Utilitarianism

Advocates of greater professionalism in public relations have long emphasized the practice's value to the public interest. The most recent code of ethics adopted by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) includes values associated with public service: advocacy, honesty, expertise, independence, loyalty, and fairness. Indeed, code provisions advocate the free flow of information, competition, and disclosure; safeguarding confidences; eschewing conflicts of interest; and enhancing the profession. Inherent in the concept of professionalism is a moral obligation to serve the public interest. Public relations serves the public when it provides information people need to make decisions, encourages commerce, and discloses financial and business dealings affecting stockholders and the public. Working on behalf of the common good is consistent with utilitarianism, a theory of morality based on improving the general welfare of humanity.

Among the best-known proponents of utilitarianism are John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). In his 1863 book Utilitarianism, Mill identified happiness as the ultimate goal of human existence.

The creed, which accepts utility, or the greatest happiness principle, as the foundation of morality, holds that actions are right in proportion to their tendency to promote happiness, and wrong in proportion to their tendency to promote the reverse of happiness (Mill, 2002, p. 239).

Mill defined happiness as pleasure or the absence of pain. The rightness of an action is based on the amount of pleasure produced for society by the action. Unlike deontological theories, the focus of utilitarian ethics is on the outcome of one's action, not the act itself. An act is judged right if it produces more good than evil or more pleasure than pain. In this sense, the theory combines the two main concepts of ethics—right and good. The good is defined independently from the right, and the right is defined as that which maximizes the good.

Because happiness is the goal of human existence, producing the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people serves as the moral obligation for humanity. Utilitarianism falls into a larger category of teleology in which maximizing the good is the goal of human action. On face value alone, wrote philosopher John Rawls (a critic of utilitarianism), teleological theories have merit.

Teleological theories have a deep intuitive appeal because they seem to embody the idea of rationality. It is natural to think that rationality is maximizing something and that in morality it must be maximizing the good. Indeed, it is tempting to suppose that it is self-evident that things should be arranged to lead to the most good (Rawls, 1971, pp. 24–25).

As the leader of England's philosophical radicals, a group of social reformers, Jeremy Bentham sought to reform England's legal system. He advocated a theory of justice in which right was measured by the effects of an action on the public welfare. He saw far too many judges basing punishment on the rule violated rather than on the crime's impact on society. For him, the level of punishment should be equivalent to the harm caused by the crime. Bentham even used a mathematical equation to determine which actions produced the most utility. His hedonic calculus determined right action by estimating the units of pleasure and pain produced by an action. If one action produced 10 units of pleasure (+10) as opposed to seven units of pain (−7) and another action produced five units of pleasure (+5) and three units of pain (−3), the first action with three overall units of pleasure would be considered more right than the latter action producing two units of pleasure (Munro, 1999, pp. 97–104).

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