Let us take the precept, Do not commit adultery. How are we to prove that no possible adultery can increase the overplus of pleasurable feeling? To put the whole matter in to words; the precepts of Hedonism are only rules, and rules may always have exceptions: they are not, and, so far as I see, they can not be made out to be laws. Thus, utilitarianism fails as a guideline of proper conduct. For example, suppose that I capture and enslave an unimportant person who has no relatives, and force him to perform all the menial tasks that I and my family hate.
We have him clean the house, do the laundry, mow the yard, change the cat litter box, fix broken appliances, and so on. However, we commonly feel that it is simply wrong to enslave someone, in spite of the overall happiness that this might produce.
According to rule-utilitarians such as Mill, we do not calculate the consequences of each action, such as whether general happiness is maximized when Jones in particular cheats on his wife. So too with exploitive acts like slavery. So, a rule prohibiting all exploitation will be one that, on balance, serves the general happiness.
With slavery there is the long term problem of slave rebellions, and creating an underclass of people that society may never fully recover from even after slavery is outlawed. In fact, the long-term negative consequences of slavery in the United States are still unfolding. The problem that Bradley exposes is not so much with act-utilitarianism itself, but with human nature and our tendency to prefer short term benefits over long term ones.
It was much easier for slave owners to focus on the immediate economic benefits of slavery than the long term social and economic devastation that it would create. Suppose we wanted to determine whether an action like the execution of Karla Faye Tucker is morally permissible.
According to utiltarians, we find this out by looking at how much pleasure and pain result from actually putting people to death. This involves an experiential inspection of the various consequences—an approach that, in essence, grounds morality in our factual observations.
In his posthumously published An Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy , John Grote — criticizes this purely experiential approach to determining our moral obligations. For Grote, appeals to experience will only perpetuate the status quo, and it will not include an ideal moral goal toward which we should aim.
There is no room for anyone with special moral vision to expose the flaws with our current moral standards and put us on the path to moral reform. Morality should include guidelines for moral improvement, but we will never get such guidelines by appealing only to what is the case.
Grote makes this point here:. Man has improved as he has, because certain portions of his race have had in them the spirit of self-improvement, or, as I have called it, the ideal element; have been unsatisfied with what to them at the time has been the positive, the matter of fact, the immediately utilitarian; have risen above the cares of the day. According to Grote, to obtain ideal guidelines, we need an intuitive knowledge of morality, which goes beyond mere experience and a utilitarian analysis.
Utilitarians have a response to both of these aspects. Regarding the first, imagine an isolated village where nothing ever changes. The population is stable and they have consistent growing seasons with no unpredictable droughts or insect infestations. There have been no technological advances in hundreds of years, and work routines are firmly established.
Their political structure is stable, with no conflicts between social groups. There is no contact with outsiders who might introduce foreign customs or pose threats of war. In this situation, there would be no utilitarian grounds to move morality beyond the status quo. For this particular village, Grote is correct: utilitarianism would only perpetuate the status quo. However, very few societies are like this today, and probably have not been since the dawn of human civilization.
Within most societies, there are continual changes as a result of population fluctuations, natural disasters, epidemics, clashes with foreigners, new technologies, social inequalities, political factions, and differing religions.
Where there is constant change within societies, there will always be a need to reexamine which actions and policies bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Where there is heated debate, the status quo is not fixed, and there is a need to draw on utilitarianism to make society a happier place. Within the isolated village described above, moral visionaries seeking to reform the status quo would only be troublemakers who would risk disrupting the efficient traditions of that past.
In spite of their good intentions, their efforts at reform might produce more unhappiness than happiness. Again, in this village Grote is correct: utilitarianism has no room for the moral visionary. However, when we turn to societies that are ever-changing with constant social clashes, there is an important role for utilitarian moral visionaries. They are the ones who propose new ideas for mediating social conflict and bringing about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. The moral visionary is the one who brings these new social ideas to the public and attempts to gain consensus with them.
The visionary will not seek guidance from an inner and intuitive sense of morality, as Grote suggests. Instead, the visionary will seek out areas of discontent within society and propose ways of remedying it.
Some discontent will be so overwhelming that it may call for radical changes to set society on a long-term path of general happiness. The abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement are cases in point, and the leaders of these movements could fully justify their reforming efforts with utilitarian reasoning.
We saw that the most distinctive feature of his theory is that happiness consists of both higher and lower pleasures, and that higher pleasures are qualitatively superior to lower ones. The problem is that Mill appears to offer two separate standards of general happiness: 1 pleasure and 2 dignity. If we see pleasure as the sole criterion, then we must deemphasize dignity; if we see dignity as the principal criterion, then we must deemphasize pleasure.
American philosopher Ernest Albee — concisely states the central issue here:. The inconsistency, in truth, may be expressed in a word: If all good things are good in proportion as they bring pleasure to oneself or others, one cannot add to this statement that pleasure itself, the assumed criterion, is more or less desirable in terms of something else e. The problem here is a serious one, and it appears that Mill simply cannot hold up both pleasure and dignity as the principal standard of happiness.
One option is to set aside the notion of dignity, and simply to see pleasure as the standard of happiness. This solution brings Mill closer to Bentham, since any difference between pleasures would then have to be quantitative. This even allows for the possibility of a utilitarian calculus of differing quantities of pleasure. However, this resurrects the problem that Mill hoped to avoid—namely, that utilitarianism is a doctrine worthy only of swine since swine also pursue pleasure.
Thus, this is not the best option for Mill. A second option is to redefine the notion of human pleasure to make it inseparable from the notion of human dignity.
That is precisely what Mill tried to do when distinguishing between higher and lower pleasures. The lower ones are bodily in nature, which even animals can experience. By contrast, the higher ones are uniquely human and involve human dignity.
It is here that Mill needs help. Suppose that both I and my pet hamster break a leg as a result of an accident. We both will experience physical pain from our respective injuries.
However, I, with my more complex brain, will reflect on my pain in ways that the hamster cannot. What I am experiencing now is not just pain, but suffering. The specific formula is pain plus reflection produces suffering.
While suffering of this sort may not be a uniquely human experience, it would at best be restricted to higher animals sophisticated thought processes. Consider now how I and my hamster would react to a pleasurable experience of, say, eating our favorite meal.
The hamster eats its food pellets and I eat a pizza. We both experience gastronomic pleasure, but, because of my more sophisticated thought process, I reflect on it in different ways. While my gastronomic pleasure is similar to that of the hamster, my overall enjoyment of the experience is entirely different since it is filtered through my higher thought processes.
At least some of this thought process involves a sense of dignity. The formula here is ordinary pleasure plus reflection produces higher pleasure. But, on the occasions that my eating enjoyment is connected with my higher functions, my experience is more valuable. With a sense of human adventure, I might expand beyond my usual eating routine and try different foreign foods and enjoy them.
Similarly, I might expand beyond the action-adventure movies that I watch and try foreign films and documentaries, and enjoy them as well. But as it becomes elevated to a higher pleasure, it cannot be separated from my human dignity. In this way, contrary to Albee, higher pleasures are not inconsistent with hedonism.
The utilitarian strategy for moral decision making has withstood the test of time and this in and of itself demands that we take it seriously.
In this final section we will consider two lingering problems with utilitarianism, one of which questions whether pleasure is the only important moral value, and the other that questions whether any bare-bones utilitarian formula can function as the sole authority in moral judgments.
On the plus side, by focusing exclusively on the pleasure that results from a course of action, morality stands up to experiential and even scientific judgment.
Hedonistic utilitarians argue that we can record experiences of pleasure, quantify degrees of pleasure, and use this as the basis of our moral judgments. Scottish economist Francis Edgeworth proposed the idea of a hedonimeter that could scientifically measure the pleasure that a person was experiencing:.
Let there be granted to the science of pleasure what is granted to the science of energy, to imagine an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine, continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual, exactly according to the verdict of consciousness. Such a machine has not yet been created, but, even today, many philosophers and social scientists defend hedonistic utilitarianism because of its objectivity.
Books in microeconomics routinely include chapters on techniques for numerically measuring utility. For the hedonistic utilitarian, then, moral assessment is not a matter of personal feelings or intuitions. Instead, it attempts to place the issue of morality squarely in the arena of public observation. The minus side of hedonistic utilitarianism, though, is that, as critics point out, pleasure is not the only thing in life that is morally significant. Religious and political martyrs are vivid illustrations of this.
Many people throughout history have felt morally compelled to defend their religious or political ideals knowing full well that they would be tortured and ultimately killed for their actions. Their lives would have been more pleasurable—or at least far less painful—if they had simply conformed to social expectations.
It seems, then, that an important part of our moral assessments goes beyond mere pleasure. Perhaps Mill would say that martyrs experience higher pleasures that counterbalance their pains. To more successfully address this problem, some contemporary defenders of utilitarianism abandon pleasure altogether as the ultimate criterion and propose instead a standard that is broad enough to include cases like religious and political martyrs.
The two most popular alternatives are ideal utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism. Ideal utilitarianism is the view that the morally right course of action is the one that brings about the greatest amount of goodness , regardless of what we specifically identify as good.
Many things in life are intrinsically good, such as aesthetic beauty, integrity, friendship, fulfillment of desires, fairness, and freedom. However, we should not single out any one of these qualities as definitive, which is exactly what Bentham and Mill did by focusing on pleasure. According to British philosopher G. Moore — , it is actually impossible for us to pinpoint all of the qualities that constitute absolute goodness:.
It is just possible that the Absolute Good may be entirely composed of qualities which we cannot even imagine. This is possible, because, though we certainly do know a great many things that are good-in-themselves, and good in a high degree, yet what is best does not necessarily contain all the good things there are. Rather than focusing on a specific quality, such as pleasure, we should instead recognize that any consequence that counts as good needs to be entered into the utilitarian tally.
Suppose I live in a repressive country and am considering voicing my unpopular political opinions. I not only tally the pain I will experience from being tortured, which is clearly bad, but also tally the assertion of my freedom and the integrity of my convictions, which are good things. How do we recognize the various things that count as good? Moore argues that we should start by pointing out the flaws in popular standards of goodness that leave out important goods.
Moore concludes that the ideal standard we arrive at will emphasize a mixture of aesthetic enjoyments, such as beauty, and admirable mental qualities, such as sociability. Ultimately, we must rely on intuition to recognize the various goods. Preference utilitarianism is the view that the morally right course of action is the one that maximizes our preferences.
Again, if I live in a repressive country and am considering expressing my unpopular political opinions, I would tally my preference for free expression in addition to the pain I would experience from being tortured. Preference utilitarianism is most associated with contemporary British philosopher R. Hare Moral Thinking , Second, my preferences include a combination of both immediate and long-term preferences. Among other combinations, it includes 1 what I prefer right now to attain right now, 2 what I prefer right now to attain in the future, and 3 what I will prefer in the future to attain in the future.
Third, my preferences are not merely restricted to myself but also include the preferences of other people. For example, I would not prefer that, if I were Tucker, I should be executed. But I would prefer that, if I were a relative of the victim, Tucker should be executed. If my preferences focused only on myself, then I would be an egoist, and not a utilitarian. Both ideal utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism allow us to tally a broad range of possible consequences in our utilitarian calculus.
Contrary to hedonism, they recognize that pleasure is not the only thing that counts. However, ideal and preference utilitarians pay a price for being so inclusive— namely, they lose objectivity. As mentioned earlier, according to hedonistic utilitarians, pleasure can be experientially measured. But, ideal goodness and personal preferences cannot be experientially measured.
These are founded in gut feelings and private intuitions, which do not lend themselves to public inspection, and is precisely what Bentham was trying to avoid.
Consequently, many utilitarians stick with the old hedonistic version in spite of its narrowness. Utilitarians from Bentham and Mill onward are united in the view that morality is a matter of weighing the positive versus the negative consequences of a course of action.
Utilitarian writers present different claims about the purpose of the bare-bones utilitarian formula. They sometimes see it as 1 a description of how we actually make moral decisions or 2 a description of how we should make moral decisions or 3 a quick and easy test to use in making moral decisions.
But no version of utilitarianism is successful in any of these claims. First, utilitarianism does not accurately describe how we always make moral decisions, as we can see from the Karla Faye Tucker story. Although both sides of the dispute at some point offered utilitarian reasoning for their views, they also appealed to a variety of non-utilitarian reasons. Tucker herself believed that, as a matter of simple mercy, society should forgive criminals who reform.
Appeals to simple mercy or to eye-for-an-eye justice do not involve utilitarian tallies of good or bad consequences. Also, utilitarianism involves a type of arithmetic by which we subtract the weight of the negative consequences from the weight of the positive ones. That is, they did not subtract the positive consequences from the negative ones, as a true utilitarian would.
Second, it is not clear that we should adopt the utilitarian formula when making all of our moral decisions. Kant made this point specifically with regard to capital punishment. Although Kant himself defended the death penalty, he argued that, if we execute a criminal because of its positive value for society, such as crime deterrence, then we are using the criminal as a tool for our own purposes.
For Kant, it is always bad to use someone as a tool, even if the person in question is a criminal Metaphysics of Morals, Third, in many if not most cases, the utilitarian formula is neither a quick nor an easy way of making moral decisions. It is difficult to see how many people might be affected by a given course of action. It is also difficult to know how to assign weight to the various good or bad consequences that emerge.
Although hedonistic utilitarians brag that pleasure can be experientially quantified, the fact remains that scientists have not yet invented a pleasure meter. Assigning weight to pleasures and pains will still involve some level of subjective judgment. Perhaps the problem with utilitarianism is its bare-bones claim that morality depends entirely on calculations of consequences. Philosophers today are drawn to simple formulas and to simple explanations for complex philosophical puzzles. But moral decision making appears to be one area that we cannot account for with a simple, unified formula.
Our actual moral decision-making process depends on a patchwork of various theories and explanations that cannot be reduced to a single theme. At times, we do rely on utilitarian reasoning, and, to that extent it is an important part of moral decision making. Utilitarians merely need to abdicate their claim to sole authority.
Many philosophers as far back as ancient times believed that pleasure is the standard by which we should judge moral conduct. One such objection is that happiness couldn't be the rational aim of human life, because it is unattainable. Furthermore, people can exist without happiness, and all virtuous people have become virtuous by renouncing happiness. First, Mill replies that it is an exaggeration to state that people cannot be happy.
He contends that happiness, when defined as moments of rapture occurring in a life troubled by few pains, is indeed possible, and would be possible for almost everybody if educational and social arrangements were different.
The major sources of unhappiness are selfishness and a lack of mental cultivation. Thus, it is fully within most people's capabilities to be happy, if their education nurtures the appropriate values. Furthermore, most of the evils of the world, including poverty and disease, can be alleviated by a wise and energetic society devoted to their elimination. Next, Mill addresses the argument that the most virtuous people in history are those who have renounced happiness.
He admits this is true, and he admits that there are martyrs who give up their happiness. However, Mill argues that martyrs must sacrifice happiness for some greater end--and what else could this be but the happiness of other people? Even though the sum total of units of happiness might be the same, it might be distributed "unfairly" in various societies. A slave society might produce the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest number.
Compare for example, these three societies with units of utility:. The total amount of value in Society C is greater than that in Society A where the distribution is even.
Even rule utilitarianism must approve this distribution --even slavery, if this is what is involved. Example slightly modified from B. Death of one for pleasure of others problem may be solved by use of rule rather than act utilitarianism.
However, act utilitarians have arguments against rule utilitarians. These include an abandonment of maximizing happiness if following a generally beneficial rule does not maximize happiness in a given case.
Some utilitarians argue that a principle of distributive justice must be added to the principle of utility Frankena. This principle could be equality, according to merit, etc. Mill and others basically argue that a slave society would never in actual practice produce more utility than a society where goods are fairly distributed. Whatever distribution of the benefits and burdens of society produces overall utility is just.
Justice is defined in terms of utility. Elderly Aunt Molly is ill. Nephew Tom visits her and helps her because he loves her. Nephew Bob visits her and helps her because he hopes to be rewarded in her will. Nephew Dave visits her and helps her not because he desires to help but because he believes it is his duty. A two-year-old is drowning. Ruth flings caution aside because she desires to save the child and jumps in, but she cannot swim. Thus, she fails to save the child.
Sue can swim, but is afraid that the child will pull her under. She does not save the child. The consequences were the same in each case, but the motives of the agents were different. According to utilitarianism, each person's action was of the same value.
Shouldn't other features such as an act being motivated by obedience to a law of the state, a religious obligation of loving the neighbor, or a natural love of and concern for others count?
Utilitarians are "aware that a right action does not necessarily indicate a virtuous character, and that actions which are blameable often proceed from qualities entitled to praise Mill in Solomon and Martin, Thus, the same action, when motives are considered, might be judged to be right and wrong at the same place and time as with helping Aunt Molly. The same motive in another case, however, might lead to negative consequences as in the example below.
Bentham invites us to consider the motive of self-preservation. It leads to bad consequences, if it leads you to kill the only witness to your crime. Good consequences, if it leads you to fight heroically in defense of your country in a noble cause, etc.
Happiness is unobtainable. One cannot exist constantly in rapture.
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