CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 11 – UTILITARIANISM

The question of what makes an act good belongs to a specific field called Normative Ethics. Normative Theories are formal attempts to provide guiding principles of ethics.

UTILITARIANISM

  • Is consequentialist in nature.
  • The result or consequence is equivalent to its production of utility. (Root word “Utility”)
  • It considers an act good if and only if it produces the highest possible amount of utility.

Consequentialism determines the morality of an act according to its consequences or results.

Jeremy Bentham (1748 – 1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806 – 1873) are two programmatic scholars related to

utilitarianism. Their theoretical positions are considered as the classical conception of utilitarianism.

Bentham is credited for being the first to develop a formal theory of utilitarianism. His arguably most important treatise, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789).

Mill, through his work eponymously titled Utilitarianism (1861), expounded the fundamental tenets of utilitarianism. He distinguished the two kinds of pleasures: Higher and Lower Pleasures.

Classical Utilitarianism

Nature’s two sovereign masters, Pain and Pleasure.

Natural Inclination

  • The guideline that determines the morality or goodness of actions.
  • Pursue Pleasure, avoid pain.
  • Utilitarianism prescribes that the moral and ethical course to take is to choose and follow the act that produces the highest amount of utility.

Note two things: First, “Nature” that Bentham and the utilitarian theorists employ is not identical to the nature conceived by the natural law theorists, such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. It refers to the basic

experience of pain and pleasure in the natural physical world. In “natural law - nature” is committed to a metaphysics of essences.

Second, the experiences of both the agent and the community affected by the action are taken into action. In fact, the agent’s experience is only one factor in considering those affected by the consequences of an action.

Bentham says: Utility is meant that it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness to

prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness.

Hedonistic Calculus/Felicific Calculus

  • The means and criteria to calculate the amount of pain and pleasure.
  • The action that produces the highest amount of pleasure over pain should be considered ethical.
  • Developed by Jeremy Bentham.

7 CONDITIONS/CIRCUMSTANCES: as criteria, viz?

  • Intensity – Refers to the strength of pain and/or pleasure produced by the act.
  • Duration – Refers to the length of time of pain and /or pleasure produced by the act.
  • Certainty or Uncertainty – Refers to the possibility of attaining pain and/or pleasure produced by the act.
  • Propinquity or Remoteness – Refers to how soon pain and/or pleasure is produced by the act.
  • Fecundity – Refers to the act’s successive production of similar experience.
  • Purity – Refers to the disruption of a successive experience produced by the act.
  • Extent – Refers to the quantity of persons affected by pain and/or pleasure produced by the act.

It is necessary to determine which is more successive and more disruptive. Results of the summary of this comparison is multiplies to the number of persons affected by the act.

Higher and Lower Pleasures

Jeremy Bentham’s silence on the question is a lacuna in the hedonic or felicific calculus because it considers only the degree of pain and pleasure in different circumstances but fails to determine their quality. This leads to the degradation of human ethical action as being no different from the actions of animals in their pursuit of pleasure.

John Stuart Mill, particularly in his work utilitarianism, made a distinction between qualities of pleasure. He argues that pleasure must be characterized into two kinds.

TWO KINDS: Higher Faculties – are gained from the rational capacity that is peculiar only to human beings.

Lower Faculties – are from sensuous experience and thus shared by animals.

Mill explains that possessing higher faculties, which entails possession of the lower faculties, requires a higher kind of pleasure, not in terms of degree and quantity but rather quality. According to him: A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable of more acute suffering.

He famously writes: It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. In sum, Utilitarianism is, in the words of Mill, the greatest happiness principle.