UTILITARIANISM

Jeremy Bentham
(1748 – 1832)
Brief Biography
• Born in London, England
• A child prodigy: read as a young toddler
and studied Latin at age three
• Studied law at Queen’s College, Oxford,
England
• Instead of practicing law, he spent his
life looking for and writing about ways in
which existing laws could be improved
The Revolution in Ethics
• HISTORICAL
BACKGROUND:
Economic, Political,
and Ideological
• The industrial
revolution in England
in the second half of
the 18th to 19th
century.
NEW IDEAS
emerged
during this era.
The years 1748-1873 were full
of changes:
 Scientific advancement
 Revolutions (the American and
French)
 Exploration/Colonization
 Social and Religious reform
 Industrialization
 New Modes of Transportation
Given this historical context, it is
understandable that Bentham used
reason and science to explain
human behavior. His ethical system
was an attempt to quantify
happiness and the good so they
would meet the conditions of the
scientific method.
Ethics had to be empirical,
quantifiable, verifiable, and
reproducible across time and
space. Just as science was
beginning to understand the
workings of cause and effect in the
body, so ethics would explain the
causal relationships of the mind.
Defining Utilitarianism
• An ethical theory that argues
for the goodness of pleasure
and the determination of right
behavior based on the
usefulness of the action’s
consequences.
• One’s actions and
behavior are good
inasmuch as they are
directed toward the
experience of the greatest
number of people.
Why did the theory come about?
Utilitarianism has its origins in the
hedonism of the ancient Cyrenaics
and Epicureans.
Bentham lived in a time where many
people lived in squalid conditions as a
result of moving from the self sufficient
country in to the new industrial towns
looking for a better life.
“We must, therefore, pursue the
things that make for happiness,
seeing that when happiness is
present, we have everything; but
when it is absent, we do
everything to possess it.”
Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), Letter to
Menoeceus
 Bentham believed that it was
wrong for the masses to live in
unhappiness while the minority
were well off.

 He also wanted to make ethics

quantitative, as Sir Isaac
Newton had made science.
The Fundamentals of
Utilitarianism
All humans by nature seek to attain
pleasure and avoid pain.
“Nature has placed mankind under the
governance of two sovereign masters,
pain and pleasure. It is for them
alone to point out what we ought to
do, as well as to determine what we
shall do.
On the one hand, the standard
of right and wrong, on the
other, the chain of causes and
effects, are fastened to their
throne”.
“They govern us in all we do, in all we
say, in all we think: Every effort we
can make to throw off our subjection,
will serve but to demonstrate and
confirm it. In words a man may
pretend to abjure their empire: But, in
reality, he will remain subject to it all
the while.”
Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and
Legislation
The Principle of Utility
It is about our subjection to
these sovereign masters:
pleasure and pain. On the
one hand, it refers to the
motivation of our actions as
guided by our avoidance of pain
and our desire for pleasure.
Having identified the
tendency for pleasure and
the avoidance of pain as the
principle of utility, Bentham
equates happiness with
pleasure.
In order to help people make the
right choice which brought about
happiness to the most number of
people Bentham devised the
Hedonistic Calculus. This is the
idea of how to calculate happiness
by adding up the happiness and
subtracting the pain. This is done
by using 7 different criteria.
The Hedonistic Calculus
1. Intensity. How strong is the
pleasure/pain? How deep or
superficial is it?
2. Duration. How long will it
last? Is it temporary or
permanent?
3. Propinquity. How soon will it
occur?
4. Certainty. How likely is it
to occur?
5. Fecundity. How likely is
the action to produce more
pleasure?
6. Purity. Will the pleasure be
mixed with pain?
7. Extent. How many people
will be affected?
What do we calculate?
 Hedons (positive)/dolors
(negative) may be defined
in terms of
• Pleasure
• Happiness
• Ideals
• Preferences
For any given action, we must
calculate:
• How many people will be affected,
negatively (dolors - a standard unit of
pain) as well as positively (hedons - a
standard unit of pleasure)
• How intensely they will be affected
• Similar calculations for all available
alternatives
• Choose the action that produces the
greatest overall amount of utility
(hedons minus dolors)
Example:
 Debating the school lunch program
Benefits
• Increased nutrition for x number
of children
• Increased performance, greater
long-range chances of success
• Incidental benefits to contractors,
etc.
Costs
• Cost to each taxpayer
• Contrast with other programs that
could have been funded and with
lower taxes (no program)
Multiply each factor by
• Number of individuals affected
• Intensity of effects
How much can we
quantify?
 Pleasure and preference
satisfaction are easier to
quantify than happiness
or ideals.
Two distinct issues:
Can everything be quantified?
• Some would maintain that some of
the most important things in life (love,
family, etc.) cannot easily be
quantified, while other things
(productivity, material goods) may get
emphasized precisely because they
are quantifiable.
• The danger: if it can’t be counted,
it doesn’t count.
Are quantified goods
necessarily
commensurable?
• Are a fine dinner and a good
night’s sleep
commensurable? Can one
be traded or substituted for
the other?
Measuring Happiness
Most people think that earning lots of money
will make them happy, so the best utilitarian
choice is to ensure that everyone has a good
job and prosperity. However, scientific studies
show that money only brings happiness in the
short term, and that it works better for some
people than others. As human beings, then,
we actually don’t know how to make
ourselves happy? So how can we trust
ourselves to make moral decisions on this
basis?
Hypothetical story told by Harvard
psychologist Fiery Cushman
When a man offends two volatile
brothers with an insult, Jon wants
to kill him; he shoots but misses.
Matt, who intends only to scare the
man but kills him by accident, will
suffer a more severe penalty than
his brother in most countries
(including the United States).
Applying utilitarian reasoning,
can you say which brother bears
greater guilt for his behavior?
Are you satisfied with this
assessment of responsibility?
Why or why not?
 The Big Man in the Cave
If utilitarianism is true, the people in
the cave should use the dynamite to
blow the Big Man out of the cave
opening.
The people in the cave should not use
the dynamite to blow the Big Man out
of the cave.
Therefore, utilitarianism is not true.
 The Organ Harvest
If utilitarianism is true, then the
doctor’s act of killing the janitor for
his organs was morally right.
The doctor’s act of killing the janitor
for his organs was not morally right.
Therefore, utilitarianism is not true.
Thank
you!