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THE GREATEST HAPPINESS PRINCIPLE / UTILITARIANISM

Discussion

1. THE LIFEBOAT CASE

To kill or not to kill. What would you do?
If you were the judge, how would you rule?

2. JEREMY BENTHAM’S UILITARIANISM

The highest principle of morality is to maximize happiness, the overall balance of pleasure
over pain. The right thing to do is whatever will maximize utility.

We are all governed by the feeling of pain and pleasure. They are our “sovereign masters.”
They govern us in everything we do and also determine what we ought to do.

Maximizing utility is a principle not only for individuals but also for legislators. In deciding
what laws or policies to enact, a government should do whatever will maximize the happiness
of the community as a whole.

3. OBJECTION 1: INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

The utilitarian logic, if consistently applied, could sanction ways of treating persons that
violate what we think of as fundamental norms of decency and respect.

Throwing Christians to lions

Is torture ever justified?

It’s morally justified to inflict intense pain on one person if doing so will prevent death and
suffering on a massive scale.
Torture violates human rights and fails to respect the intrinsic dignity of human beings.

True test: If the only way to induce the terrorist suspect to talk is torture his young
daughter, would it be morally permissible to do so?

The city of happiness

“They all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their
friendships, the health of their children… even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly
weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery…”

4. OBJECTION 2: A COMMON CURRENCY OF VALUE

Utilitarianism weighs preferences without judging them. Everyone’s preferences count equally.
But in order to aggregate preferences, it is necessary to measure them on a single scale.
Cost-benefit analysis tries to bring rationality to social choices by translating everything into
monetary terms. Is it possible to translate all moral goods into a single currency of value
without losing something in the translation?

The benefits of lung cancer

The CEO of Philip Morris apologized, saying the study showed “a complete and unacceptable
disregard of basic human values.”

Exploding gas tanks: $200,000 per life (1970s)

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 A discount for seniors: $3.7 million per life / $2.3 million if you’re old than 70 (2003)

Placing a monetary value on human life is morally obtuse.

No, many social choices implicitly trade off some numbers of lives for other goods and
conveniences. Human life has its price whether we admit it or not.

5. JOHN STUART MILL

The case for liberty
People should be free to do whatever they want, provided they do no harm to others.
Mill’s case for liberty doesn’t seem to reflect utilitarianism. But Mill insists that the case for
liberty rests entirely on utilitarian considerations. How does he defend the compatibility
between utilitarianism and liberty? (page 50)

Mill suggests another reason to promote individual liberty. What is it?

: Forcing a person to live according to custom or convention or prevailing opinion is wrong
because it prevents him from achieving the highest end of human life – the full and free
development of his human faculties. Conformity, in Mill’s account, is the enemy of the best
way to live.

According to Sandel, Mill’s On Liberty is a kind of heresy. Why? (page 51)

Higher pleasures: 소녀시대 versus 사랑가

The higher pleasures are not higher because we prefer them; we prefer them because we
recognize them as higher. We judge Hamlet as great art not because we like it more than
lesser entertainments, but because it engages our highest faculties and makes us more fully
human.
Language

1. Four English sailors were stranded at sea in a small lifeboat. 발이 묶이다.

2. They subsisted on the turtle and the remaining turnips. 근근이 살아가다.
3. Brooks emerged from his conscientious objection to share in the gruesome bounty.
양심적 거부 / 현상금, 은혜로운 것
4. Dudley describes their rescue in his diary, with staggering euphemism. 충격적인/완곡표현
5. …tendency to take the law into their own hands
6. Morality consists in weighing costs and benefits, and simply wants a fuller reckoning of the
social consequences.
7. Certain duties and rights should command our respect. ~을 받을 자격이 있다.
8. [해석] If certain rights are fundamental in this way – be they natural, or sacred, or inalienable,
or categorical – how can we identify them? 불가침의 / 절대적인
9. He proposed a number of projects to make penal policy more efficient. 처벌의
10. The sum of the pains suffered by the public is greater than whatever unhappiness is felt by
beggars hauled off to the workhouse. 억지로 끌고가다
11. Any citizen who encountered a beggar would be empowered to apprehend him. 체포하다
12. It can run roughshod over individual people. 거칠게(함부로) 다루다
13. Utilitarian logic could sanction ways of treating persons… 허가하다
14. Such games will coarsen habits and breed more violence. 거칠게 하다 / ~을 낳다.
15. …to desist from subjecting Christians to violent death for the sake of entertainment…멈추다

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16. He refuses to divulge the bomb’s location. 알려주다
17. avert another terrorist attack =prevent
18. They are entirely compatible with utilitarian thinking. 양립할 수 있는, 호환되는
19. It purports to prove that numbers count. =appear to do something
20. If enough lives are at stake, we should be willing to override our scruples about dignity and
rights. 걸려있는 / 양심의 가책
21. [해석] Lest we find this place too unrealistic to imagine, the author tells us one more thing
about it.
22. If it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas
would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. 조건
23. In hopes of fending off the tax increase, … (공격 등)을 막다
24. Viewing lung cancer deaths as a boon for the bottom line does display a callous disregard for
human life. =blessing, godsend / heartless, cruel
25. Its fuel tank was prone to explode when another car collided with it. ~하기 쉽다
26. Placing a monetary value on human life is morally obtuse. =insensitive, dull
27. The use of cars exacts a predictable toll in human lives. =require, call for
28. The US Congress mandated a speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour. 명령하다
29. It’s possible to translate our seemingly disparate desires and aversions into a common
currency of pleasure and pain. 서로 전혀 다른
30. parietal rules (대학) 이성 방문시간에 관한 규정
31. defray the costs (비용을) 돌려주다, 갚다
32. Mill’s speculations about the salutary social effects of liberty… 추측 / 유익한
33. if the majority persecutes adherents of an unpopular faith, 박해하다 / 추종자
34. Conformity is the enemy of the best way to live. 순응
35. He chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. 능력
36. [해석 p50] “It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my
argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as
the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense,
grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being.”
37. [해석 p50] Respecting individual rights for the sake of promoting social progress leaves rights
hostage to contingency. =something that might happen in the future
38. It is not really an elaboration of Bentham’s principle but a renunciation of it. 상세한 설명, 포기
39. jurisdiction 사법권, 관할권
40. philistine 속물
41. de facto 사실상의, 실질적인
42. Mill strays from the utilitarian premise. 벗어나다

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 Uilitarianism: Language – Extra

1. Mill’s writings can be read as a strenuous attempt to reconcile individual rights with the utilitarian
philosophy he inherited from his father and adopted from Bentham.
2. It’s central principle is that people should be free to do whatever they want, provided they do no harm
to others. =providing, if
3. The only actions for which a person is accountable to society, Mill argues, are those that affect others. *
be accountable to somebody for something
Politicians are ultimately accountable to voters.
Someone must be held accountable for the killings.
4. This unyielding account of individual rights would seem to require something stronger than utility as its
justification. 굴하지 않는 / 설명
5. Allowing the majority to silence dissenters or censor free-thinkers might maximize utility today, but it
will make society worse off in the long run.
6. [해석] Subjecting prevailing opinion to a vigorous contest of ideas will prevent it from hardening into
dogma and prejudice.
7. Violating someone’s rights inflicts a wrong on the individual, whatever its effect on the general welfare.
8. [해석] For Mill, individuality matters less for the pleasure it brings than for the character it reflects.
9. Mill’s response to the second objection to utilitarianism – that it reduces all values to a single scale –
also turns out to lean on moral ideals independent of utility.
10. It takes people’s preferences as they are, without passing judgment on their moral worth.
11. But some object to utilitarianism on precisely this point. =be opposed to
12. A further objection is that it caters to perverse pleasures rather than noble ones.
13. But if more people would rather watch dogfights than view Rembrandt paintings, should society
subsidize dogfight arenas rather than art museums?
14. Mill begins by pledging allegiance to the utilitarian creed. 충성을 맹세하다 / 신도
15. “A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy..,”
16. But in relying on it, Mill strays from the utilitarian premise.
17. No longer are de facto desires the sole basis for judging what is noble and what is base.
18. We judge Hamlet as great art not because we like it more than lesser entertainments, but because it
engages our higher faculties and makes us more fully human.
19. Mill saves utilitarianism from the charge that it reduces everything to a crude calculus of pleasure and
pain, but only by invoking a moral ideal of human dignity and personality independent of utility itself.
20. He provided in his will that his body be preserved, embalmed, and displayed.
21. (page 57) His admirers have obliged. 순응하다, 따르다
22. ,whose minutes record him as “present but not voting.” 회의록
23. He now keeps his vigil with a wax head in place of the real one. 철야 간호하다, 야간 경비를 서다