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Chapter 7: Ethics
Utilitarianism
Introducing Philosophy, 10th edition
Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins, and
Clancy Martin
Utilitarianism
• A conception of morality developed by
Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and his son
John Stuart Mill
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
• A leader in the legal reform movement in
England; founding father of utilitarianism
• His principle of utility, that one should act to
produce the greatest good for the greatest
number of people, was the central theme of
utilitarianism and slowly worked its way into
the confusion of rules and statutes that
constituted the English legal system of his day
• His best-known work is his Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
• Utilitarians wished to consider the
consequences as well as the “will” of an
action and to consider the particular
circumstances of an action in an attempt
to determine what is morally right
Utilitarianism and Pleasure
• Hedonism: the good life in which ultimate
good is pleasure; in the final analysis we want
and ought to want this pleasure
• Traditional hedonism is concerned with one’s
personal pleasure; utilitarianism is concerned
with pleasure of one’s own and of others
• Central principle is often summarized as “the
greatest good for the greatest number”
• The procedure we use to implement the
principle of utility is called the happiness
calculus
Problems with Bentham’s Theory
• It can be used to morally justify actions that
many of us consider to be immoral, such as a
secret but adulterous “fling” in a marriage
• Suppose many people would get a great deal
of pleasure out of seeing some innocent
person tortured and slaughtered. The victim
would suffer a great deal of pain, but by
increasing the size of the crowd we could
eventually obtain an amount of pleasure on
the part of everyone else that more than
balanced the suffering of the victim
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
• Son of philosopher James Mill and one of the
documented geniuses of modern history
• Intellectual feats by age ten would have been
to the credit of most scholars at age sixty
• Suffered nervous breakdown in 1826 at twenty
and turned attention from the “hard” sciences
to poetry and political reform
• Best known for his moral and political
writings On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism
(1861)
• Mill’s logic and epistemology are the best to
be found in the British empiricist tradition of
the nineteenth century
• His views on mathematics, for example,
became one of those positions that every
writer on the subject had either to accept or
to fight forcefully
Mill’s Refinements on
Utilitarianism
• Mill’s version of utilitarianism added an
important distinction:
– It is not only the quantity of pleasure that
counts but also the quality
Mill’s Refinements on
Utilitarianism
• The “swine objection” to utilitarianism
– Is the life of a satisfied pig preferable to
that of an unsatisfied human?
• Mill’s response: distinguish between higher
and lower pleasures
– A dissatisfied human may live a better life
than a satisfied pig because the human has
access to a higher quality of pleasures than
the pig does