“Utilitarianism,” a moral theory associated with the British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) among others, holds that the moral rightness or wrongness of an act depends on the total amount of happiness (which is a function of pleasure and pain) contained in its consequences compared to the consequences of any other acts available to the agent at the same time.
That is, in any given situation, one would consider all possible acts, note all the consequences of each of these possibilities, total up the happiness in each of these sets of consequences, and then rank them from most to least happiness. The closer to the top of the list, the better it would be morally to choose that act; the closer to the bottom of the list, the worse it would be morally to choose that act.
Over the years many objections have been raised to utilitarianism, by fellow philosophers, students, and lay people. Utilitarians have addressed these concerns as best they can; in fact Mill anticipated and responded to many of them when he initially presented his version of utilitarianism.
Let’s take a look at some of these objections, and what the utilitarian counter might be:
1. Morally, people shouldn’t simply be doing whatever makes them happy, without regard to its effects on other people.
Response: This is a misunderstanding of utilitarianism. “Happiness” in the utilitarian formula doesn’t refer to the agent’s happiness specifically. It refers to all happiness. So it’s true that a person shouldn’t simply be doing whatever makes him or her happy; utilitarians never claimed otherwise.
2. Not everything that makes someone happy is good for that person or for the world as a whole. What of sacrifice, and delayed gratification, and “no pain no gain”?
Response: Consequences means all consequences, not just immediate consequences. What makes it sometimes better to sacrifice, to delay gratification, to accept some pain and discomfort now for later benefits, etc. is precisely that sometimes the total consequences of those acts are better than those of the acts that create some superficial immediate pleasure.
Utilitarianism does not endorse an all chocolate diet, or condemn altruistic sacrifice; in fact it provides an account of what makes the first a dubious choice and the second a sometimes good one.
3. Happiness should not be equated with presence of pleasure and absence of pain. That reduces humans to the level of animals. What of loftier human capacities that go beyond mere pleasure and pain?
Response: Utilitarianism in no way limits pleasure and pain to only crudely physical things. If people are capable of deriving happiness and unhappiness from other kinds of pleasure and pain, then by definition, those other kinds of pleasures and pains count.
Utilitarians never claimed pleasure is just orgasms and back rubs and fatty fried foods. It’s also the contemplation of great art, the elation of seeing one’s child succeed in life, or, for that matter, ending up in Heaven and communing with God, if such a thing actually happens. Similarly, pain isn’t just being tortured or having a particularly bad time at the dentist; it’s also the guilt of knowing you betrayed your friend, or the empathic suffering you experience when confronted with film of starving children in Africa.
4. Not all pleasures and pains are equal. It isn’t just that the higher pleasures should be included, but that they shouldn’t be treated as equal to lesser pleasures and judged solely on quantity.
Response: Utilitarianism does not require judging pleasure and pain only by quantity. Already implicitly built in is the notion that if one pleasure is more long-lasting and more fruitful of additional happiness then it counts for more than another pleasure, since it’s the total happiness that matters.
If the pleasure of the fellowship of attending church regularly with like-minded people is more long-lasting, more fruitful of additional pleasures, etc. than is the pleasure of shooting up heroin, then, all else being equal, it is worth more morally. (And if it’s the other way around, then the shooting up of heroin is worth more.)
But even beyond that, quality of pleasures and pains need not be ignored by utilitarianism. If people who’ve experienced both the drunken revelry of an all-night frat party, and the satisfaction of successfully completing a difficult translation from ancient Sanskrit to English prefer one to the other, then (regardless of the opinion of those who’ve only experienced one or the other, or neither), the preferred one receives more weight in the utilitarian calculations.
5. There are other things of moral importance besides happiness. Freedom, justice, love, honesty, etc.
Response: Utilitarianism does not deny that those things, and many others, have moral value or importance. What they don’t have is intrinsic moral value; only happiness has that. But they certainly have instrumental value.
Why, for instance, is it good to be honest? And is it good always, most of the time, some of the time, or what? Utilitarianism can answer these questions by citing the consequences of honesty.
It’s certainly possible in principle that there will be times utilitarianism endorses being dishonest, but it will be precisely in those (probably few) cases where doing so has the best total consequences for happiness. Isn’t that precisely where we’d want there to be exceptions?
6. Still, you can’t have people trying to maximize happiness like that rather than abiding by other moral rules. Let’s say someone is on trial for a crime. Surely the verdict should depend on the guilt or innocence of the defendant, and not on a calculation of how much happiness or unhappiness it would cause to convict him. Even if somehow convicting an innocent person would result in more total happiness (because he’s a member of an unpopular minority, the overwhelming majority of members of the public are convinced-mistakenly-that he’s guilty and want him punished, etc.), it’s still wrong.
Response: There are two possibilities in a case like this.
The first possibility is that it only superficially looks like convicting the innocent person would be the best choice for generating happiness. In reality, it wouldn’t have that effect. Maybe people would find out later he was really innocent. Maybe the people knowingly convicting an innocent man would get into the habit of doing so in other cases they think are similar and really aren’t, thereby causing more damage than if they didn’t judge things on a case-by-case basis like that and simply stuck to convicting guilty people and acquitting innocent people. Maybe the members of the unpopular minority group would become more embittered and there would be more strife between the groups down the road, and less total happiness.
The second possibility is that this is indeed a rare case where convicting an innocent person doesn’t just do some short term good, but in fact generates more total happiness overall than any other available choice would have.
In the first case, utilitarianism, contrary to the objection, doesn’t endorse convicting the innocent person. It rejects it, not on the grounds of some abstract appeal to “justice,” but precisely because it’s a bad choice on the utilitarian grounds of judging acts based on their consequences for total happiness.
In the second case, utilitarianism does indeed endorse convicting the innocent person, and, its proponents would say, rightly so.
It may well be that the second type of case never happens outside of hypotheticals. If so then utilitarianism would never call for convicting an innocent person. But if it does happen, then so be it.
7. Utilitarianism can give rise to other clearly wrong assessments. Imagine a universe with only two people: a sadistic adult and an innocent child. Let’s say the sadistic adult is so sadistic that if he were to torture and abuse the child in the most unimaginably horrific ways, he would derive a tiny bit more pleasure out of doing so than the child would suffer pain. Utilitarianism says not only that it’s OK for him to torture the child, but that it’s his moral duty, since it generates more total happiness.
Response: The act in question would by hypothesis generate more happiness than unhappiness, but that’s not the relevant comparison. What makes an act right or wrong is how it compares to all other available acts. It’s not a matter of its score being “positive” or “negative,” but a matter of how it ranks compared to all other possibilities.
But leaving that aside, if we instead hypothesize that torturing the child is the best of all the available acts in terms of the total happiness resulting from it, then, yes, utilitarianism would endorse the torture.
But it’s an unimportant hypothetical because it bears no resemblance to the real world. Torturing children doesn’t in fact, in the real world, generate more happiness than all other available choices, so utilitarianism opposes it.
If hypothetically there were times that it did, then that would be different. Just like it’s true that if convicting an innocent person will have the best consequences, then utilitarianism is for it. Or if walking down the street with melted cheese on your head shouting out curses in Flemish will have the best consequences, then utilitarianism is for it.
To say utilitarianism endorses these things is inaccurate. To say it could in rare circumstances, in principle, occasionally, endorse them is accurate, but not damaging to utilitarianism.
8. What about our duties to non-humans? Don’t animals have some value beyond making humans happy or unhappy? And don’t we, for instance, have a duty to the Earth, not to despoil its environment?
Response: Utilitarianism in no way limits pleasure and pain to only that experienced by present humans. Total happiness means total happiness. It doesn’t matter if that happiness is experienced by a human, a squirrel, an alien from another galaxy, a member of a future generation or whomever.
Many moral theories struggle with the moral status of animals and such, needing to bring them in through the back door in convoluted ways if at all, but utilitarianism decidedly does not. Anything capable of experiencing pleasure and pain “counts.”
As far as inanimate or non-sentient things like “the Earth,” it is correct that they have no intrinsic moral worth according to utilitarianism. But so what? It doesn’t follow from that that utilitarianism is somehow indifferent to ruining the environment and such. For surely the things we do that affect the environment have massive consequences for the happiness of humans and all manner of sentient beings, both present and not even yet born. But that’s why those acts are right or wrong, because they affect beings capable of pleasure and pain. There’s no direct duty to “the Earth” or “nature” itself.
9. Utilitarian standards are unrealistically high. It simply isn’t possible to know and consider all acts one is capable of doing at every instance of one’s life. Nor is it possible to calculate all the consequences, especially since those consequences extend out to as long as sentient beings exist who could in any direct or indirect way be affected by the present choice. It’s hard enough to know the immediate impact of our choices, let alone how they’ll affect someone 20,000 years from now on some other planet. Beyond the practical difficulties, utilitarianism is motivationally unrealistic. People do not care about everyone’s happiness to the same degree they care about their own. Even if they somehow had the brain power to do all these calculations, they’d still have some bias toward themselves and the people they feel closest to. They’ll never fully overcome that to count everyone’s happiness equally, as utilitarianism requires.
Response: No doubt utilitarianism is difficult or impossible to implement perfectly. But it is neither surprising nor a valid objection to a moral theory that one of the implications of that theory is that it is difficult or impossible to be morally perfect.
There is no presupposition to morality that it has to fit our capacities and even biases. Maybe moral reality isn’t constructed for our convenience. So be it.
Your obligation is to do the best you can. Consider as many choices as you can, ascertain the consequences and their total happiness as accurately as you can, and try not to be too biased in giving more weight to your own happiness or the happiness of those you more easily identify with. Of course that doesn’t mean you’ll be able to consider all possible choices, calculate and compare their consequences perfectly, and never have any bias. Therefore doing the best you can won’t result in utilitarian perfection.
But the right thing is still the right thing. And the closer you can come to it, the better.
The verdict of most philosophers is that utilitarianism is not able to completely overcome all objections, that while the total happiness contained in the consequences of acts surely is of moral importance, it probably fails to contain everything that is of moral importance. Hence most present day moral philosophers argue for a mixed theory that contains both consequentialist and non-consequentialist elements. But the debate continues.
