UTILITARIANISM.doc

UTILITARIANISM

John Stuart Mill

Main sources:
- Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1996; ‘Utilitarianism’ (53-60) and 127-134. Very insightful.
- Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "Consequentialism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
- Adam Swift, Political Philosophy. A Beginner’s Guide for Students and Politicians (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 118-20.
- Will Kymlicka, Introduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2002. Chapter 2, ‘Utilitarianism’
- Mel Thompson. Ethical Theory (London: Hodder & Stoughton Educational, 2005), Chapter 9 (‘Utilitarianism’), concise and very clear.
- Michael Sandel (2009) Justice. What’s the Right Thing to Do? New York Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Chapter 2 (‘The greatest happiness principle/Utilitarianism’): a very interesting and clarifying chapter with several insightful examples.
- Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1999); chapter 1 (‘About ethics’) and pp. 230-1.

Note: This seminar text partly consists of (sometimes literal) excerpts and summaries of texts from the above sources, to which I often, but not always, explicitly refer. Some parts of this seminar text are original.

CONTENTS

1. Key notions
2. The trolley dilemmas
3. The history of utilitarianism
4. Explanations of utility
5. Is ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ coherent?
6. Diminishing marginal utility
7. Utilitarianism as egalitarianism
8. Future generations
9. Cost-effectiveness
10. Advantages of utilitarianism
11. Disadvantages of utilitarianism
12. Summary
13. Possible study questions

1. Key notions
· Utilitarianism: the view that what matters morally is utility (usually in the sense of happiness) and that the right action is the one that maximizes expected utility.
· Greatest happiness principle or principle of utility: the greatest good for the greatest number
· Act utilitarianism: utilitarianism applied to the direct results of individual choice
· Rule utilitarianism: utilitarianism that takes into account general rules of conduct (for instance, the rule of telling the truth or keeping a promise), supposing that this yields more overall happiness in the long run, although breaking the rules may yield greater immediate happiness in the short run.
· Preference utilitarianism: utilitarian theory that takes into account preferences rather than happiness.

2. The trolley dilemmas
Utilitarianism is the view that the right action is the one that maximizes pleasure and happiness and minimizes pain, grief and sufferance. In other words it tries to promote the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’. To understand what this means, let us start with a thought experiment. A thought experiment is one of the tools used by normative political philosophy to analyse ethical principles. We will discuss so-called trolley dilemmas. It concerns a trolley that has broken loose and speeds down a hill. The trolley threatens to run over 5 persons who are working on a railway track. The switch dilemma runs as follows.

Figure 1: The switch dilemma

The only way to rescue the 5 persons is to turn a switch to sidetrack the trolley. On this sidetrack one person is working on the rails. As a result of turning the switch, 1 person is killed and 5 persons are saved. In a utilitarian approach it is clear that turning the switch is the right thing to do because the overall utility is larger than when we do not turn the switch: instead of one person, five persons keep alive. Probably most people, including those who are not pure utilitarians, will turn the switch, although they may have problems with the fact that they become responsible for the death of the person who would stay alive if we would not turn the switch. But if we would not turn the switch, although we could do it, we would perhaps, at least partly, be responsible for the death of five persons instead of one. Turning the switch can perhaps partly be compared with the action of a bus driver who notices that the breaks of the bus fail. Turning the wheel and driving the bus to a side of the road where one instead of five persons are killed, seems a correct action, better than not turning the wheel. Looking at the consequences and total utility this decision yields the best result.

Let us now discuss a second trolley dilemma, the bridge dilemma.

Figure 2 The bridge dilemma

Here the nature of the choice is different. You are standing on a bridge above the track next to a heavily built man, who you do not know. The only way to stop the trolley and to rescue the 5 persons on the track is to throw the man off the bridge in front of the trolley. The man will be killed, but as a consequence the trolley will be stopped, so that it will not run over the 5 persons. Is it right to rescue the 5 persons in this way?

Summarizing, in both dilemmas, the consequences in utilitarian terms are the same: one person is sacrificed to save five other persons. In the first case the 5 are rescued by turning the switch; in the second case by pushing the heavy man from the bridge. As appears from empirical studies making use of questionnaires, most respondents will not throw the man from the bridge, while most people do turn the switch. This difference in decision may be, at least partly, be explained by the fact that the bridge dilemma, in contrast to the switch dilemma, concerns a clash between utility and other moral considerations. The utilitarian approach makes the decision dependent solely on the consequences it brings about. A different approach says that, morally speaking, consequences are not the only things we should care about. According to this latter approach morality is not merely a matter of counting and weighing lives, or weighing costs and benefits. Certain moral duties may outweigh utilitarian calculations. When I throw somebody from the bridge in front of the trolley, I probably commit a wrong – I kill somebody intentionally – although the aim is to achieve something good. I use a person as a means to stop the trolley and to rescue five other persons. As we will discuss in a separate seminar, this goes against the Kantian deontological principle that one should not use a human being merely as a means, no matter how important the end. The bridge-dilemma involves an intentional kill and uses a person purely as a means to an end. In the deontological perspective this is a grief injustice.

The fact that most people do not throw the man from the bridge means that most people are not pure utilitarians. Indeed, otherwise they had decided to choose the option that five persons are rescued. Also respondents who do throw the man from the bridge need not be pure utilitarians. They may doubt the moral rightness of pushing the man from the bridge, but they may believe that, in this case, the utility of saving five persons instead of one, outweighs other moral considerations.

Whatever may be the case, ‘act-utilitarianism’ regards as the morally right action not only turning the switch but also pushing the man from the bridge. ‘Rule-utilitarianism’ may conclude differently, because following some rules and respecting personal rights may in the long run yield more general happiness than if such rules are not followed. As we will discuss in the seminar on Immanuel Kant, deontological morality will arrive at the conclusion that pushing the man from the bridge is morally wrong, not because (as the rule-utilitarian would argue) this will ultimately and in the long run lead to less overall happiness but because the act is morally wrong independent of the possible favourable or unfavourable consequences. In other words, classic utilitarianism is consequentialist as opposed to deontological morality. “It denies that moral rightness depends directly on anything other than consequences, such as whether the agent promised in the past to do the act now. Of course, the fact that the agent promised to do the act might indirectly affect the act’s consequences if breaking the promise will make other people unhappy. Nonetheless, according to classic utilitarianism, what makes it morally wrong to break the promise is its effects on those other people rather than the fact that the agent promised in the past.” (Sinnott-Armstrong ‘Consequentialism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Another interesting example of utilitarian thought having similarities with the bridge dilemma (sacrificing one person to save five persons) can be found in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Chapter 6):

" . . . I could kill that damned old woman and make off with her money, I assure you, without the faintest conscience-prick," the student added with warmth. The officer laughed again while Raskolnikov shuddered. How strange it was! "Listen, I want to ask you a serious question," the student said hotly. "I was joking of course, but look here; on one side we have a stupid, senseless, worthless, spiteful, ailing, horrid old woman, not simply useless but doing actual mischief, who has not an idea what she is living for herself, and who will die in a day or two in any case. You understand? . . ."
"Yes, yes, I understand," answered the officer, watching his excited companion attentively.
"Well, listen then. On the other side, fresh young lives thrown away for want of help and by thousands, on every side! A hundred thousand good deeds could be done and helped, on that old woman's money which will be buried in a monastery! Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from the Lock hospitals—and all with her money. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm. She is wearing out the lives of others; the other day she bit Lizaveta's finger out of spite; it almost had to be amputated."
"Of course she does not deserve to live," remarked the officer, "but there it is, it's nature."
"Oh, well, brother, but we have to correct and direct nature, and, but for that, we should drown in an ocean of prejudice. But for that, there would never have been a single great man. They talk of duty, conscience – I don't want to say anything against duty and conscience – but the point is, what do we mean by them.”
(End of quotation from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.)

Let us now more systematically discuss utilitarianism.

3. The history of utilitarianism
Utilitarianism was the dominating school of thought amongst political theorists in the 20th century before John Rawls published his influential A Theory of Justice. Rawls’s opus magnum is partly a critical comment on the utilitarian approach. Rawls replaced this approach by what he calls ‘justice as fairness’ which – unlike classical utilitarianism – takes into account the separateness of persons and their individual rights.

One of the founding fathers of utilitarianism is Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). In England, where he lived, a large part of the population was very poor, a small part very rich. Bentham was a proponent of a fair distribution of welfare. He argued that the right act or the right policy is the one that causes ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people’ (the so-called ‘greatest happiness principle’ or ‘principle of utility’). In The Principles of Morals and Legislation he wrote:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do ... Jeremy Bentham. The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) Ch I, p. 1.

According to Bentham pleasure had to be distributed equally amongst all members of society. His utilitarianism emphasizes this principle of equality: “Everybody is counted for one, no one for more than one.”
Bentham’s skeleton was preserved, stuffed out with hay and dressed in his clothes. It is stored and kept on public display in University College London in a wooden cabinet called the “auto-icon”.

The ‘auto-icon’ of Jeremy Bentham

Utilitarianism was revised and expanded by Bentham’s student John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and became a major element in the liberal conception of state policy. Apart from Utilitarianism Mill wrote his famous ‘On Liberty’, a concise but very interesting and important essay.

Another important 19th century utilitarian is Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), who wrote the influential but difficult book The Methods of Ethics.
Since Rawls, utilitarianism has become less influential as philosophical school of thought, but its ideas are still powerful and are often applied in questions of efficient distribution of resources. As Michael Sandel (2009, 34) notices, “it exerts a powerful hold on the thinking of policy-makers, economists, business executives, and ordinary citizens to this day.” Also in the distribution of health care resources, so-called cost-effectiveness plays an important part: the question which medical treatments yield the largest total utility that is, the largest total health benefit.
But also in political philosophy there are still always powerful adherents to versions of utilitarianism, for instance, Richard Hare, Peter Singer and James Griffin.
In section 1 we have defined utilitarianism as the view that what matters morally is utility and that the right action is the one that maximizes expected total utility. This definition does not yet give us sufficient information to know what utilitarianism considers as the right thing to do. This depends on how ‘utility’ is defined.

4. Explanations of utility
Main source: Kymlicka 2002, 13-20.

4.1. Utility as pleasure
Utilitarians have traditionally defined utility in hedonistic terms, that is, in terms of pleasure (the Greek word ‘hedon’ means ‘pleasure’). Hedonism claims that pleasure is the only intrinsic good and that pain is the only intrinsic bad. In other words, as Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of utilitariansim famously states: an act is morally right if and only if it causes ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’.

Objections to explanation of utility in terms of pleasure.
As Bentham argued: “The game of push-pin [an old English ch