Utilitarianism

• Act Utilitarianism was first introduced by Bentham an athiest and sought to look at the quantity of happiness
• "Nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters, pleasure and pain" - Bentham - it is human nature to find pleasure good and pain bad, and to seek pleasure and avoid pain
• An action is good if it leads to the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people
• Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory and does not take peoples intentions into consideration
• Bentham devised the hedonic calculus to work out the most happiness for the most people
• Hedonic Calculus

  Intensity - How strong the pleasure is

  Duration - How long the pleasure lasts

  Certainty - How likely the pleasure will occur

  Propinquity - How far away in time the pleasure will happen

  Fecundity - The likelihood that more pleasure will stem from it

  Purity - The likelihood that pain will stem from it

  Extent - How many people will be affected
• Utilitarianism is a theory that states that the morality of an action is determined by the consequences of that action. teleological, relativist and consequentialist
• The four sadistic guards highlight how the pleasure of the 4 guards that torture one man is more than the suffering of the person, meaning that Bentham's Act utilitarianism can prove difficult to apply to everything
• Mill provided rule utilitarianism which looked at the quality as well as the quantity of happiness
• Mill distinguishes between higher and lower pleasures - lower pleasure's being from the body (food, sex, drugs), and higher from mental activity (art, philosophy, reading)
• Lower pleasures are fleeting, so higher pleasures show to have a higher duration, meaning more pleasure overall
• Mill claims that competent judges (people who have experienced both higher and lower) will always prefer higher pleasures
• "It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied" - Mill
• Mill highlights that many will prefer higher pleasures, but will not choose them
• Rule Utilitarianism follows set rules that generally in most cases cause the most happiness
• The principle of utility - the goal of moral action is to maximise happiness (the first principle)
• Mills rule utilitarianism gives rules that are a product of society's best attempt at producing the most happiness - they are subject to improvement (called the secondary principle)
• The harm principle - people should be free to do what they want as long as they are not hurting others (secondary principle)
• Preference utilitarianism developed by singer sought to promote actions that fulfil peoples preferences and interests