Utilitarianism (Mill and Bentham)

Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are the early exponents of utilitarianism. According to utilitarian
principle, an action is right from an ethical point of view if and only if the sum total of utilities produced
by the act is greater than the sum total of utilities produced by any other act the agent could have
performed in its place. The emphasis in utilitarianism is not the maximizing the utility or wellbeing of the
individual, rather the on maximizing the wellbeing of society or group or human beings as a whole.
There is a famous slogan of utilitarianism- ‘the greatest pleasure/happiness for the greatest number of
people.’

Utilitarians follow the following steps to make decisions:

First, identify various alternative courses of action available to us .

Second, ask who will be affected by each action and what benefits or harms will be derived from each. In
other words, do the cost- benefit analysis of each alternative action.

Third, Choose the action that will produce the greatest benefit/pleasure and the least harm/pain. The
right action is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

An example of utilitarian decision making is the building of a dam. Dams often lead to great benefit to
the society by providing stable supplies of water, flood control and recreational opportunities. However,
these benefits often come out at the expenses of people who live in areas that will be flooded by the
dam and to find new homes. Utilitarianism tries to balance the needs of society with the needs of the
individual, with an emphasis on what will produce the most benefit to most people.

The utilitarian principle assumes that we can somehow measure the quantities of pleasure and pain.
Bentham recognized this most explicitly when he tried to work out a hedonistic calculus of pleasure and
pain using some dimensions: intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity (nearness), purity and extend.
Bentham emphasized on quantity of pleasure. But Mill held that some pleasures are superior in quality
to others. For example, the pleasure of listening to good music is generally held to be superior in quality
to the pleasure of eating.

Shift from Egoism to Utilitarianism

Ethical egoism is the view that each person ought act in such a way so that he can maximize his own
interest/pleasure. On the other hand, utilitarianism is the view that each person ought to act in such a
way he can maximize general interest. Bentham and Mill believe that egoism and utilitarianism are very
much connected with each other in the sense that egoism leads to utilitarianism. Mill writes:

“No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except that each person, so far as he
believes it to be attainable, desires his own happiness .This, however, being a fact, we have not only all
the proof which the case admits of, but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good, that
each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and that the general happiness, therefore, a good to
the aggregate of all persons”.

What is said in the above passage can be presented by the following argument:
 Each person desires his own happiness

What is desired is desirable/good

Pleasure is good (because it is desired by people)

Each person’s pleasure is good to that person

Therefore, the general pleasure is good to the aggregate of all persons

William Lille criticizes this argument as follows:

“To infer from the statement that each person’s happiness is good to each particular person, the
conclusion that general happiness is a good to that whole number of persons is no more a valid
argument than to suppose that because each man in a city has the right to open the door of his own
house it follows that all in the city have the right of opening the door of any house they may fancy”

Now let us examine each of the statements of the arguments:

First, each person desires his own pleasure: This statement is not acceptable. It is true that we have love
for self, but we have also love for others- we want to make others happy even at the cost of our
happiness. For example, a mother frequently sacrifices her pleasure to make her baby happy.

Second, what we desire is desirable or good: Mill argues that what we see is visible, what we here is
audible, therefore what we desire is desirable or good. Here Mill is right when he says that what we see
is visible, and what we here in audible. But he is wrong to say that what we desire is desirable, because
we have some bad desires too. A sadist desires to torture others, he gets pleasure through it. Certainly
that kind of desire is not good and therefore not desirable.

So we can say that Mill and Bentham’s attempt to deduce utilitarianism from egoism does not succeed.
They have, however, given some other reasons to show why self- interested persons will act to realize
general good. According to Bentham, some sort of external sanctions compel individuals to work for
general happiness/good. These sanctions are:

Natural sanction: caused by nature;

Political sanction: imposed by law/state;

Moral sanction: communities moral conviction;

Religious sanction: applied by God-reward/punishment in after life.

In addition to above sanctions, Mill suggests some sort of internal sanction. He says that our conscience,
feeling for mankind which can be sharpen by education plays an important role to leave our egoistic
tendency and to become utilitarian.

Some Objections Against Utilitarianism

First, as seen in the example of building a dam, sometimes what is best for majority people may be bad
for a particular individual or group of individuals. Utilitarianism ignores the interest of minority group
even though they have justified claim. In an utilitarian society. Decision is taken by counting by heads of
the individuals, not by counting their quality. But ‘an unhappy Socrates is better than one thousand
happy pigs’ said Mill.

Second, a problem with utilitarianism is that its implementation depends greatly on knowing what
would lead to maximum pleasure/good. Frequently it is difficult to know exactly what are the
consequences of an action are. It is often impossible to do a complete set of experiments to determine
all of the potential outcomes. So maximizing the benefit of society involves guesswork and the risk that
the best guess might be wrong.

Third, Utilitarians believe that we can measure the pain and pleasure. But pain and pleasure are not
economic goods. Those are noneconomic goods, and hence is not a subject of mathematical
measurement. For example, what is the value of having good health or enjoining a cinema? How can we
measure whether eating a pizza is more pleasurable than eating a burger.

Fourth, Sometimes utilitarianism, in the name of social welfare or maximizing good allows injustice and
violates human rights, e.g., by killing an innocent person save the life of other five persons.