Good, in Bentham’s eyes, is the maximum amount of pleasure with the minimum amount of pain and bad is the maximum amount of pain afflicted to people and the minimum amount of pleasure. This then means that his utilitarian theory is a democratic one. This is because it is good when it is the maximum amount of good for the maximum amount of people. As a result Bentham claimed that if someone is faced with a problem they should think of a solution that would bring the maximum amount of happiness to the maximum amount of people. For example, if a man with the cure for a disease, which affects thousands of people, a year and a child was in a car crash, one would assume to save the life of a child as they are considered to be innocent and helpless, however Bentham states that you should do the maximum amount of good for the maximum people, which means you should save the man. Even though the child’s parents will be devastated what you have done is not ‘bad’ in the eyes of Bentham but good as he saved the man with the cure for a terrible disease that affects many people. By saving one man you would be indirectly saving thousands of people.
However in order to help people, Bentham created the ‘hedonic calculus’ which allows people to choose which option produces the most pleasure and the minimum amount of pain. There were seven factors/ criteria’s which options were measured in:
Intensity
Duration
Certainty
Extent
Remoteness
Richness
Purity
When faced in a dilemma, Bentham claimed that you could chose the ‘good’ option, the option which would do the most amount of good and the least amount of pain. For example, in the middle of a battle a group of soldiers are sent in to help their colleagues. Once they have done their part they all make their way to the pick up point to wait for the helicopter. However, the enemy is closing in from behind and one of the men is seriously injured and slowing the whole group down. The question is, would you leave one of you colleagues, a friend, to save the rest of the group or go with the rule of ‘leave no man behind’ and end up with a risk of none of them reaching the pick up point.
In this situation, Bentham would state that one should leave their personal and emotional feelings aside and use the hedonic calculus.
There is no guarantee that all will survive even if they leave their wounded comrade, it would just speed them up. There is also possibility that they could all survive if they leave one man behind. Therefore as a result it seems more logical, and by going with Bentham’s theory the ‘good’ thing to do is to leave your fellow soldier behind. This is because there is a bigger risk of them all being killed since the wounded soldier is slowing them down and there is a lower risk of them being all killed if they leave a man behind. It is just the question of whether they are willing to sacrifice one life or the life of the entire group.
Bentham’s version of utilitarianism cannot be defended. Discuss
I believe that Jeremy Bentham’s version of utilitarianism isn’t completely undependable, however, it is much easier to criticise it as it has more imperfections than perfection. It is logical and practical for Bentham to come up with a theory in which everyone strives to act for the most amount of good and the least amount of bad. Anyone would agree that a theory which states that you should always make the decision which would cause less harm than good and pursue good and avoid pain. Utilitarianism allows us to balance situations out; to take a lot of thought into a decision, which would intern stop, us from making foolish decisions. It offers a democratic solution, which encourages general happiness, it is a completely unselfish theory, since it has to be the greatest amount of good for the ‘greatest’ amount of people, and therefore it can never be about just one being. It is a theory which is simply based on common sense and needs no great amount of wisdom and can be used in practically any situation. The great thing about this theory is that it can be used in modern days, since most theories were written a long time ago when things like euthanasia and abortion didn’t exist, and therefore in most theories offered by philosophers do not refer to modern situations.
However this can be seen as a bad thing as well. Since this is a democratic theory in which the interests of the majority are more important than one individual, it does not help with individual quests. There are many difficulties when it comes to the utilitarian theory. The first difficulty regarding utilitarianism is that no one can really be 100% sure of the consequences of an action. Not everyone would agree that the decision is good because the consequence may not have turned out to be good. In addition, who is to say that anyone knows what the future holds and therefore we can never know what the real consequence is we can only assume. We can only assume through experience. The consequences of our action may not even be obvious to us until its too late, or may become obvious very later on. I.e., at the time the president of the united states believed that what he was doing was right when he agreed to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, he believed he was doing it for his country, however the truly horrifying affects of his decision could only be known afterwards and many years afterwards when the radiation affected the living and the unborn.
The second difficulty is the hedonic calculus, measuring pleasure. How can we compare the pleasure you feel of eating a bar of chocolate after finally giving into your temptations during a diet, to watching your children grow up to becoming successful and accomplished adults. Another problem with the hedonic calculus is that what if when measuring the pleasure of each of your options when faced with a dilemma, you end up finding that both your options are just as good or just as bad as each other, the whole point of this system is so that you can find one which is better than the other. It would just end up confusing someone.
The third difficulty concerns justice. The utilitarian way means that the greatest amount of pleasure for the greatest amount of people. Therefore the Nazis’ torturing the Jews would have been ‘good’ in a utilitarian’s eye if there were a greater population who got pleasure out of it. Or 4 boys scaring and hitting a cat for ‘fun’ would be considered to be ‘good’ because those four boys got pleasure out of it compared to the one cat that suffered.
The final difficulty of utilitarianism is that it fails to consider the fact that the view of good and bad, pleasure and pain depends on the people, culture, lifestyle and background. What one person from one background believes is good may not be the same as what someone from another background would consider happiness and pleasure to be, i.e., a man who lives in the jungle would consider bugs to be delicious food and that would bring them pleasure however give that same thing to a rich girl from Beverly hills, USA you would not get the same reaction as the man in the jungle.
In conclusion, one cannot say that Bentham’s version of utilitarianism cannot be defended since his theory of striving to get the most pleasurable results is a logical and sensible way of living, however in reality it is inconvenient and in some cases it will just end up confusing us.