Module 4: Lesson 4

UTILITARIANISM
Jeremy Bentham’s Short Biography

He was born in Spitalfields, London, into a

wealthy family that supported the tories. He was
reportedly a child prodigy.
 He was found as a toddler sitting at his father's
desk reading a multi-volume history of England,
and he began to study Latin at the age of three.
 He attended Westminster School. He took his
Bachelor's and Master's degree and the Queen’s
Colleg in Oxford. He became deeply frustrated
with the complexity of the English legal code,
which he termed the Demon of Chicane.
 He was an English jurist, philosopher, and
legal and social reformer. He became a leading
theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law.
 Bentham is also a political radical whose
ideas influenced the development of
welfarism. He is best known for his advocacy
of utilitarianism and animal rights, and the
idea of the panopticon.
 His position included arguments in favor of
individual and economic freedon, usury, the
separation of church and state, freedom of
expression, equal rights for women, the right to
divorce, and the decriminalizing of homosexual
acts.
 He argued for the abolition of slavery and the
death penalty and for the abolition of physical
punishment, including that of children.
Although strongly in favor of the extension of
individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of
natural law and natural rights.
 He was made an honorary citizen of the
French Republic in 1792, and published
copiously on penal and social reform,
economics, and politics. He also founded the
University College in London, where his clothed
skeleton is preserved on public view.
John Stuart Mill’s Short Biography

Mill was born on Rodney Street in the

Pentonville area of London. He is the eldest son
of the Scottish philosopher, historian and
economist James Mill, and Harriet Burrow.
 He was educated by his father, with the advice
and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis
Place.
 He was given an extremely rigorous
upbringing, and was deliberately shielded
from association with children of his own
age other than his siblings.
 Mill was a British philosopher and civil
servant. He is an influential contributor to social
theory, political theory, and political economy.
His conception of liberty justified the freedom of
the individual in opposition to unlimited state
control.
 He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an
ethical theory developed by Jeremy
Bentham, although his conception of it was
very different with that of Jeremy Bentham.
 Hoping to remedy the problems found in an
inductive approach to science, such as
confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the
premises of falsification as the key component in
the scientific method.
 Mill argues that despotism is an acceptable
form of government for those societies that are
backward as long as the despot has the best
interests of the people at heart, because of the
barriers to spontaneous progress.
 He believed that the struggle between
liberty and authority is the most conspicuous
feature in the portions of history. For him,
liberty in antiquity was a contest between
subjects or some classes of subjects, and the
government.
 Mill defined social liberty as protection
from the tyranny of political rulers. He
introduces a number of different tyrannies,
including social tyranny, and also the tyranny
of the majority.
 Social liberty for Mill was to put limits
on the ruler’s power so that he would not be
able to use his power on his own wishes and
make every kind of decision which could
harm society. In other words, people should
have the right to have a say in the
government’s decisions.
 He argued that social liberty was the nature
and limits of the power which can be
legitimately exercised by society over the
individual. It was attempted in two ways:
 By obtaining recognition of certain
immunities called political liberties or
rights.

 By establishment of a system of
constitutional checks.
The Concept of Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the idea that the moral

worth of an action is determined solely by
its usefulness in maximizing utility and
minimizing negative utility as summed
among all sentient beings.
 It is thus a form of consequentialism,
meaning that the moral worth of an action is
determined by its outcome. It was described
by Jeremy Bentham as the greatest
happiness or greatest felicity principle.
 Utility, the good to be maximized, has
been defined by various thinkers as
happiness or pleasure, although preference
Utilitarian defines it as the satisfaction of
preferences. It may be described as a life
stance, with happiness or pleasure bein.g of
ultimate importance.
 Utilitarianism can be characterized as a
quantitative and reductionist approach to
ethics. It can be contrasted with
deontological ethics which do not regard the
consequences of an act as a determinant of
its moral worth, and virtue ethics which
focuses on character.
 Bentham's utilitarianism is primarily
absolutist, even though it is much more free
than theories such as those put forward by
Immanuel Kant. This means that all acts
require a definite rules and codes as to what
the person must do in each situation to
benefit the most people.
 While, Mill's rule utilitarianism is much
more relative in that he encourages people to
do acts that are pleasurable to themselves as
long as they are what he calls a higher
pleasure.
 An act utilitarianism states that when
faced with a choice, we must first consider
the likely consequences of potential actions
and, from that, choose to do what we believe
will generate the most pleasure.
 The rule utilitarian, on the other hand,
begins by looking at potential rules of action.
The distinction between act and rule
utilitarianism is therefore based on a
difference about the proper object of
consequentialist calculation - specific to a
case or generalized to rules.
 It has been argued that rule utilitarianism
collapses into act utilitarianism, because for
any given rule, in the case where breaking the
rule produces more utility, the rule can be
sophisticated by the addition of a sub-rule
that handles cases like the exception.
 This process holds for all cases of
exceptions, and so the rules have as many
sub-rules as there are exceptional cases,
which in the end, makes an agent seek out
whatever outcome produces the maximum
utility.