Week 6 Act Utilitarianism

Week 6 – Act Utilitarianism

Outline: 1. Summary of Social Contract Theory 2. Waluchow on Utilitarianism 3. John Stuart Mill on Utilitarianism

Social Contract Theory Summarized.

Hobbes and Gauthier are both trying to deal with the problem that arises if/when all people actually are egoists. This is the ‘problem of universalization’ discussed by Rachels.

Hobbes characterizes the problem with the State of Nature, and this problem can only be overcome by means of a Social Contract, enforced by the Sovereign. Gauthier frames the problem with the Prisoner’s Dilemma and solves it by advocating self-interested reasoning from the perspective of a ‘constrained maximizer’, which will end up satisfying each individual’s rational self-interest.

Trusting others is based solely on their ability to reason as constrained maximizers for Gauthier, but for Hobbes trust is a function of the Sovereign’s sword.

Problems for Gauthier’s view? 1. Too much faith in the power of individuals to reason as constrained maximizers. 2. Too much faith in the power of reason generally to generate a coordinated set of agreements. 3. Inevitable inequality of bargaining positions. 4. ‘Reasonableness’ is its own reason for action, not just self-interest. Utilitarianism: the view and some shortcomings. Waluchow, pgs. 145 – 161.

All versions of Utilitarianism have two parts: 1. An account of human welfare or ‘utility’ 2. And an instruction to maximize utility

The earliest proponents of Utilitarianism were Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. They lived and wrote between 1750 and 1850. They were opposed to Divine Command Theory, Relativism and Egoism because on their view, ‘The Principle of Utility’ is objective and universal as a standard for determining moral obligations and assessing social institutions.

Utilitarianism is both monistic (the is only ONE principle of utility) and consequentialist (right actions are those actions that produce good consequences). So what we need first and that’s an account of what counts as a ‘good consequence’, i.e., what do people find valuable.

Bentham and Mill present a monistic theory of human value, i.e., there is only one thing all persons find valuable. They believe that all things humans find valuable are valuable because they produce happiness. Happiness is defined as the production of pleasure or the avoidance of pain.

Bentham maintained that all human pleasures were equivalent; Mill argued that pleasures differed in quality. ‘Better to be a fool dissatisfied than a pig satisfied’. But if Mill is right, how do we compare qualitatively different pleasures and how does the ranking occur? In response to this difficulty, some have proposed pluralistic theories of value, i.e., there are many things humans find valuable, each of which can contribute to the production of good consequences. But whether we choose to focus on preferences, rationally-informed preferences or more specific types of experience, we still don’t avoid the problems of comparing types of pleasure.

Suppose we return to consider Bentham’s view where quantity of pleasure is all we seek to compare; first, our quantification will not be precise, and second, this won’t allow us to make accurate quantitative comparisons of utility between persons.

Act Utilitarianism (AU): the rightness of an action is a function of the amount of utility that action produces. So AU is concerned with specific actions, as opposed to action-guiding rules (our subject for next week).

AU always maintains that “an action is right iff nothing else I could have done: a) would have produced a greater balance of utility over disutility or b) would have produced a smaller balance of disutility over utility.”(W, p. 152).

‘b’ accounts for those times that the right act involves choosing the action that is less wrong.

When applying a utility calculation, we must assume the perspective of a benevolent and disinterested spectator, taking into account equally the interests of all those that are affected by the consequences of my action. Problems with AU: 1. No account of the moral significance of special relationships. 2. AU is only future-oriented. 3. AU reasoning can encourage free-riders. 4. AU denies the moral relevance of the intentions that motivate actions. 5. AU will often require actions that would usually be regarded as supererogatory.

John Stuart Mill – Utilitarianism.

The Greatest Happiness Principle: ‘Actions are right as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to promote the reverse…’

This excerpt is divided into two sections; the first tries to explain how pleasures (happiness/utility) can be ranked according to quality and how this is impartial, the second tries to explain how we could prove that the Greatest Happiness Principle is the moral rule for us.

All things that are desirable are so inasmuch as they produce happiness or serve as a means in the production of happiness.

Critics have objected that this reduces human pleasure to that of beasts; but surely it is the critics that reduce human pleasure – why would anyone believe the pleasures of a swine could satisfy a human?

This criticism has arisen from emphasizing the quantity of pleasure an act produces, not the quality of pleasure produced. So how do we qualitatively rank order pleasures? Of any two pleasures, we ask those that have experienced both which they prefer, and whichever the majority endorse is the greater pleasure. Some may respond that higher pleasures are often sacrificed in favour of lower. This may be true, but only because the capacity for the higher pleasures is fickle and may disappear over time. The fact is that the judgment of those that have experienced both of two types of pleasure is all that we have as a guide.

Now, since we are seeking to produce the greatest amount of the best possible happiness, we should not be primarily concerned with our own well-being, but the general good for all of humanity, indeed, any sentient creature.

What this impartiality entails is that we should strive to put our own interests in harmony with those of the whole and that we should educate our youth in this way. Section 2. How do we prove that the Greatest Happiness Principle is really the one universal principle of morality? Because it’s a ‘first principle’ it is not subject to rational proof, but it is ‘known’ to each of us. If I can show that we know happiness is the only thing we each desire, then that’s the best evidence there is that the Greatest Happiness Principle is true.

Proof that any object or state of affairs is desirable comes from the fact that there are people who desire it. Since people desire their own well-being, we can infer that the general happiness of all persons is a desired goal. But all this shows is that ‘general happiness’ is only one of many potentially competing desired ends.

So I have to show that happiness is the only end individuals seek which is made more difficult by the obvious fact that people do seek other ends for their own sake, like virtue. That is, people try to be virtuous for no other reason than being virtuous. So the question is, does the fact that people desire things like virtue for themselves undermine the Greatest Happiness Principle?

It does not. Why? Because things like virtue and money and all things that are sought in themselves are initially pursued as a means of producing happiness, and become one of many individually variable components of happiness. So the desire for some thing is not distinct for the desire for happiness, but is instead a part of that desire.

This means that the only things humans desire are things that are a means to, or produce, happiness. And Mill intends for this argument to be a good reason to believe that the right action will be any action that leads to the maximum amount of the best kind of happiness for the greatest number.