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Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is an influential moral and political theory about what is valuable and what we ought to do, which prescribes that we should always act in the way that will produce the greatest overall amount of good. In the political domain, utilitarianism holds that a society is just when its major institutions are arranged in a way that achieves the greatest net balance of satisfaction summed over all the individuals belonging to it. The early advocates of the theory included Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. Utilitarianism played an important role in political thinking in Britain and the United States in the 19th century, and it continues being of major interest to moral and political theorists.

Conceptual Overview

Utilitarianism consists of two doctrines: a theory of what is good and a theory of what is right. Utilitarianism's theory of right is consequentialism, namely, the doctrine that the morally right option is the option that brings about the best consequences, such that any other option is wrong.

Hedonism

Utilitarianism provides an account of what is intrinsically valuable. Classical utilitarians were hedonistic in that they held that human well-being consists of pleasure. This includes not only bodily pleasures but also the pleasures of friendship, the contemplation of one's family flourishing, and even the pleasure of helping the needy. In contrast, pain and unhappiness are the opposite states of pleasure and happiness; they are intrinsically disvalued. Pleasure is the only thing that we desire for its own sake alone and not because it leads to something else that is desirable. Hedonists do not claim that it is one's own pleasure that is the good; that theory would be a form of egoism. What is desirable as an end is not some particular person's pleasure, but simply pleasure itself. Hence, hedonism is an impartial view about the good: No one's pleasure is more important than anyone else's; each person's pleasure counts equally. Some utilitarians, including Bentham, insisted that all creatures capable of pleasure and pain should be taken into account in utilitarian deliberations. That argument led contemporary utilitarians to defend animal rights and attack the practice of raising and killing animals for our own pleasure.

The main problem with hedonism is that if pleasure alone were desirable as an end, people would be indifferent to whether they get it through real activities such as writing novels, listening to music, and so forth or whether they get it through an “experience machine” that is capable of producing any pleasure directly by electrical stimulation or drugs. People do prefer to write novels and listen to music; they do not just want the pleasure of those activities. Furthermore, most people prefer many things that they know will be painful. Not all desirable things are equivalent to pleasure or even pleasurable. Consequently, most contemporary utilitarians have abandoned hedonism as a theory of the good. Well-being should be determined in accordance with maximizing preferences, rather than pleasure.

Preferences

The satisfaction of preferences is problematic, because sometimes what people prefer is not beneficial to them. You might prefer to take some pill to reduce a headache, believing that the pill will help, but if—unbeknownst to you—the pill is poisoned, then if your preference is satisfied, your welfare will not benefit. Rather than actual preferences, your welfare consists in the satisfaction of informed preferences, that is, the preferences you would have were you given all relevant information.

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