Introduction

After Kant, the next major thinkers in the Enlightenment were the utilitarians. Two exemplars were Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832) and John Stuart Mill (d. 1873). On utilitarianism, no morals are intrinsically right or wrong, or good or bad. Following the trend we’ve seen, they thought pleasures and pains, and benefits and harms, could be measured empirically. Utilitarianism uses means-to-end reasoning to determine what is moral, based on the sum of an action’s consequences.  

Bentham, Mill, and More

Bentham was a hedonistic utilitarian: what action maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain is right. He treated all pleasures and pains alike, focusing on the net quantity of pleasure. But Mill realized some pleasures (e.g., intellectual ones) are better than others (e.g., sensual ones). Thus he focused on their quality. For him, we should act to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

There also is act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism. The former focuses on individual acts; the one that maximizes utility should be performed. The latter looks at kinds of acts that, from experience, we know tend to maximize utility. This is helpful, e.g., in taxation policies, so that we don’t have to re-run the calculus each time we consider a proposal.  

Assessment

There definitely is a place for appeals to utility in moral reasoning. E.g., when crafting public policy, we should consider the likely consequences of a proposed action, even when a deontological principle clearly applies. After all, people have to live with such decisions. Moreover, utilitarianism appeals to people, especially in secular societies, as apparently being morally neutral. There is no appeal to God or some other set of values to determine what is moral.

However, what gets to count as a “good” or “bad” consequence in the first place? Who gets to decide that? According to whom is something (or someone) more valuable than another? Biases easily could enter the calculation here. To make such judgments seems to presuppose some outside standard, beyond utility.

Another issue is that utilitarianism seems inadequate in terms of how it treats motives. Yet, surely they are morally important. If someone kills another, it makes a major difference if it was done intentionally or accidentally. We rightly recognize that difference in the law.

Relatedly, utilitarianism undermines acts of moral supererogation, ones that are heroic and praiseworthy, yet not required. Suppose someone is jogging but notices another person in danger of being attacked by a third person with a knife. While we should expect that jogger to at least call for help (call the police or cry out, to scare off the attacker), it would be above and beyond the call of duty for that jogger to fight off the attacker and save the would-be victim. Yet, on utilitarianism, that act would be obligatory if it would result overall in net good consequences.

Perhaps most significantly, utilitarianism makes net utility the basis for what is moral. Consider again our core morals: murder and rape are wrong, and justice and love are good. If the good consequences of a murder outweigh the bad, then that act would be justified and even obligatory. The same goes for rape, whether under act or rule utilitarianism. But these results clearly are deeply mistaken, to say the least. If this justification held, it could be moral to rape another person, or murder a racial minority person who is protesting peacefully for civil rights. But, we deeply know such acts are wrong; otherwise, why would there be such uproars against these acts?

Likewise, justice would be reduced to whatever is the result of the calculation. A rape or murder would be just in a society that is predominately one race if that act would maximize the overall benefits for the majority. Yet, if these acts can be just on this moral system, we have lost justice. Indeed, murder’s and rape’s wrongness, and justice’s and love’s goodness, seem to be intrinsically so.

So, it seems utilitarianism undermines our four core morals and is inadequate as the basis for ethics.

For Further Reading

Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 4