Transcript Lecture 1/22: Utilitarianism

Consequentialism vs.
Deontology
• Consequentialism:
– the view that an act is right if and only if it will maximize (or is
likely to maximize) good consequences.
• Deontological theories:
– The view that there are some features of acts beyond their
consequences that make them right or wrong. Ergo certain acts
must be done (or not done) regardless of the consequences.
(Sometimes it is called “absolutism”):
• Judeo-Christian Ethics
• Moral Theory of Immanuel Kant
• Rawls: Two major moral theories in US
– Utilitarianism (Consequentialism)
– Rights/Duties (Deontological)
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Utilitarianism
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Basic Arguments of
Utilitarianism
• The purpose of morality is to make the
world a better place.
• Morality is about producing good
consequences, not having good
intentions
• We should do whatever will bring the
most benefit (i.e., intrinsic value) to all of
humanity.
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Fundamental Imperative
• The fundamental imperative of
utilitarianism is:
– Always act in the way that will produce the
greatest overall amount of good in the world.
– The emphasis is clearly on consequences,
not intentions.
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The Emphasis on the Overall
Good
• We often speak of “utilitarian” solutions in
a disparaging tone, but in fact utilitarianism
is a demanding moral position that often
asks us to put aside self-interest for the
sake of the whole.
• Utilitarianism is a morally demanding
position for two reasons:
– It always asks us to do the most, to maximize
utility, not to do the minimum.
– It asks us to set aside personal interest.
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The Dream of Utilitarianism:
Bringing Scientific Certainty to
Ethical Choices
• Utilitarianism offers us a powerful vision of the
moral life, one that promises to reduce or
eliminate moral disagreement.
– If we can agree that the purpose of morality is to
make the world a better place; and
– If we can scientifically assess various possible
courses of action to determine which will have the
greatest positive effect on the world; then
– We can provide a scientific answer to the question of
what we ought to do.
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Yardsticks of Utility: A Brief
History of Utilitarianism
• Many things have instrumental value, that is, they
have value as means to an end.
• However, there must be some things which are not
merely instrumental, but have value in themselves.
This is what we call intrinsic value.
• What has intrinsic value? Three principal candidates:
– Pleasure
• Jeremy Bentham
– Happiness
• John Stuart Mill
– Preferences
• Kenneth Arrow
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Jeremy Bentham
1748-1832
• Bentham believed
that we should try to
increase the overall
amount of pleasure in
the world.
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Pleasure
• Definition: The
• Criticisms
enjoyable feeling we
– Came to be known
experience when a
as “the pig’s
state of deprivation
philosophy”
is replaced by
– Ignores higher
fulfillment.
values
• Advantages
– Could justify living
– Easy to quantify
– Short duration
– Bodily
on a pleasure
machine
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John Stuart Mill
1806-1873
• Bentham’s godson
• Believed that
happiness, not
pleasure, should be
the standard of utility.
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Happiness
• Advantages
– A higher standard,
more specific to
humans
– About realization of
goals
• Disadvantages
– More difficult to
measure
– Competing
conceptions of
happiness
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Preferences
• Kenneth Arrow, a Nobel
Prize winning Stanford
economist, argued that
what has intrinsic value is
preference satisfaction.
• The advantage of Arrow’s
approach:
– it lets people choose for
themselves what has
intrinsic value.
– It simply defines intrinsic
value as whatever satisfies
an agent’s preferences.
– It is elegant and pluralistic.
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The Utilitarian Calculus
• All consequences must be measured and
weighed
• Units of measurement may be defined in terms of
– Pleasure
– Happiness
– Preferences
• For any given action, we must calculate:
– How many people will be affected, negatively as well
as positively
– How intensely they will be affected
– Similar calculations for all available alternatives
– Choose the action that produces the greatest overall
amount of utility (positive measures minus negative
measures)
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How Much Can We Quantify?
• Pleasure and preference satisfaction
are easier to quantify than happiness or
ideals
• Two distinct issues:
– Can everything be quantified?
– Are quantified goods necessarily
commensurable?
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Problems with Utilitarianism:
Jim and the Indians
Jim finds himself in the central square of a small South American town.
Tied up against the wall are a row of twenty Indians, most terrified, a few
defiant, in front of them several armed men in uniform. A heavy man in a
sweat-stained khaki shirt turns out to be the captain in charge and, after
a good deal of questioning of Jim which establishes that he got there by
accident while on a botanical expedition, explains that the Indians are a
random group of the inhabitants who, after recent acts of protest against
the government, are just about to be killed to remind other possible
protestors of the advantages of not protesting. However, since Jim is an
honoured visitor from another land, the captain is happy to offer him a
guest’s privilege of killing one of the Indians himself. If Jim accepts, then
as a special mark of the occasion, the other Indians will be let off. Of
course, if Jim refuses, then there is no special occasion, and Pedro here
will do what he was about to do when Jim arrived, and kill them all. Jim,
with some desperate recollection of schoolboy fiction, wonders whether
if he got hold of a gun, he could hold the captain, Pedro and the rest of
the soldiers to threat, but it is quite clear from the set-up that nothing of
the sort is going to work: any attempt at that sort of thing will mean that
all the Indians will be killed, and himself. The men against the wall, and
the other villagers understand the situation, and are obviously begging
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him to accept. What should he do?
Responsibility
• Utilitarianism suggests that we are
responsible for all the consequences of our
choices.
• The problem is that sometimes we can
foresee consequences of other people’s
actions that are taken in response to our own
acts. Are we responsible for those actions,
even though we don’t choose them or
approve of them?
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Integrity
• Utilitarianism often demands that we put
aside self-interest. Sometimes this
means putting aside our own moral
convictions.
• Integrity may involve certain identityconferring commitments, such that the
violation of those commitments entails a
violation of who we are at our core.
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Who is Included?
• When we consider the issue of consequences,
we must ask who is included within that circle.
–
–
–
–
Those in our own group (ethnocentrism)
Those in our own country (nationalism)
All human beings (humanism)
All sentient beings
• Classical utilitarianism has often claimed that we
should acknowledge the pain and suffering of
animals and not restrict the calculus just to
human beings.
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A Summing Up
• Alluring attempt to employ human reason
for ethical choice, but problems:
– Predicting consequences
– Measuring good vs. bad consequences
– Who is included
– Lack of attention to responsibility/integrity
– Need to define moral minimum
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Utilitarianism doesn’t always have a cold
and calculating face—we perform utilitarian
calculations in everyday life.
• “…the problems of
three little people
don’t amount to a hill
of beans in this crazy
world.”
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