Ethics 1: Utilitarianism

• Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that determines right from wrong by focusing on outcomes.
• Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism
• Utilitarianism holds that the most ethical choice is the one that will produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
• Utilitarianism is the only moral framework that can be used to justify military force or war.
• Utilitarian Limitation:

  1)cannot predict the future, so difficulty in knowing whether our action will have good or bad outcomes

  2)trouble accounting for justice and individual rights
• Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill gave the definitive formulation for utilitarianism
• Maximise pleasure and minimise pain ( right and wrong ) - Jeremy Bentham
• harms and benefits - John Stuart Mill
• John Stuart Mill:

  Work out actions that lead to best outcome in the long run - rule utilitarianism
• Action is right if they promote happiness, and it is wrong if it promotes the opposite
• Jeremy Bentham's criterion for plesaure:

  • frequency
  • duration
  • intensity
• Issues with Bentham's Utilitarianism:

  • No regard for individual rights
  • No common currency of value
• Criticisms of John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism:

  1. concerns affinity with pleasure alone
  2. happiness may be unattainable
  3. standards are too high (demanding)
  4. renders people cold and unsympathizing
  5. Expediency - what is good/practical, not principle
  6. No time to calculate/ weight the effects
  7. Make an exception to moral rules when doing bad things
• "if human nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness, we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desireable" -John Stuart Mill
• Main message of Utilitarianism:

  • Eudaimonia is attainable if our daily moral decisions are geared towards eudaimonia.
• Consequentialism:

  the sole basis of the good is pleasure and pain. An action that produces more pleasure than pain was deemed right. That which produces more pain than pleasure was considered wrong.
• Consequentialism is concerned more with outcomes and never intentions.
• One way of stating the core message of Consequentialism is " greatest good for the greatest number of people."
• John Stuart Mill's more sophisticated version of Utilitarianism:

  1. focus on quality over quantitiy of happiness
  2. emphasis of harms & benefits over pains & pleasure
  3. rules over acts