What Is Utilitarianism?

“What is Utilitarianism?” Ask a passerby to describe his personal morality, and you’ll likely get a complicated explanation filled with ifs, ands, and buts. Ask a utilitarian, and he can give a six-word response: greatest good for the greatest number. Of course, utilitarianism is not that simple. Like any philosophical system, it is the subject of endless debate. Still, for the average reader who is unfamiliar with the jargon that characterizes most philosophy, utilitarianism can be a useful tool in deciding before an action whether or not to carry it out or, after an action, whether or not a moral choice was made. Most credit the economist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) as utilitarianism's principal author. Bentham described his thinking as the “greatest happiness principle,” and his idea was elaborated upon in the nineteenth century by John Stuart Mill in his classic work, Utilitarianism (1863). In that book, Mill develops three critical components of utilitarianism: an emphasis on results, individual happiness, and total happiness (by which he means the happiness of everyone affected by an action). Results: Mill expanded Bentham’s definition of utilitarianism to argue that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”[1] This means that utilitarians care only about the results of an action. Other factors that we typically consider when making moral judgments about an action, including a person’s motive or his expectations about the results, do not matter in utilitarianism. A utilitarian would say that a man who shoots another by accident is guilty of murder, whether or not the shooting was an accident. Conversely, the man with "murder in his heart" who tries to shoot another but misses cannot be held morally accountable for the act. In utilitarianism, only the results matter. Individual happiness: The second component of utilitarianism is Mill’s idea of happiness, by which he means pleasure. As individuals making moral choices, we should seek to act in ways that maximize happiness and minimize pain (which Mill defines as "the reverse of happiness"). In promoting the maximum happiness, Mill is not advocating a life of food, sex and sleep. He specifically states that not all pleasures are created equal: “Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals," he writes, "for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus.”[2] For Mill, a hierarchy of pleasures exists, with human pleasures such as love rising to the top of the list. Falling in love or being moved by a song or poem are greater goods to a utilitarian than eating a delicious sandwich, not because love and music and poetry are different in kind than the physical pleasure of eating, but because these are especially profound pleasures. Total happiness: The third defining aspect of utilitarianism is its emphasis on the total happiness, by which Mill means the happiness of all people affected by an action. To decide if an action is moral, a utilitarian will conduct an accounting of the pleasure and pain associated with that act. If the sum total of pleasure outweighs the sum total of pain, the action is considered moral; if not, immoral. Take as an example the case of price-fixing, the government's setting of minimum prices for goods such as milk to protect farmers from ruin. Is price-fixing moral? Utilitarians would think through this question as follows: When the government (as opposed to the free market) sets the bottom-line price for milk, every consumer suffers moderate pain since the government artificially raises the cost of milk above what the marketplace, operating according to the laws of supply and demand, would otherwise charge. Large consumers who depend on milk (for example, ice cream manufacturers) may suffer severely if the price is kept artificially high. And that increased cost would no doubt be passed on to millions of consumers in the form of increased costs for ice cream. But if the dairy farmers don't get price protection, they may go bankrupt—in which case a far greater cost would be paid: no one would be able to buy milk or milk products. Price fixing, then, helps farmers stay in business at the expense of ice cream manufacturers and consumers. Is that expense justified? Utilitarians would answer on a case-by-case basis after a careful balancing of benefits to a few with the increased (though small) cost to the many.[3] Individuals as well as governments can be guided by utilitarian thinking. Take the question of organ donation. Is it moral for the family member of a recently (and perhaps tragically) deceased person to grant doctors permission to harvest their loved one's organs? Utilitarianism's "greatest happiness" principle demands any personal sacrifice in which the total amount of pleasure produced outweighs the costs in pain, even if the person making the choice receives none of the benefits. Other philosophers place a priority on individual liberty and object to using one person (even a dead person or dead person's body parts) for another’s benefit.
Utilitarians, by contrast, conclude that such actions are morally necessary. The emotional pain of a family that has lost a loved one is very real. But to utilitarians, the extra pain caused by organ donation is a measure of pain on top of the pain of having already lost a family member. That extra measure of pain must be less than the happiness that results when a life is saved through a transplanted organ. Thus, if the family uses the principle of greatest happiness to guide its decision, then they will agree to the harvesting of organs. A more controversial example of using utilitarianism to make moral decisions involves the ethics of torture. It is sometimes argued that utilitarianism would allow the torture of a prisoner if the torture induced a confession that could save lives, a practice that is strictly outlawed in international law. In a society where this interpretation of utilitarianism was widely accepted, police would be able to inflict any amount of pain on an individual in order to save even one life. This final example highlights one aspect of utilitarianism that is often criticized. Although the greatest happiness principle is easy to understand, its application can lead to some unsettling results. One can imagine a society's interest in achieving the "greatest happiness" justifying all kinds of abuses in the name of morality. Utilitarians, in fact, cannot easily explain why torture is morally wrong. Still, in guiding people through more ordinary decisions, utilitarianism has remained popular among both philosophers and non-philosophers. All of us need help sometimes in deciding on the right course of action. Utilitarianism has provided that help for philosophers and common folk alike for two hundred years.
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[1] John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001) 7.
[2] Mill, 9.
[3] Robert W. McGee, “Some Thoughts on Anti-dumping Laws: Utilitarianism, Human Rights and the Case for Appeal,” European Business Review 96 (1996): 30.