Utilitarianism

Throughout the history of moral and political philosophy, the idea of welfare as a moral good has repeatedly appeared. Utilitarians distinctively take welfare consequences to be the central good and the principle by which to judge the morality of individuals' actions. It would be odd, even perverse, to suppose that political theory should not attend to the consequences of actions or policies, because consequences are the very point of important policies. Hence, moral and political philosophy is a joint program in the view of utilitarians. Indeed, Jeremy Bentham's most cited statement on utilitarianism is in his 1789 book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Thereafter, utilitarianism was more or less a dominant moral theory into the beginning of the 20th century with Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1907) in philosophy and down to this day in the work of many economists. Herbert Hart (1958/1983) states that it dominated legal theory from Bentham through roughly the 1960s, when somewhat disorganized and often contradictory theories of rights rose to a brief heyday. Since then, a hundred flowers and not a few weeds have grown. This entry examines both act utilitarianism, which focuses on the consequences of individual actions, and rule utilitarianism, which states that we should act in accordance with the rules that achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number. It also considers the role that institutional rules play in utilitarian assessment of public policy and examines the utilitarian perspective on distributive justice.

During all of this development, utilitarianism was often taken in new directions. For much of its first century, it was grounded in the value theory of interpersonally comparable and additive utility theory. This was cardinal rather than ordinal utility, roughly in keeping with views in economics, most especially in the utilitarian discussion of Francis Edgeworth. If utility is interpersonally comparable, 10 utiles for you is equal to 10 utiles for me in our overall evaluation of our society. If it is additive, your utiles added to mine sum to 20 utiles.

Paul Samuelson notes that many issues in economics can be well understood only if we treat utility as not simply additive but as ordinal. You can prefer A to B, but you cannot say by how much you prefer it. It follows that your utility from a policy cannot simply be added to mine to yield an overall value of the policy. Although this view has been criticized because it is not part of Bentham's statement of utilitarianism, such critics incorrectly assume that utilitarianism is all and only what Bentham states. In fact, utilitarian theory develops in tandem with the value theory of utility in other fields, particularly, of course, in economics but also in psychology and in recent experimental games. More typically, John Rawls (1999) compares his own theory of justice with utilitarianism. But after smartly canvassing David Hume's value theory and implicit utilitarianism, which he seems to think are more credible than Bentham's, Rawls then argues for the superiority [Page 2685]of his own theory over utilitarianism as though the only definitive utilitarian vision is that of Bentham (1789/1970).

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