Utilitarianism

Ideals, Objections, and Responses

John Stuart Mill
Bentham’s Ideas for Application
• Pauper Management Scheme
• Self-financed workhouse for the poor
• Utilitarian logic also applied to assigning people to rooms within the facility
• “Next to every class, from which any inconvenience is to be apprehended, station a class
unsusceptible of that inconvenience”
Attractiveness of Utilitarianism
• Utilitarianism matches well with the views advocated about choice of
government policies and public goods
• Matches with the intuitive criteria that people employ when
discussing moral conduct
• Explains why certain types of activities are generally morally wrong
while others are generally morally right
Objections to Utilitarianism
• Fails to respect individual/minority rights
• Throwing Christians to lions
• Is torture ever justified?
Objections to Utilitarianism…
• A common currency of value
• It weighs preference without judging them

• Not possible to aggregate all values into $$

• Czech republic case
• Philip Morris
Philip Morris’ Cost-Benefit Analysis
• The benefits of lung cancer
• Philip Morris’ cost-benefit analysis
• The government gains by having Czech citizens smoke
• Costs Benefits
Increased health Tax revenue from
care costs cigarette sales
Healthcare
savings
Pension savings
Savings in housing
costs
Philip Morris’ Cost-Benefit Analysis
• Net gain if citizens smoke
• $147 million
• Savings from premature deaths
• $1227 per person

• “Tobacco companies used to deny that cigarettes killed people, now

they brag about it.”
Ford’s Cost-Benefit Analysis
• Repairing the Ford Pinto
• Costs
• $11 per part
• 12.5 million cars
• $137 million (to improve safety)
• Benefits
• 180 deaths X $200,000
• 180 injuries X $67,000
• 2000 vehicles X $700
• $49.5 million
A Discount for Seniors
• EPA
• $3.7m per life saved due to cleaner air
• $2.3m for people above seventy
Pain for Pay
• Psychologist’s attempt to aggregate in the 1930s
• To have an upper front tooth pulled out
• To have one little toe cut out
• To live the rest of your life in a farm in Kansas
• To choke a stray cat to death with your bare hands
• To eat a live earth worm six inches long
Response
• Live in Kansas - $300,000
• Eat a worm - $100,000
• Toe cut out - $57,000
• Pull a tooth - $4500
• Choke a stray cat - $10,000

• “Any want or desire that exists, exists in some amount and is therefore
measurable. The life of a cat, a dog or a chicken consists of appetites,
desires and their gratification so does the life of human beings though the
appetites and desires are more complicated.”
John Stuart Mill’s Response to the First
Objection
• The case for liberty
• “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be
utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a
progressive being.”
• What about religious minorities?
• We should maximize utility, not case by case, but in the long run

• Does it promote utility in the long run?

• The dissenting view may be true
• Is this a convincing moral basis for individual rights?
John Stuart Mill’s Response to the First
Objection…
• Is this a convincing moral basis for individual rights?
• Respecting individual rights for the sake of promoting social progress leaves rights
hostage to contingency
• Basing rights on utilitarian considerations misses the sense in which violating
someone’s rights inflicts a wrong on the individual, whatever its effect on the general
welfare
• Mill’s response to these objections carries him beyond the confines of
utilitarian morality
• The highest end of human life: the full and free development of his human faculties
• Conformity is the enemy of the best way to live
• “One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no
more than a steam engine has character.”
Weighing Preferences
• Why should we weigh all preferences without assessing whether they
are good or bad preferences?
• Bentham did not consider preferences to be qualitatively different.
Hence the egalitarian appeal and non-judgmental aspect of his
version of utilitarianism
• “The quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry.”
John Stuart Mill’s Response to the Second
Objection
• He tried to see whether the utilitarian calculus could be enlarged and
modified
• “Some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others.”
• “The sole evidence that it is possible to produce that anything is
desirable is that people actually do desire it.”
• But it is possible for a utilitarian to distinguish higher from lower
pleasures
• How?
• If you have tried both of them, you will prefer the higher one naturally,
always.
John Stuart Mill on Utilitarianism
• “Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have
experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any
feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, then that is the more desirable
pleasure.”
• Isn’t it often the case that we prefer lower pleasures to higher ones?
• “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,
better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied and if the fool or
the pig are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their
side of the question.”