an action, regardless of the consequences. (2) Secondly, there is the problem of calculating the amount of pleasure and pain caused by actions. We would need to assign numerical values to pleasures and pains. (We would have to quantify them.) On further reflection this seems absurd. How can one compare physical pleasures with intellectual pleasures? Utilitarians would claim that “objective” measures of pleasure and pain could be devised. For example, they might involve implanting electrodes into the pleasure centres of the brain and measuring the electrical stimulus in those centres resulting from certain activities. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that appeals strongly to those who believe only in the existence of matter — that is, materialists.

V. Bad pleasures

There is also the issue of whether there are any bad pleasures. Clearly the utilitarian cannot believe that any pleasures are inherently bad, since they equate pleasure with goodness and pain with badness. However, we have considered the question of whether a sadist enjoys bad pleasures. Related questions involve also the question of whether it is better to be a unhappy man or a happy pig, and whether it would be right to enter into a computer generated dream world (a virtual reality) in which you lived out your pleasurable fantasies, regardless of the nature of reality.

J.J.C. Smart argues that there are no inherently bad pleasures and that pleasures that seem bad are only so because they characteristically lead to bad consequences. If in fact the pleasure could be separated from the consequence we would see that there was nothing wrong in the pleasure itself.

Our repugnance to the sadist arises, naturally enough, because in our universe sadists invariably do harm. If we lived in a universe in which by some extraordinary laws of psychology a sadist was always confounded by his own knavish tricks and invariable did a great deal of good, then we should feel better disposed towards the sadistic mentality. Even if we could de-condition ourselves from feeling an immediate repugnance to a sadist (as we could de-condition ourselves from a repugnance to cheese by going through a course in which the taste of cheese was invariably associated with a pleasurable stimulus) language might make it difficult for us to distinguish an extrinsic distaste for sadism, from an immediate distaste for sadism as such. Normally when we call a thing “bad” we mean indifferently to express a dislike for it in itself or to express a dislike for what it leads to. When a state of mind is sometimes extrinsically good and sometimes extrinsically bad, we find it easy to distinguish between our intrinsic and extrinsic preferences for instances of it, but when a state of mind is always, or almost always, extrinsically bad, it is easy for us to confuse an extrinsic distaste for it with an intrinsic one. If we allow for this, it does not seem so absurd to hold that there are no pleasures which are intrinsically bad. [J.J.C. Smart: An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics.]

VI. Being or nothingness

One possible intrinsic value that the utilitarian does not recognize as an intrinsic value is that of “being”. Thus, it is better to be a man than to be a pig. However, it is very difficult to make sense of such an intrinsic value if one remains a materialist. For a materialist “being” is a meaningless term, and defines no real property of men or pigs. This is the attitude J.J.C. Smart adopts in the following extract.

Some years ago two psychologists, Olds and Milner, carried out some experiments with rats.* Through the skill of each rat they inserted an electrode. These electrodes penetrated to various regions of the brain. In the case of some of these regions the rat showed behaviour characteristic of pleasure when a current was passed from the electrode, in others they seemed to show pain, and in others the stimulus seemed neutral. That a stimulus was pleasure-giving was shown by the fact that the rat would learn to pass the current himself by pressing a lever. He would neglect food and make straight for this lever every few seconds for hours on end. This calls up a pleasant picture of the voluptuary of the future, a bald-headed man with a number of electrodes protruding from his skull, one to give the physical pleasure of sex, one for that of eating, one for that of drinking, and so on. Now is this the sort of life that all our ethical planning should culminate in? A few hours' work a week, automatic factories, comfort and security from disease, and hours spend at a switch, continually electrifying various regions of one's brain? Surely not. Men were made for higher things, one can't help wanting to say, even though one knows that men weren't made for anything, but are the product of evolution by natural selection.

This clearly illustrates the connection between utilitarianism and materialism. The idea that it is better to be a man than a pig, regardless of how much as a man you might suffer is an appeal to a value (of being) that cannot be contained within the utilitarian schema.

VII. Identity

The utilitarian and the (metaphysical) materialist are natural allies. It is no surprise that J.C.C. Smart is a defender of both doctrines. However, both utilitarians and materialists do have something to say about personal identity. They reject the Cartesian notion of a soul made of a “spiritual substance” and separable from the body. They would regard certain ideas about personhood as superstitious relics. They could claim that our notions of justice are bound up with our false “folk psychology” about human identity. In a sense, as individuals, we do not exist. We exist only as entities capable of feeling pleasure and pain, and it is unethical to regard one person's pleasure as more sacrosanct than another's. Because individuals do not have souls in the Cartesian sense, the utilitarian would argue that there is nothing ethically worth considering as important except the maximization of the sum total of pleasure in the universe and minimization of the sum total of pain.

VIII. The naturalistic fallacy

So the basic question in ethical theory is — what are the things that we shall call ultimately good-in-themselves. G.E. Moore argues that to call something good is always a synthetic proposition. What he means by this is that one can never define what is good.

Let us, then, consider this position. My point is that 'good' is a simple notion, just as 'yellow' is a simple notion; that, just as you cannot by any manner of means, explain to any one who does not already know it, what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is. Definitions of the kind that I was asking for, definitions which describe the real nature of the object or notion denoted by a word, and which do not merely tell us what the word is used to mean, are only possible when the object or notion in question is something complex. You can give a definition of a horse, because a horse has many different properties and qualities, all of which you can enumerate. But when you have enumerated them all, when you have reduced a horse to his simplest terms, then you can no longer define those terms.

... But yellow and good, we say, are not complex: they are notions of that simple kind, out of which definitions are composed and with which the power of further defining ceases. [G.E. Moore: Principia Ethica.

If Moore is right, good is a quality that is sui generis, and incapable of being defined in terms of other properties. Thus, to say that pleasure is good is not a definition. Pleasure may be good, but it is not good because to have pleasure means to have something good. The point is that if this is agreed, then it opens up the possibility that other things, apart from pleasure, are also good. There might be a plurality of good things, and pleasure is just one of them. The attempt to define good in terms of some other quality — such as pleasure — is what G.E. Moore calls the “naturalistic fallacy”.

'Good', then, if we mean by it that quality which we assert to belong to a thing, when we say that the thing is good, is incapable of any definition, in the most important sense of that word. The most important sense of 'definition' is that in which a definition states what are the parts which invariably compose a certain whole; and in this sense 'good' has no definition because it is simple and has no parts. It is one of those innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition, because they are the ultimate terms by reference to which whatever is capable of definition must be defined. That there must be an indefinite number of such terms is obvious, on reflection; since we cannot define anything except by an analysis, which, when carried as far as it will go, refers us to something, which is simply different from anything else, and which by that ultimate difference explains the peculiarity of the whole which we are defining: for every whole contains some parts which are common to other wholes also. There is, therefore, no intrinsic difficulty in the contention that 'good' denotes a simply and indefinable quality. There are many other instances of such qualities.

... It may be true that all things which are good are also something else, just as it is true that all things that are yellow produce a certain kind of vibration in the light. And it is a fact, that Ethics aims at discovering what are those other properties belonging to all things which are good. But far too many philosophers have thought that when they named those other properties they were actually defining good; that these properties, in fact, were simply not 'other', but absolutely and entirely the same with goodness. This view I propose to call the 'naturalistic fallacy' and of it I shall now endeavour to dispose.

In his view, there are in fact many things which are good in themselves — for example, intelligence is valuable in its own right, and not merely for its association with pleasurable consequences. Moore regards anything which is good as having “intrinsic value”. In his system, having intrinsic value and being good are the same thing. However, Moore remains a consequentialist, and defines right actions in terms of their consequences. He differs from utilitarians in allowing there to be more intrinsic values than just pleasure.

IX. Consequentialism

Although G.E. Moore is not a utilitarian, because he recognises the existence of more than one intrinsic value and regards the proposition “pleasure is good” as both synthetic and debatable, he is a consequentialist, as utilitarians are. Consequentialists reject duty as a primary ethical concept, and derive duty from consequences. G.E. Moore explains this idea effectively here.

... I propose... to deal with ... the question: What ought we to do?

... It has been characteristic of a certain school of moralists, as of moral common sense, to declare that the end will never justify the means. What I wish first to point out is that 'right' does and can mean nothing but 'cause of a good result,' and is thus identical with 'useful'; whence it follows that the end always will justify the means, and that no action which is not justified by its results can be right.

... That the assertion 'I am morally bound to perform this action' is identical with the assertion 'This action will produce the greatest possible amount of good in the Universe' has already been briefly shown... ; but it is important to insist that this fundamental point is demonstrably certain.

This doctrine is disputed.