UTILITARIANISM AND UTILITARIAN ETHICS

Following the strict and rigid philosophy of Kant and the categorical imperative, our perception
of what is right and wrong, good or bad continues to be challenged by the next ethical
perspective that we are going to tackle. Utilitarianism as an ethical theory is not only noted for
its sheer popularity but also for its sheer flexibility and versatility which is something that has
also helped it flourish in modern times. But, to further understand why this theory is so
beloved, we first have to dissect the principle and look at its core tenet.

Utilitarianism: Consequences and Happiness as the Basis for Ethicality

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory founded by Jeremy Bentham and developed and popularized
by John Stuart Mill. As the term suggests, utilitarianism is founded on the principle of utility,
which adheres to the belief that an act is good or ethical if it produces happiness and
reduces pain or suffering, and it is bad or unethical if it produces pain and reduces
happiness.

A more comprehensive reiteration of the core tenet of utilitarianism is when we say that an act
is good or ethical if it produces greatest happiness to the greatest number of
people; and bad or unethical if it produces more harm or pain than benefits or
happiness to the greatest number of people.

The key, therefore, in utilitarianism is the principle of happiness. It does not consider or place
any ethical value on the means that you have taken in order to achieve your end since, nor
does it consider your motive or purpose. For utilitarianists, the end justifies the means. This
explains why the utilitarian would not care whether the action is done out of deception, lie or
manipulation as long as it produces maximum benefits to many people. It does not matter if
you’ve done some really bad things for the sake of achieving happiness for the greatest amount
of people, so long as you achieved your end, it is ethical.

For example, the act of condemning 10 innocent civilians to death via carpet bombing is
ethically right (that is, good) for the utilitarian should this action cause the eradication of a
dangerous international criminal/terrorist organization. The sorrow and pain caused by the
death of these ten people is overshadowed by the happiness caused by the death/eradication of
this international criminal/terrorist organization, and has thus fit the demands of the main
principle of this theory: the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people.

Another example that we could use to illustrate the utilitarianist perspective are The Trolley
Problem and The Drawbridge Keeper’s son. For both scenarios, the act of choosing to save the
people in the train is ethical seeing as the pain that one experiences in losing your child is
overshadowed by the happiness generated by saving the lives of the 5 people strapped down to
the train tracks or the lives of the passengers of the train. Your choice created more happiness
for more people as compared to pain, as such, utilitarianism would declare such actions ethical.
As an ethical theory, utilitarianism had been formed and influenced by the thoughts and ideas
of two philosophers: Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Each of these philosophers believed
in the same core tenet or principle of utilitarianism but the differences between their models lie
in the approach promoted by each; which will be something that we will be briefly going over as
part of this lesson.

Jeremy Bentham’s Model of Utilitarianism

As an ethical theory, the variation of utilitarianism that Jeremy Bentham had spearheaded holds
that the ethicality of an action is determined by calculating the amount of happiness
it produces. For Bentham, he equates utility with happiness and pleasure and this utility is the
main criterion by which we should judge whether an action is right or not.

In fact, it was Bentham that first formulated the idea of “utility as happiness or pleasure”. In
his book, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham tells us that this
principle serves as the basic principle of utilitarianism and states that actions are right if they
produce happiness and wrong is they produce the opposite, that is, pain or unhappiness. He
writes:

…by the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or

disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears
to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in
question; or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose
that happiness.
…by utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce
benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all this in the present case
comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent
the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness.

Bentham’s Hedonistic Calculus

We have already established that for Bentham, happiness or pleasure determines the ethicality
of human actions; that more happiness is good and more pain is bad. But how do we know if
our actions do indeed produce more happiness and pleasure for the greater amount of people
instead of pain and suffering?

Bentham believes that we can quantify our happiness and use said quantities to calculate the
consequences of our actions and choose the action that produces greater happiness.To do
this, we have to use Bentham’s Felicific or Hedonistic Calculus.

Bentham introduced the “felicific” calculus to measure the degree of happiness or pleasure that
a specific action may produce. The felicific calculus is also called the utility calculus or hedonistic
calculus.
There are two parts to the calculus. Firstly, should one represent it using a mathematical
formula, the formula of Bentham’s felicific calculus goes like this:

XHappiness – YPain = ZBalance

Following this simple formula can help one determine which one of the two choices available to
a moral agent is the one that generates the most happiness.

Secondly, Bentham provides us with seven factors or points of consideration when it comes to
measuring pleasure and pain. He includes intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity,
purity, and extent. The description for each factor are as follows:

 Intensity. The more intense the pleasure is, the better it is;
 Duration. The longer the pleasure lasts, the better;
 Certainty. The more certain you are that pleasure will happen, the better;
 Propinquity. The closer or the sooner that pleasure will occur, the better;
 Fecundity. The greater the possibility that your action will be followed by another
pleasure, the better;
 Purity. The purer the pleasure you feel as a result of your actions, the better;
 Extent. The greater the number of people that it benefits or experiences pleasure as a
result of your actions, the better.

Now that we know what each of the seven factors are, the steps in using this calculus are as
follows:

Firstly, after we’ve identified what actions or decisions we are going to assess using the
calculus, we need to determine what scale or score range you are going to use. You need a
uniform scale before going forward as you are going to rank the pleasure that your action
generates in terms of the conditions set by the seven factors.

Secondly, once we have the scale decided, we now to have to rate the pleasure generated by
the first of our two choices using both the ranking scale we have chose and the seven factors
that Bentham gave us. If the pleasure that your action generates is very intense, then on a
scale of one to five, we might rate it a 5. This process continues until you finish ranking it using
all seven of the factors.

Thirdly, once finished with the first step, sum up all your answers above. The sum is your value
of Xhappiness.

Fourthly, now that you have the value of Xhappiness, it is now time to find the value of YPain. To
obtain it, simply follow the first three steps but instead of ranking the pleasure generated by
your actions, you rank the pain that it generates. Once finished, sum up all your answers and
the sum is your value of Ypain.
Fifthly, now that you have the values for both variable, you can subtract the value of Y from the
value of X and the difference is now the value of your balance for this option. The value of
balance is important to the calculus as it indicates whether your actions generate more pleasure
or more pain. If your balance is positive, then your actions generate more pleasure than pain. If
your balance is negative, then your actions generate more pain than pleasure.

Sixthly, if you are comparing two options, after you’ve obtained the value of your balance for
the first option, follow the first six steps all over again to obtain the value of balance for the
second option.

Seventhly, once the values of balance for each option has been obtained, compare the balances
of the two options. The one whose balance is greater is the choice or option that generates
more happiness than pain or sorrow and, is therefore, the ethical choice. If the balances of both
options are negative, choose the one who is closest to one as arithmetically, it is the greater
number and hence, the lesser of two evils. If the balances of both options are positive, choose
the one who is greater in value arithmetically.

In other words, for Bentham, if the balance is in favour of happiness, then the act is morally
right, and if it is in favour of pain, then it is morally wrong. Put in simple mathematical
calculation: on one hand, “…if an act produces 12 pleasures and 6 pains, then the balance is 6
which is in favour of pleasure or happiness.” But, on the other hand, “…if the act produces 20
pains and just 5 pleasures, then the balance is 15” which is in favour of pain. If this is the case,
then for Bentham the act is morally wrong.

John Stuart Mill’s Model of Utilitarianism

Although Mill admired Bentham, there were a few things that Mill disagreed with in his
philosophy.

Firstly, he disagreed with Bentham’s hedonistic calculus. He believes that when one begins to
quantify happiness and use its values to calculate the consequences of human actions, Bentham
failed to acknowledge some deeper feelings of human nature. Mill remarked that Bentham
never recognized man’s capacity to pursue excellence of character for the sake of excellence of
spiritual perfection for perfection’s sake.

Secondly, he believed that Bentham’s utilitarianism confused happiness with mere sensual
pleasure; thus ignoring the emotional or spiritual aspects of our humanity such as aesthetic
(beauty), charity, beneficence, and sympathy (love).

Hierarchy of Pleasures

It is with these critiques in mind that Mill redefined Bentham’s notion of happiness. Instead of
just one general type of happiness, he forwarded the existence of higher-order pleasures or
satisfactions. As Mill writes, “a being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy”,
hence he devised a hierarchy of pleasures for which there are two types: lower and higher
pleasures.

Lower pleasures are usually associated with basic physical needs and wants such as eating,
drinking, copulating, and resting. They are strongly satisfying but too much indulgence may
lead to pain.

Higher pleasures are more enduring and continuous and are associate with intellectual or
spiritual enterprises which include cultures, scientific knowledge, aesthetics, and social
enjoyment.

Mill recognizes the need for us to have lower pleasures but what eventually leads us to a lasting
happiness is the attainment of higher pleasures such as the attainment of deep friendships, the
development of the intellect, and the ability to create art.

This, in turn, gives us enough context to fully understand one of Mill’s most iconic remarks: “It
is to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a
fool satisfied.”

With this redefinition, then, how do we determine the ethicality of certain actions?

The Greatest Happiness Principle

Mill holds that the satisfaction of pleasure and avoidance of pain are the only desirable ends of
all actions. With this, Mill provides one fundamental principle of his moral theory which he
describes as follows:

The Greatest Happiness Principle holds that actions are right 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. The
pleasure that Mill is talking about, of course, is higher-order pleasure; pleasure that stimulate
our intellectual nature.

For Mill, utilitarianism is considered qualitative since the philosopher emphasizes intellectual
pleasure than sensual pleasure so much so that Mill would strongly encourage people to choose
decisions or actions that can help a person achieve this intellectual growth over the option that
simply satisfies our base nature.

A good example to illustrate this flavor of utilitarianism is by imagining the following scenario.
Suppose that you have a brother who was just killed as a result of a terrorist bombing/bomb
attack that happened while your brother was working. Once the national police managed to
identity which terrorist group masterminded this bomb attack and arrested everyone involved,
they gave the families of the victims the ability to dictate what kind of punishment they would
give to these terrorists. As someone who lost their brother in the aforementioned attack, you
were given two options: firstly, you could choose to allow the national police to execute these
people (capital punishment) or secondly, you could choose to have the national police imprison
these people for the rest of their life (lifetime imprisonment).

While Bentham would encourage you to choose the option that generates the most amount of
happiness, Mill would encourage you to choose the option that helps you achieve higher-order
or intellectual pleasure, that is, the option for lifetime imprisonment. That is because Mill holds
that the first option (capital punishment) only helps you achieve lower-order or animalistic
pleasure (an eye for an eye) while the second option helps you learn and carry out higher-order
virtues such as justice.

Criticisms and Objections to Utilitarianism

Despite the popularity of utilitarianism, there are still numerous intellectuals and scholars that
have forwarded numerous objection and counterarguments to this particular ethical theory. For
the sake of brevity, we will only talk about the five most common objections to utilitarianism,
and they are as follows:

1. The first objection to utilitarianism comes by considering the equal value of each of our
happiness. If Bentham believes that we should cout everyone’s happiness
equally, including one’s own, utilitarianism then would require us to sacrifice
our own happiness for the sake of the happiness of the greater number of
people. If everyone did this, it would lead to greater unhappiness than
happiness. Bentham emphasized that everyone’s happiness are equally as equal in
quality and vary only in quantity. So, whether you defend against this point by saying
that there will be the achievement of a greater happiness when one prioritizes one’s
own happiness over others and vice versa, it would still run against Bentham’s
statement on the equality of all of our happiness.

2. The second objection to Bentham’s variation of utilitarianism comes after examining the
flexibility of act utilitarianism. By taking everyone’s preferences equally,
Bentham’s utilitarianism fails to condemn perverse pleasures, which are
considered to be intrinsically wrong and are morally objectionable, regardless
of the amount of happiness they produce. By failing to ground itself to some
intrinsic moral goods such as justice, rights, honesty, or modesty, this kind of
utilitarianism lacks the moral force to condemn actions that are clearly immoral or
morally questionable.

3. Bentham’s act utilitarianism is consequentialist in nature. Being consequentialist means

morality is determined according to the result or consequences of the action. Some
critics see this as a principle that supports the view that “the end justifies the means”,
which states that an action that is considered as intrinsically wrong may be morally
justified and right according to the standard of utilitarianism on the grounds that it
 maximizes happiness. Critics fear that utilitarianism allows for the violation of
someone’s human rights as long as the end produces greater benefits.

4. How can we know which pleasures are qualitatively higher? Mill thinks of a panel of
“experts” who have wide experience of pleasures to set the standard for which is higher
or lower. In the course of human history, Mill believes that there has been a collective
understanding about this standard; for example, musicians of notable degree and
experience will prefer Mozart over Snoop Dogg’s music – the former being an expression
of sophistication and the latter being elementary in style. The problem is that people
vary in the degree of their experience of pleasure and that some of what is
considered the highest pleasure is not the most desirable pleasure. What
about those whose only source of pleasure are little to none at all?

5. There is the “tyranny of the majority”. Since the notion of the greatest number
constitutes the very definition of Mill’s theory, hence, the rules and preferences of the
majority will be followed. Implicitly then, the minority loses their voice and pushing them
to the extreme margins of society.