- Intensity
- Duration
- Certainty or uncertainty( having a headache pill will certainly relieve pain- if you place a bet it you may win and be happy, but you may also lose and be unhappy)
- Propinquity or remoteness
- Fecundity- fecundity means productivity and by this Bentham meant the probability or otherwise of whether the act will bring out other pleasures.
- Purity- some pleasures involve pain others do not. The less pain involved in a pleasure the more pure and better it is.
- Extent- the more people who experience it the better
By assigning a number register each of the above Bentham made it so it was possible for a person to determine the best result, he called it the hedonistic calculus. Bentham believed that if a person did not follow the utility principle they should be punished
Bentham obviously realised that it was impossible to use the calculus in every small moral decision that had to be made and the methodology was extremely complex. He held that a person should not sit there and use the complex methodology to work it out, but he thought that when a person made a decision they should bare the seven dimensions in mind and use them as a rough guide.
Bentham was an act utilitarian; an act utilitarian believes that a person should apply the principle of utility when ever possible, the principle of utility must be directly applied in any situation. An act utilitarian believes that a person must never judge a situation in an empirical way and must treat every event in it’s own way. If I were an act utilitarian I would believe that anything should be done to achieve the “greatest happiness for the greatest number”, even if meant lying or even breaking a law. According to act utilitarianism, when determining whether an action is right, it is the value of the consequences of a particular act that counts. The benefit of act utilitarianism is that it has flexibility, in that it can be changed to suit a new situation at any moment.
Bentham past away and he’s ideas where challenged without any one to respond on the behalf of Bentham, that was until the young child prodigy John Stuart Mill was born. Mill was a genius, he had been able to read and write in several languages by a young age and by the time he was fourteen he had had a very good education. His Father, James Mill was a friend and follower of Bentham, and had brought Mill up on the teachings of Bentham, Mill was a strong follower of Bentham, but he had noticed a few problems with the ethical theory. At the age of twenty Mill had a nervous mental break down, he did eventually recover, some people believe he recovered because of romantic poetry, something his father did not approve because he believed that it was not “useful” enough. After Mill had recovered he devoted his life to doing good and developing Bentham’s utilitarianism, he went on to many great things he became a politician for 3 years, in those three years he became one of the first people to take a stand for the woman’s right to vote, he wrote a book about woman’s rights it was called On the subjugation of woman, one of the inspirations behind modern feminism.
The works he did on ethics were written in on liberty (1859) and utilitarianism (1861), the second book, utilitarianism focuses mainly on responding to Bentham’s critiques. Mills problem with the ethical works of Bentham though was that it focused mainly on Quantitative pleasures and allowed the pleasures of one person to be extinguished as long as the majority were satisfied, Mill maintained that the most important thing was that the well-being of the individual were satisfied. To over come this problem Mill decided to focus on the Quality of pleasure and not the just the quantity. He made a system of higher and lower pleasures, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” Mill thought that the pleasures of the mind were higher than physical pleasures. He believed that because bodily pleasures like eating were needed that when we were faced to chose between a bodily pleasure and a mental pleasure a person would chose the pleasure of the mind, like enjoying fine art.
Unlike Bentham Mill was a rule utilitarian, a rule utilitarian try to look problems more logically when faced with a problem they will do the thing that brings the greatest good for the community and not for the greatest number. A rule utilitarian would never lie because while lying may bring the greatest good for the greatest number it would not bring the greatest good for the community.
Going back to Mills idea of higher and lower pleasures he said that “it is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied” some philosopher would argue that he is, one of them being Peter Singer he believed that pleasure should not only be for Humans and that non-humans should be taken into consideration as well. He also decided that the rule should not be pleasure, but “the best interest” of those involved, because who is to decide what pleasure is for some one else. Another person who disagrees with Bentham’s and Mills idea for utilitarianism is R.M. hare he wrote a book the langue of morals about it, he believes that there is not one idea of happiness as suggested in Bentham and Mills ideas, but the right thing to do is maximise the satisfaction of the preference of each individual involved.
So to summarise utilitarianism is based on a single rule “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” the rule was made by an English philosopher named Francis Hutcheson. From there philosopher like Bentham and Mill have taken this rule and developed it into there own ethical theories. Bentham made the principle of utility, which looks at the “usefulness” of an action, and he made the hedonistic calculus, which tries to measure the usefulness of an action by using the seven dimensions. Mill made the idea of higher and lower pleasures form mind and body. We discovered that there were two types of utilitarian a rule utilitarian and an act utilitarian, they rule utilitarian satisfies the community and the act tries to satisfy everybody. Then we looked at the flexibility of utilitarianism and how it can be applied to humans, and how the rule can be changed to either the best interest for the most people or the most preference for the most people.
B) Now we have identified the major factors within utilitarianism I what to look at some of the critiques made against utilitarianism, and then see the responses to these critiques.
The first critique that I want to look at is the criticism made against Bentham’s idea of one pleasure; the critique was not originally against Bentham it was against Epicurus the philosopher of hedonism, but Mill described the critique against Bentham as,
“To suppose that life has… no higher end than pleasure… they designate as utterly mean and grovelling; as a doctrine worthy of swine”
Mill responds by saying that the happiness of pigs may lie in simple pleasures, but that humans are capable of deeper emotions and so the two cannot be compare. He argued that pleasure was both quantitative and qualitative with the emphasis on qualitative.
“It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasure should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.”
Bentham was also criticized for imposing that happiness was even attainable, many Christians undoubtedly argued that it was unattainable until you reached haven.
“..Another class of objectors.. say happiness, in any form, cannot be the rational purpose of human’s life and action; because, in the first place it is unattainable: and they contemptuously ask, What right hast thou to be happy?.. next, they say, that men can do without happiness..”
However utilitarians were not proposing a life of continual rapture, but a more realistic one with frequent and varied pleasures, and momentary raptures, with few and transitory pains mixed in. Mill argued that this was possible. The only thing holding the mass of humanity back was:
“The present wretched education, and wretched social arguments, are the only real hindrance to it’s being attainable by almost all.”
This really motivated utilitarians to counteract injustice. This motivation was not only restricted to utilitarians, it also helped improve society in general, education and social standards would improve to increase overall happiness, the “summum bonum”
The third critique I want to look at is says that utilitarianism is selfish in that it is based on happiness. However both Mill and Bentham thought that this was a fairly weak criticism easily disposed of, they emphasized that:
“I must again repeat, what the assailants of utilitarianism seldom have the justice to acknowledge, that the happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct, is not the agent’s own happiness, but that of all concerned.”
From this critique a more important point would arise, whether or not humans could act commonly bearing the good of all their personal detriment. Utilitarians thought this unimportant, they believed that as long as the out come of the action is what is morally right it doesn’t matter what his motive is, even if it was getting paid.
But saying this leaves utilitarianism wide open to criticism, because people are likely to say it is far to cold and calculating to follow as a moral guide. Mill thought this wrong he believed that if the actions were wrong and damaged public welfare they could not be praised.
Criticism number four looks at the hedonistic calculus and criticises the idea of having to calculate every action. It is stupid to propose that before every action we should work out the mathematical outcome, because the action may need to be decided in the moment, and nobody would want to spend there time trying to work out the outcome because it’s just a waste of time in general. Mill argued that the intention of the hedonistic calculus was not for it to be calculated in every situation but for it to be used as a general guiding rule. IN this he differs from Bentham and this form of utilitarianism, developed and espoused by Mill, is called rule utilitarianism. There are two forms of rule utilitarianism, weak and strong. Strong emphasizes that a you must not break general rules to fit individual situations, where as weak you allow the particular pain or pleasure in a particular situation to take precedence over the general rule whilst still bearing it in mind.
Criticism five looks at sanctions, Bentham and Mill had contradicting ideas about sanctions, Bentham believed that external sanctions were more important than internal sanctions, he believed in public opinion and not conscience. Mill on the other thought that internal sanctions should be used as the guiding principle,
“the internal sanctions of duty, whatever our standard of duty may be, is one and the same a feeling of our own mind; a pain… attendant on violation of duty… This feeling, when disinterested.. is the essence of conscience.”
The six an d final critique I want to look at is justice, when looking at a situation it is possible for an injustice to take place without being against utilitarians being upset. For example somebody is murdered you had nothing to do with the murder but you are still arrested, you are then tried and sentenced to death despite the fact you had nothing to do with the murder. Later people decide that this crime is far too dangerous to commit so it stops happening, utilitarianism would say this is ok, but somebody is dead because something someone else did. This is called Expediency. The thought of this happening did horrify Mill, but Mill decided that to solve this problem there would be a hierarchy of principles, and the first principle would be justice. He is therefore a rule utilitarian. One principle (he calls it a maxim) is:
“The moral rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another (in which we must never forget to included wrongful interference with each other’s freedom) are more virtual to human well-being than any maxims, however important, which only point out the best mode managing some department of human affairs.”
Mill was always in favour of justice, but he did oppose the book on liberty, which argued for justice and individual liberty, and also it was questionable whether utilitarianism allowed justice. So it remains to be seen how in favour of justice he was.
In conclusion utilitarianism is a well thought out ethical theory that has a lot of flexibility to change around its critiques. But having said that I do thing that it’s impractical to use any ethical on every situation, because as the critiques have shown it’s only after the ethical theories have faltered that it can be change to suit the best outcome, in my opinion a person should just trust there instincts.
