What's the Right thing to do?-Episode 2 Utilitarianism

Bentham’s version of Utilitarianism:

The highest principle of morality is to maximize the general welfare or the collective happiness or the overall balance of pleasure over pain. In a phrase: maximize utility.

Bentham tells us maximizing utility is a principle not only for individuals but also for communities and for legislators.

And it often goes, this utilitarian logic, under the name of cost-benefit analysis, is used by companies and governments all the time. And what it involves is placing a value usually a dollar value to stand for utility on the costs and the benefits of various proposals.

Objections to Utilitarianism

1. Fails to respect individual/minority rights

2. Not possible to aggregate all values and preferences

- using a single measure like $$ (values are not commensurable)

- Isn’t there a distinction between higher and lower pleasures?

Question: Is Utilitarianism right to assume the uniformity of value, the commensurability of values and translate all moral considerations into dollars or money.

Why should we weigh all preferences that people have without assessing whether they’re good preferences or bad preferences? Shouldn’t we distinguish between higher pleasures and lower pleasures?

Part of the appeal of not making any qualitative distinctions about the worth of people’s preferences is that it is non-judgemental and egalitarian, the Benthamite Utilitarian says, everybody’s performances count regardless of what people want and regardless of what makes different people happy. For Bentham, all that matters are the intensity and the duration of a pleasure or pain. The so-called higher pleasure or nobler virtues are simply those according to Bentham that produce stronger, longer pleasure. He has a famous phrase to express this idea: “The quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.”

But is that right, this refusal to make qualitative distinctions? Can we altogether dispense with the idea that certain things we take pleasure in are better or worthier than others?

John Stuart Mill replied to these objections to utilitarianism. What Mill tried to do was to see whether the utilitarian calculus could be enlarged and modified to accommodate humanitarian concerns like the concern to respect individual rights and also to address the distinction between higher and lower pleasures. In 1859 Mill wrote a book on liberty, the main point of which was the importance of defending individual rights and minority rights. In 1861 till the end of his life, he wrote Utilitarianism. It makes it clear that utility is the only standard of morality. He affirmed Bentham’s premise. He says very explicitly “The sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people actually do desire it.” He stays with the idea that actual empirical desire is the only basis for moral judgment.

But then, he argues that it is possible for a utilitarian to distinguish higher from lower pleasures. Since we cannot step outside actual desires and preferences that would violate utilitarian premises, the only test of whether a pleasure is higher or lower is whether someone who has experienced both would prefer it.

“Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, then that is the more desirable pleasure.” — John Stuart Mill arguing within utilitarian framework for a distinction between 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. And if the fool or the pig are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their side of the question.”—John Stuart Mill

Is Mill actually, without admitting it, stepping outside utilitarian considerations in arguing for qualitatively higher pleasures and for sacred or specially important individual rights?

To answer that question in the case of rights and justice will require us to explore other ways, no utilitarian ways of accounting for rights and justice and then ask whether they succeed.

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