Name : Anish Mall ID: 2021A8PS1138P Course : GS312 Applied Philosophy

Utilitarian Ethics

INTRODUCTION
Utilitarianism or Utilitarian Ethics is a theory of normative ethical philosophy according to
which an action is morally right if it produces the maximum amount of happiness out of all
possible actions. It considers the interests of all humans equally. This theory is majorly
associated with two philosophers from the 18th and 19th centuries, Jeremy Bentham, the founder
of utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill.

According to Jeremy Bentham, nature has placed humanity under the governance of two
sovereign masters - pleasure and pain, and it is for them alone to point out what we do.
Therefore, according to Bentham, all human action is motivated by the desire for pleasure and
the avoidance of pain. He famously rejected the idea of inalienable natural rights, i.e. rights that
exist without the intervention of any governing body. Instead, his views were guided by the
application of the principle of utility in the law and the governing body. He attempted to create a
“utilitarian pannomion”—a complete body of law based on the utility principle by reforming
laws that considerably impacted the British public.

John Stuart Mill was a follower of Jeremy Bentham, and while he greatly admired Bentham’s
work, he also disagreed with some of his claims. Mill rejected a purely quantitative measurement
of utility and believed that some kinds of pleasures were more desirable and valuable than others.
According to him, the happiness produced by an action can be measured over various qualities
such as Intensity, Duration, Certainty, Proximity, Feduncity (Probability that the sensations of a
similar kind would follow the action), Purity( Probability that the sensations of a different kind
would follow the action) and Extent (The number of people affected by the action). Thus, there
are different qualities as well as quantities of pleasure. In his perspective, no amount of lower
(bodily) pleasures could overcome higher (intellectual or creative) pleasures. In his book,
Utilitarianism, Mill explains that all of us desire the happiness of everyone. So the best action is
the one that results in the greatest pleasure in social utility.
The Utilitarian principle can be summed up as “Maximisation of overall happiness.”
Utilitarianism can also be considered a genre of consequentialism, an ethical doctrine which
states that the consequence of any action is the ultimate basis for judging the rightfulness or
wrongfulness of said action. However, unlike other forms of consequentialism, such as egoism
and altruism, utilitarianism considers all human interests equally. All ethical theories that belong
to the utilitarian family have four common defining elements :

1. Consequentialism - Moral rightness depends on the consequences of the actions

performed.
2. Impartiality - The identity of the individual is unrelated to the consequences of the action.
3. Welfarism - Only the welfare of people decides how good the state of the world is.
4. Additive Aggregationism - View that all the values in the world are the sum of all the
values of its parts, like individuals or societies.

Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are referred to as Classical utilitarians, and Classical
utilitarianism is distinct from other utilitarian theories in that it accepts the following two
additional elements:

● Hedonism - Well-being consists only of the balance of positive over negative conscious
experiences.
● Total view of population ethics - One action is better than the other if and only if it
contains greater overall happiness.

ARGUMENTS FOR UTILITARIANISM

What Really Matters
Ethical perspectives usually serve to specify what fundamentally matters, and utilitarianism
seems to provide a riveting answer to this question. The argument that overall general happiness
or well-being is what really matters is a rather compelling one. If someone could suggest that
something is more important than overall happiness, they would face the challenge of how that
could possibly be. As such, utilitarianism could be thought of as a starting point for all moral
theorising.
The Veil of Ignorance
This argument was presented by the Nobel Prize-winning economist John Harsanyi. According
to him, the correct moral view is the one you would have chosen if you did not know who you
would be in society. Imagine if you were to decide how to structure society while hiding behind a
veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, you know every possible fact about every person. However,
you do not know which person among them is you. Thus, now you have an equal chance of
being any person. If you were to act rational and self-interested, you would try to do what is best
for yourself, and since you do not know who you are, that would ultimately mean that you would
try to structure society in a way that promotes the total of everyone’s well-being. Hence, a person
acting rationally and with their self-interest would take up some form of utilitarianism while
structuring society.

Track Record
It is worth noting that utilitarianism has a strong track record of helping humanity collectively
progress morally. During the 18th and 19th centuries, classic utilitarians brought in many
reforms that were progressive for the time and fought for multiple issues such as separation of
the state and the church, abolition of slavery and capital punishment, legal regulations to protect
animals and criminals from cruel treatment and torture, the decriminalisation of homosexuality
etc. Thus, utilitarianism led the early utilitarians to reach conclusions ahead of their time and
seemed counterintuitive to the general public at that time.

CRITICISMS OF UTILITARIANISM
Quantifying Utility
The most common and perhaps the most logical criticism of utilitarianism is that it is difficult to
quantify or compare happiness and well-being. There may not be just one single right which we
should seek, and in such scenarios, it is difficult to choose between rights that require us to
trade-off between different potentially desirable ends like pleasure, knowledge, friendship, health
and so on.
Predicting Consequences
It can also be argued that it is impossible to perform the calculations utilitarianism requires
because of a lack of information that makes consequences unknowable. We may be lacking the
ability to correctly apply rational principles that depend on, among other factors, perceived facts.
Both Bentham and Mill realised that certainty in such matters is unobtainable, and they believed
that it was necessary to rely on the tendencies of actions to bring about consequences.

The Demandingness Objection

Another criticism is that though utilitarianism may be good, it is too demanding to be practical,
and the critics claim it to be “the morality for saints”. Utilitarianism requires us to always act in
such a way as to bring about the most desirable outcome for everyone. This leaves no room for
actions that are permissible yet do not bring about the best consequences. It is tough to live life
in perfect accordance with utilitarianism, and rarely can a person do so. People are morally
required to engage in a never-ending action of striving towards the “greater good” when it would
be much simpler to focus on their own lives.

CONCLUSION
What matters most (or “what really matters”) for utilitarianism is maximising well-being. I
believe that even though true utilitarianism is challenging to achieve, it is best to strive towards
improving the well-being of the majority of the people. We should know our capacity to provide
and our capacity to create well-being, and this should be the limit of our moral obligation. This
way, we can overcome the impracticalities of utilitarianism while staying true to its fundamental
principles.