Questions What makes something right?The principle of utility: calculating pleasures and pains

What makes something right?Consequences

The principle of utility: calculating pleasures and pains

Utilitarianism; "the greatest happiness of the greatest number"; the felicific calculus

Jeremy Bentham 1748 · 1832The good is the greatest happiness of the greatest number: pleasures and pains can be calculated.

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What it claims

The standard of right and wrong is the principle of utility: to approve of every action, private or public, according as it increases or decreases the happiness of everyone concerned.

Why

Only pleasure and pain have value, and they can be measured and added up: the right act produces the greatest total happiness.

The same idea through history

Francis Hutcheson1725Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue: our moral sense judges that the best action is the one that brings "the greatest Happiness for the greatest Numbers". For Hutcheson this is a feeling that approves of benevolence, not yet a calculation of pleasures.

Cesare Beccaria1764On Crimes and Punishments: laws should aim at "the greatest happiness shared among the greatest number". The book, translated all over Europe, made the phrase known to Bentham's generation.

Jeremy Bentham1789Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation: pleasure and pain are our "two sovereign masters"; an action is right according to its tendency to increase the happiness of everyone it affects, and that happiness can be calculated (intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, extent). In 1822 he prefers to speak of the "greatest happiness" principle.

John Stuart Mill1861Utilitarianism: Mill keeps the principle but adds that pleasures also differ in quality, and attempts a "proof" of the principle.

In short

"The principle of utility: calculating pleasures and pains" is an argument by Jeremy Bentham (Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ch. I and IV, 1789) on the question "What makes something right?" (answer: consequences). Its claim: The standard of right and wrong is the principle of utility: to approve of every action, private or public, according as it increases or decreases the happiness of everyone concerned. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ch. I and IV

Valid with an implicit premise

How can we tell whether an action is right? Jeremy Bentham, an English legal thinker, offers a simple answer that he wants to be as rigorous as a science: look at what it produces. Every human being seeks pleasure and avoids pain; these are the only things that really matter. A good law, or a right action, is therefore the one that gives, in total, the most pleasure and the least pain to everyone it affects, each counting for one. We can even do the calculation: how many people, what pleasure, for how long, with what certainty. This is the principle of utility, which Bentham wanted to apply to the laws of his country: prisons, taxes, punishments. This idea is the origin of utilitarianism, one of the major moral theories today.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a world where pleasure is the only good and happiness adds up, but where some things remain forbidden whatever the total: punishing an innocent person, breaking a promise. In that world, producing the most happiness is a good reason, but not the only one. That is the position of Ross or Kant, who take consequences into account without making them everything.

Valid with P3. P4 links the three ideas: if pleasure is the only good (P1), if it adds up (P2) and if only effects count (P3), we get the principle of utility. Bentham does not defend P3 separately: for him the principle of utility is the starting point of every proof and cannot itself be proved (ch. I, § 11); mostly he refutes the rival principles (ch. II). The objections target P1 (are all pleasures equal?), P2 (can the happiness of different people be added up?) and P3 (do an innocent person's rights count only through their effects?).

Analogy. A doctor must share out scarce medicine among several patients. She does not ask who is the nicest: she looks for the distribution that will relieve the most suffering in total, counting each patient the same. Bentham wants morality and law always to reason like this doctor.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

The opponents of utilitarianism (as reported by Mill) 1861 · attacks premise 1

To say that life has no higher end than pleasure is a doctrine "worthy only of swine". If only the amount of pleasure counts, a well-fed pig is worth as much as a scholar, and a silly game as much as poetry. A human being expects something more from life than what satisfies a beast.

Bentham replies

John Stuart Mill 1861 · Reply by Mill, Bentham's disciple

It is the accusation that degrades human beings: it supposes they are capable only of a pig's pleasures. Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and once conscious of them, they do not call anything happiness which does not satisfy them.

G. E. Moore 1903

Mill's reply saves human dignity but gives up the original thesis. If one pleasure can be better than another without being greater, then something other than pleasure has value. Mill's judgement of preference, far from establishing that pleasure alone is good, contradicts it.

The debate goes on (our summary) Bentham himself distinguished pleasures only by their quantity (ch. IV): he would probably have accepted the conclusion the objection finds shocking, saying that a pleasure is not "low" by nature but only if it is short, uncertain or followed by pains. The debate between quantity (Bentham) and quality (Mill) continues in the argument "Better to be Socrates dissatisfied".

Robert Nozick (the utility monster) 1974 · attacks premise 2

Imagine a being, the "utility monster", which gets from everything we give it an enormously greater pleasure than others lose. If the good is only the sum of pleasures, we would have to sacrifice everything to it, ourselves included. Adding up happiness forgets that each person is separate from the others: their misery is not cancelled by someone else's happiness.

no reply

No reply possible: objection raised in 1974, after the author's death (1832).

The debate goes on (our summary) Bentham died long before this objection. Utilitarians often reply that such a being is impossible, or that our intuitions are worthless for such strange cases; others accept giving special weight to the worst off ("prioritarianism"), which moves away from Bentham's simple sum.

Derek Parfit (the Repugnant Conclusion) 1984 · attacks premise 2

If the good is the total sum of happiness, then a huge world of people whose lives are barely worth living would be better than a world of ten billion very happy people, provided the total is larger. Parfit finds this conclusion very hard to accept: adding up happiness goes too far.

Bentham replies

Torbjörn Tännsjö 2002

We ought to accept the Repugnant Conclusion. It shocks only because we picture badly a life "barely worth living": many ordinary lives are already close to that level. Once this is seen, the more populated world is not absurd.

The debate goes on (our summary) Parfit searched all his life for a theory that would avoid this conclusion without falling into other absurdities, and he admits he did not find it. The question of future populations remains one of the most open problems in ethics; it affects utilitarianism but other theories too.

H. J. McCloskey (the sheriff and the innocent man) 1957 · attacks premise 3

In a small town a crime has been committed and a riot threatens: several people will die. The sheriff can prevent it by having an innocent man, whom the crowd believes guilty, convicted. If only effects count, he must do it. Yet it is a grave injustice. A morality that demands it forgets that everyone has rights that cannot be sacrificed for the total.

Bentham replies

John Stuart Mill 1861 · Mill's anticipated reply (on justice)

Justice is not foreign to utility: it is the name for certain social utilities far more important than the others, and therefore more absolute and imperative. That is why it is guarded by a stronger feeling and stricter rules.

J. J. C. Smart 1973

The utilitarian must admit it: in such an extreme case, his doctrine may demand an act that common moral feeling judges unjust. But such cases are very rare, and it is not for our feelings to judge the principle: if the two clash, so much the worse for our feelings.

See the rest of the debate (1)

R. M. Hare 1981

There are two levels of moral thinking. In everyday life, we should follow simple, firm rules ("never convict an innocent person"): they produce the most good in the long run, and a sheriff who calculates case by case would often get it wrong. Calculation belongs only to the "critical" level, to choose those rules. Cases invented to trap utilitarianism do not resemble real life.

The debate goes on (our summary) Critics reply that these answers do not go all the way: for Mill and Hare, the rule "do not punish an innocent person" holds only because it is useful; in the precise case where breaking it would really be better and would stay secret, the theory still says to break it. Smart openly accepts this. For McCloskey and his successors, that is precisely the sign that rights cannot be reduced to consequences.

What today's voices say

Defend it

Michael SandelHe presents Bentham's utilitarianism in Lectures 2-3, then raises objections to the greatest good for the greatest number and to measuring all values in money.

Criticize it

Jordan Peterson'It's a fool's game to map pleasure and pain onto good and evil': there are evil pleasures and justified pains.

Bishop Robert BarronHe says consequentialism ignores the category of acts that are intrinsically evil.