Pros and Cons - Debbie Newman, Ben Woolgar 2014

Utilitarianism
Section A. Philosophy/political theory

Utilitarianism is almost certainly the best known moral framework, but it is often used imprecisely. That is perhaps the fault of the slogan coined by Jeremy Bentham (1776) in A Fragment on Government, advocating the ’greatest happiness of the greatest number’. But as a moment’s reflection shows, that is not one principle, but two. There might be some hypothetical situations where we can, for instance, increase 20 people’s happiness by one unit, or 10 people’s by three units; in such a case, the ’greatest happiness’ would commend the latter, but the ’greatest number’ would commend the former. Put simply, utilitarians believe in creating the greatest amount of happiness possible. That may sound like an intuitively plausible claim, but as the following arguments show, it is far from obvious that utilitarianism is the correct moral worldview. This raises a final important point; utilitarianism may be deployed in many debates, but it must be argued for. Simply to say ’According to John Stuart Mill’s principle of utilitarianism . . .’ does not advance the debate.

Pros

[1] The great advantage of happiness as a benefit to promote is that it is universal. Everyone knows what happiness feels like, and everyone feels it at least some of the time; thus, we are not simply encoding some people’s desires as being the things which matter, but working off a physical human good. Moreover, in essence, the pursuit of happiness guides all human action; for that reason, we should seek to promote it for others as we do ourselves.

[2] Utilitarianism allows us to make tradeoffs. A rights-based or duty-based ethical theory may leave us with unsolvable conflicts; when the right to life and the right to bodily autonomy conflict in the case of torturing a terrorist for potentially life-saving information, how are we to decide which one is more important? By contrast, utilitarianism is simply a matter of totting up the numbers, and this, at least in principle, gives us an answer. Moreover, work in behavioural economics and psychology has given us a much better idea of how actually to measure happiness; now, more than ever, utilitarianism can guide real-world choice making.

[3] Utilitarianism is a highly egalitarian doctrine; it treats happiness as of equal worth, regardless of who possesses it. Moreover, because people who are worse off tend to gain more happiness from small incremental increases in their resources, utilitarianism is also radically redistributive, requiring us to give money to the poorest until each transfer does not make them more happy than the corresponding loss of happiness for the rich.

[4] Utilitarianism simply does not allow these kinds of abuses with any regularity, because their impact on happiness is so severe.’Rule-utilitarians’ believe that rights can be justified on the grounds that rules need to be imposed on human action to maximise happiness, because otherwise biases and the difficulties of decision making in any given case overwhelm us. Moreover, if torture is, in the end, the utility-maximising act, then so be it; that does not mean it is not what we should do.

Cons

[1] The truth is that while we can all say ’I am happy’, we have no idea whether the good experienced is the same for all people, or in fact radically different. Conceptions of exactly what happiness is diverge hugely. Is it short-term pleasure, or is that a life, as Mill said, ’fit only for swine’? Or is it long-term satisfaction in doing well at your job and in your life? And if so, how are those things to be prioritised? The truth is that utilitarianism is just as guilty as other philosophies of simply taking one group’s preferences and treating them as universals.

[2] In theory, utilitarianism might allow for easy trade-offs; but in practice, that is absurd. We do not know how to value happiness; we do not know if everyone experiences it with the same intensity, or whether some people can get happier than others. We also do not know how to measure it; as such, it is not at all useful in making real-world choices.

[3] If we want our moral theories to care about equality, then we can build equality into them. The problem with utilitarianism is that it has no interest at all in equality. In the classic thought experiment of the Utility Monster, we imagine that some person can generate infinite happiness from society’s resources; we would therefore be obligated to give all the resources to that monster. Obviously there is no real-life monster, but there are many people who cannot benefit from resources in the same way as others, especially people with severe disabilities; utilitarianism might require us, in fact, to deprive them of resources.

[4] Utilitarianism imposes no limits whatsoever on what may be done to a person in pursuit of the greater good; it erodes individual rights. No one would want to live in a world where it is possible for anything to be done to them by the state; torture, murder, etc. all become fair game. While they may rarely be the utilitarian course, the fact that they are in principle not barred is deeply troubling, as it shows that we are sacrificing personal bodily autonomy altogether. Utilitarianism errs by having only one value.

Possible motions

This House would maximise happiness.

This House would be utilitarian.

Related topics

Capitalism v. socialism

Welfare state

Terrorist suspects, torture of