Tag Archives: utilitarianism

David Lewis

One way for the utilitarian to deal with the Inquisitor is not to argue with him at all. You don’t argue with the sharks; you just put up nets to keep them away from the beaches. Likewise the Inquisitor, or any other utilitarian with dangerously wrong opinions about how to maximize utility, is simply a danger to be fended off. You organize and fight. You see to it that he cannot succeed in his plan to do harm in order—as he thinks and you do not—to maximize utility.

A second way is to fight first and argue afterward. When you fight, you change the circumstances that afford the premises of a utilitarian argument. First you win the fight, then you win the argument. If you can make sure that the Inquisitor will fail in his effort to suppress heresy, you give him a reason to stop trying. Though he thinks that successful persecution maximizes utility, he will certainly agree that failed attempts are nothing but useless harm.

David Lewis, ‘Mill and Milquetoast’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 67, no. 2 (June, 1989), p. 159

Brian Barry

Saying that something involves excessive sacrifice implies that you already know what the right answer is: it makes sense to speak of giving something up only against the background of some standard. But if you already have the standard (for example, that each person has a “natural right” to whatever he can make in the market) then the criticism to be made of other criteria should be that they happen to be incompatible with it. Nothing is added to this by talking about the “sacrifice” called for by utilitarian or other criteria.

Brian Barry, Theories of Justice, Berkeley, 1989, pp. 82-83

Bernard Williams

In one, and the most obvious, way, direct utilitarianism is the paradigm of utilitarianism—it seems, in its blunt insistence on maximizing utility and its refusal to fall back on rules and so forth, of all utilitarian doctrines the most faithful to the spirit of utilitarianism, and to its demand for rational, decidable, empirically based, and unmysterious set of values.

Bernard Williams, ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 19

William Shaw

Professional philosophers […] have been more interested in using the issue of famine relief as a club with which to beat utilitarianism over the head for its allegedly extreme demandingness than they have been in upholding the moral necessity of doing far more than most of us do now to aid those in distress—or in exploring why our culture is resistant to that message.

William Shaw, Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, p. 287

C. L. Ten

The retributive theory allows criminals to be punished without reference to the social consequences of punishment. But suppose that, for a variety of reasons, punishment significantly increases the crime rate rather than reduces it. Mentally unstable persons might be attracted by the prospect of punishment. Punishment might embitter and alienate criminals from society and increase their criminal activities. If punishment had these and other bad effects, utilitarians would renounce punishment in favour of some other more effective approach for dealing with offenders. But retributivists are still committed to punishing criminals. The effect of retributive punishment in such a situation is that there will be an increase in the number of innocent victims of crime. For whose benefit is punishment to be instituted? Surely not for the benefit of law-abiding citizens who run an increased risk of being victims of crime. Why should innocent people suffer for the sake of dispensing retributive justice?

C. L. Ten, ‘Crime and Punishment’, in Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics, Oxford, 1991, p. 369

Robert Goodin

There is a sense of ‘utilitarianism’, associated with architects and cabinet-makers, which equates it to the ‘functional’ and makes it the enemy of the excellent and the beautiful. Yet therein lies one of the great advantages of utilitarianism as a theory of the good: by running everything through people’s preferences and interests more generally, it is non-committal as between various more specific theories of the good that people might embrace, and it is equally open to all of them.

Robert Goodin, ‘Utility and the Good’, in Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics, Oxford, 1991, p. 242

Jeremy Bentham

Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you,—will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others,—or to diminish something of their pains. And for every grain of enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find a harvest in your own bosom,—while every sorrow which you pluck out from the thoughts and feelings of a fellow creature shall be replaced by beautiful flowers of peace and joy in the sanctuary of your soul.

Jeremy Bentham, Deontology Together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitarianism, Oxford, 1983, p. xix

William Shaw

In the past twenty-five years, many philosophers have been persuaded by John Rawls that the root problem is that utilitarianism ignores “the separateness of persons.” So widespread is this contention, that it has become a virtual mantra.

William Shaw, Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, pp. 124-125

Jeremy Bentham

In looking over the catalogue of human actions (says a partizan of this principle) in order to determine which of them are to be marked with the seal of disapprobation, you need but to take counsel of your own feelings: whatever you find in yourself a propensity to condemn, is wrong for that very reason. For the same reason it is also meet for punishment: in what proportion it is adverse to utility, or whether it be adverse to utility at all, is a matter that makes no difference. In that same proportion also is it meet for punishment: if you hate much, punish much: if you hate little, punish little: punish as you hate. If you hate not at all, punish not at all: the fine feelings of the soul are not to be overborne and tyrannized by the harsh and rugged dictates of political utility.

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, London, 1789, chap. 2, sect. 13

R. M. Hare

Another argument commonly used against aggregationism is also hard to understand (Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 27). This is the objection that utilitarianism “does not take seriously the distinction between persons”. To explain this objection: it is said that, if we claim that there is a duty to promote maximal preference satisfaction regardless of its distribution, we are treating a great interest of one as of less weight than the lesser interests of a great many, provided that the latter add up in aggregate to more than the former. For example, if I can save five patients moderate pain at the cost of not saving one patient severe pain, I should do so if the interests of the five in the relief of their pain is greater in aggregate than the interest of the one in the relief of his (or hers).

But to think in the way that utilitarians have to think about this kind of example is not to ignore the difference between persons. Why should anybody want to say this? Utilitarians are perfectly well aware that A, B and C in my example are different persons people. They are not blind. All they are doing is trying to do justice between the interests of these people. It is hard to see how else one could do this except by showing them all equal respect, and that, as we have seen, leads straight to aggregationism.

R. M. Hare, in Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer (eds.), A Companion to Bioethics, Oxford, 1998, p. 83

Jeremy Bentham

Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:
If it be public, wide let them extend.
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few.

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, London, 1789, chap. 4, fn. 1

John Stuart Mill

That the morality of actions depends on the consequences which they tend to produce, is the doctrine of rational persons of all schools; that the good or evil of those consequences is measured solely by pleasure or pain, is all of the doctrine of the school of utility, which is peculiar to it.

John Stuart Mill, ‘Bentham’, Dissertations and Discussions, London, 1859

J. J. C. Smart

[I]f it is rational for me to choose the pain of a visit to the dentist in order to prevent the pain of a toothache, why is it not rational of me to choose a pain of Jones, similar to that of my visit to the dentist, if that is the only way in which I can prevent a pain, equal to that of my toothache, for Robinson?

J. J. C. Smart, ‘An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics’, in J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge, 1973, p. 26

Bertrand Russell

It appeared to me obvious that the happiness of mankind should be the aim of all action, and I discovered to my surprise that there were those who thought otherwise. Belief in happiness, I found, was called Utilitarianism, and was merely one among a number of ethical theories. I adhered to it after this discovery, and was rash enough to tell my grandmother that I was a utilitarian. She covered me with ridicule, and ever after submitted ethical conundrums to me, telling me to solve them on utilitarian principles. I perceived that she had no good grounds for rejecting utilitarianism, and that her opposition to it was not intellectually respectable.

Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1872-1914, London, 1967, pp. 44-45