Utilitarianism

Consequentialism – the goodness of an action is determined exclusively by its consequences.
Utilitarianism is one type of consequentialist ethical theory.

• Classical utilitarians and founders of the tradition include Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
• Utility is only thing that is fundamentally good
• Act Utilitarianism– an action is morally required if and only if it maximizes utility, generally when some uses the term “utilitarianism” they are referring to act utilitarianism
•   “Optimific” is used to describe actions that maximize utility
•  Utility:
  •  “greatest good for the greatest number”
  • or more precisely the greatest net balance of happiness over unhappiness
  •  not
    • happiness for the most
    • or the most happiness, without considering the suffering involved

Utility Calculus -Bentham talked about a utility calculus where we could literally add up the units of positive utility and subtract all the units negative utility and get an exact number of units of utility produced by each action

• “pushpin (video games) is as good as poetry” Bentham
• Mill thought there were higher and lower pleasures such than a strict utility calculus was not possible in the way Bentham imagined
• The utilitarian calculus includes ALL the consequences of our actions to the end of time and every single sentient being that will be affected by them

How to apply consequentialist reasoning:
1) Identify what is intrinsically good.
2) Identify what is intrinsically bad.
3) Determine all of your options.
4) For each option, determine the value of its results.
5) Perform the action that yields the highest ratio of good to bad results.
Attractions of Utilitarianism
Impartiality:
Everyone’s interests count equally.
Justifies conventional moral wisdom:
Slavery, rape, and killing are wrong because they make people (very) unhappy.
Conflict resolution:
Utilitarianism gives us a method for making difficult moral decisions.
Moral flexibility:
Explains why moral prohibitions (against lying, stealing, etc.) may sometimes be broken.
In summary utilitarianism explains many of our most basic intuitions regarding what actions are right and wrong.
The Moral Community

• The moral community consists of those whose interests we are morally obligated to consider for their own sake.
• For utilitarians, the moral community consists of all beings capable of suffering.
• Bentham “the question is not Can they reason?, Nor can they talk?, but Can they suffer?”
• Utilitarians were way ahead of their time on women’s rights and animal rights

Agent Neutrality
Consequentialism is agent neutral in that it does not give any preference to the agents desire, preferences, happiness, or life. An agent may be obligated to sacrifice any or all of the above.
Assessing Actions and Intentions with a Utilitarian Framework

• Morally praiseworthy actions are not necessarily the right actions according to utitlitarianism
• Actions are evaluated on actual consequences
• Intentions are evaluated on expected consequences not actual consequences
• The right action is the action that maximizes actual utility
• The right intention is the intention maximizes expected utility
• This is a little strange in that you could have an action that would be the wrong action but still be morally praiseworthy

Example: You see a drowning man and decide to save his life. This is a morally praiseworthy action that turns out to be the wrong action because the drowning man is actually Hitler.
Example: you decide to steal someone’s car a morally blameworthy action that turns out to be the right action as that person was going to hit and kill someone while driving home drunk
“On this view there is no essential connection between the morality of an action and the morality of the intentions behind it” (FoE, 124).
Summary:
“Consequentialists say that our fundamental moral duty is to make the world the best place it can be. Utilitarians in particular understand this to mean that we msut contribute as much to the improvement of well-being as we possibly can. Though theorists differ, most claim that whether an action is optimific depends only on its actual (not expected) results. All results count, not just that occur in the short term. When we fail to maximize good results, we act wrongly, even if we had the best intentions. Though good intentions may earn us praise, they are irrelevant to an action’s morality. When we pass up a chance to do an action that would have had better results, we are doing something wrong. Always” (FoE 124).