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Utilitarianism
Julia Driver
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/utilitarianism-history/

… utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the
action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general
claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right
action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. What distinguishes
utilitarianism from egoism has to do with the scope of the relevant consequences.
On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good — that is, consider the
good of others as well as one's own good.
The Classical Utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, identified the good
with pleasure, so, like Epicurus, were hedonists about value. They also held that we
ought to maximize the good, that is, bring about ‘the greatest amount of good for the
greatest number’.
Utilitarianism is also distinguished by impartiality and agent-neutrality. Everyone's
happiness counts the same. When one maximizes the good, it is the good impartially
considered. My good counts for no more than anyone else's good. Further, the
reason I have to promote the overall good is the same reason anyone else has to so
promote the good. It is not peculiar to me….
Though the first systematic account of utilitarianism was developed by Jeremy
Bentham (1748–1832), the core insight motivating the theory occurred much earlier.
That insight is that morally appropriate behavior will not harm others, but instead
increase happiness or ‘utility.’ What is distinctive about utilitarianism is its approach
in taking that insight and developing an account of moral evaluation and moral
direction that expands on it. Early precursors to the Classical Utilitarians include the
British Moralists, Cumberland, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Gay, and Hume….
The Classical Utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, were concerned with legal and social
reform. If anything could be identified as the fundamental motivation behind the
development of Classical Utilitarianism it would be the desire to see useless, corrupt
laws and social practices changed. Accomplishing this goal required a normative
ethical theory employed as a critical tool. What is the truth about what makes an
action or a policy a morally good one, or morally right? But developing the theory
itself was also influenced by strong views about what was wrong
in their society. The conviction that, for example, some laws are bad resulted in
analysis of why they were bad. And, for Jeremy Bentham, what made them bad was
their lack of utility, their tendency to lead to unhappiness and misery without any
compensating happiness. If a law or an action doesn't do any good, then it isn't any
good.
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Jeremy Benthamc xv
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) was influenced both by Hobbes' account of human
nature and Hume's account of social utility. He famously held that humans were
ruled by two sovereign masters — pleasure and pain. We seek pleasure and the
avoidance of pain, they “…govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think…” …
Yet he also promulgated the principle of utility as the standard of right action on the
part of governments and individuals. Actions are approved when they are such as to
promote happiness, or pleasure, and disapproved of when they have a tendency to
cause unhappiness, or pain…
…. Bentham does take from Hume the view that utility is the measure of virtue….
On… Bentham's view the action (or trait) is morally good, right, virtuous in view of
the consequences it generates, the pleasure or utility it produces, which could be
completely independent of what our responses are to the trait….

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) was a follower of Bentham, and, through most of his
life, greatly admired Bentham's work even though he disagreed with some of
Bentham's claims — particularly on the nature of ‘happiness.’ Bentham… had held
that there were no qualitative differences between pleasures, only quantitative ones.
This left him open to a variety of criticisms. First, Bentham's Hedonism was too
egalitarian. Simple-minded pleasures, sensual pleasures, were just as good, at least
intrinsically, than more sophisticated and complex pleasures. The pleasure of
drinking a beer in front of the T.V. surely doesn't rate as highly as the pleasure one
gets solving a complicated math problem, or reading a poem, or listening to Mozart.
Second, Bentham's view that there were no qualitative differences in pleasures also
left him open to the complaint that on his view human pleasures were of no more
value than animal pleasures and, third, committed him to the corollary that the moral
status of animals, tied to their sentience, was the same as that of humans. While
harming a puppy and harming a person are both bad, however, most people had the
view that harming the person was worse. Mill sought changes to the theory that
could accommodate those sorts of intuitions.
To this end, Mill's hedonism was influenced by perfectionist intuitions. There are
some pleasures that are more fitting than others. Intellectual pleasures are of a
higher, better, sort than the ones that are merely sensual, and that we share with
animals. To some this seems to mean that Mill really wasn't a hedonistic utilitarian.
His view of the good did radically depart from Bentham's view. However, like
Bentham, the good still consists in pleasure, it is still a psychological state. There is
certainly that similarity…. While it is true that Mill is more comfortable with notions
like ‘rights’ this does not mean that he, in actuality, rejected utilitarianism. The
rationale for all the rights he recognizes is utilitarian.
Mill's ‘proof’ of the claim that intellectual pleasures are better in kind than others,
though, is highly suspect. He doesn't attempt a mere appeal to raw intuition. Instead,
he argues that those persons who have experienced both view the higher as better
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than the lower. Who would rather be a happy oyster, living an enormously long life,
than a person living a normal life? Or, to use his most famous example — it is better
to be Socrates ‘dissatisfied’ than a fool ‘satisfied.’ In this way Mill was able to solve a
problem for utilitarianism….
It should be noted… that Mill was offering this as an alternative to Bentham's view
which had been itself criticized as a ‘swine morality,’ locating the good in pleasure in
a kind of indiscriminate way. The distinctions he makes strike many as intuitively
plausible ones. Bentham, however, can accommodate many of the same intuitions
within his system. This is because he notes that there are a variety of parameters
along which we quantitatively measure pleasure — intensity and duration are just
two of those….
Thus, what Mill calls the intellectual pleasures will score more highly than the
sensual ones along several parameters, and this could give us reason to prefer
those pleasures — but it is a quantitative not a qualitative reason, on Bentham's
view. When a student decides to study for an exam rather than go to a party, for
example, she is making the best decision even though she is sacrificing short term
pleasure. That's because studying for the exam, Bentham could argue, scores higher
in terms of the long term pleasures doing well in school lead to, as well as the
fecundity of the pleasure in leading to yet other pleasures. However, Bentham will
have to concede that the very happy oyster that lives a very long time could, in
principle, have a better life than a normal human.

G. E. Moore
G. E. Moore strongly disagreed with the hedonistic value theory adopted by the
Classical Utilitarians. Moore agreed that we ought to promote the good, but believed
that the good included far more than what could be reduced to pleasure. He was a
pluralist, rather than a monist, regarding intrinsic value. For example, he believed
that ‘beauty’ was an intrinsic good. A beautiful object had value independent of any
pleasure it might generate in a viewer.
Thus, Moore differed from Sidgwick who regarded the good as consisting in some
consciousness. Some objective states in the world are intrinsically good, and on
Moore's view, beauty is just such a state. He used one of his more notorious thought
experiments to make this point: he asked the reader to compare two worlds, one was
entirely beautiful, full of things which complimented each other; the other was a
hideous, ugly world, filled with “everything that is most disgusting to us.” Further,
there are not human beings, one imagines, around to appreciate or be disgusted by
the worlds. The question then is, which of these worlds is better, which one's
existence would be better than the other's? Of course, Moore believed it was clear
that the beautiful world was better, even though no one was around to appreciate its
beauty….
Moore's targets in arguing against hedonism were the earlier utilitarians who argued
that the good was some state of consciousness such as pleasure. He actually
waffled on this issue a bit, but always disagreed with Hedonism in that even when he
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held that beauty all by itself was not an intrinsic good, he also held that for the
appreciation of beauty to be a good the beauty must actually be there, in the world,
and not be the result of illusion.
Moore further criticized the view that pleasure itself was an intrinsic good, since it
failed a kind of isolation test that he proposed for intrinsic value. If one compared an
empty universe with a universe of sadists, the empty universe would strike one as
better. This is true even though there is a good deal of pleasure, and no pain, in the
universe of sadists. This would seem to indicate that what is necessary for the good
is at least the absence of bad intentionality. The pleasures of sadists, in virtue of
their desires to harm others, get discounted — they are not good, even though they
are pleasures. Note this radical departure from Bentham who held that even
malicious pleasure was intrinsically good, and that if nothing instrumentally bad
attached to the pleasure, it was wholly good as well….

Since the early 20th Century utilitarianism has undergone a variety of refinements.
After the middle of the 20th Century it has become more common to identify as a
‘Consequentialist’ since very few philosophers agree entirely with the view proposed
by the Classical Utilitarians, particularly with respect to the hedonistic value theory.
But the influence of the Classical Utilitarians has been profound — not only within
moral philosophy, but within political philosophy and social policy….