Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism (Latin utilis, “useful”), in ethics, the doctrine that what is useful is good, and consequently, that the ethical value of conduct is determined by the utility of its results. The term utilitarianism is more specifically applied to the proposition that the supreme objective of moral action is the achievement of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This objective is also considered the aim of all legislation and is the ultimate criterion of all social institutions. The utilitarian theory of ethics is generally opposed to ethical doctrines in which some inner sense or faculty, often called the conscience, is made the absolute arbiter of right and wrong. Utilitarianism is likewise at variance with the view that moral distinctions depend on the will of God and that the pleasure given by an act to the individual alone who performs it is the decisive test of good and evil.

Utilitarianism was enunciated in its most characteristic form by the British theologian William Paley in his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) and by the British jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). In Paley's work, utilitarianism is combined with both individualistic hedonism and theological authoritarianism, as illustrated in his definition of virtue as the “doing [of] good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” Bentham employed the utilitarian theory as a foundation, not merely of an ethical system, but also of legal and political reforms. He maintained the necessity of sacrificing smaller interests to greater, or, at all events, of not sacrificing greater interests to smaller, and so posited as the ethical goal of human society the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Bentham sought to illustrate the doctrine of utilitarianism by counterposing it to the doctrine of asceticism on the one hand and to the theory of sympathy and antipathy on the other. Asceticism he defined as the principle that pleasure should be forfeited, and pain incurred, without expectation of any recompense. The theory of sympathy and antipathy he held to be based on the “principle which approves or disapproves of certain actions, not on account of their tending to augment the happiness, nor yet on account of their tending to diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question, but merely because a man finds himself disposed to approve or disapprove of them: holding up that approbation or disapprobation as a sufficient reason for itself, and disclaiming the necessity of looking out for any extrinsic ground.” In his exposition of the theory of utilitarianism, however, Bentham postulated “four sanctions or sources of pain and pleasure,” namely, the physical, the moral, the religious, and the political. The physical sanction, according to Bentham, is the basis of all the others. He sought further to devise a scale of pleasures and pains, rating them in terms of their intensity, purity, duration, propinquity or remoteness, certainty, fruitfulness, and the extent to which pleasure and pain are shared among the greatest number of people.

Other notable exponents were the British jurist John Austin and the British philosophers James Mill and John Stuart Mill. Austin set forth a strong defense of the utilitarian theory in his Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832). James Mill interpreted and popularized the theory in a number of articles contributed for the most part to the Westminster Review, a periodical founded by Bentham and others to promote the spread of the utilitarian philosophy. John Stuart Mill, who made utilitarianism the subject of one of his philosophical treatises (Utilitarianism,1863), is the ablest champion of the doctrine after Bentham. His contribution to the theory consists in his recognition of distinctions of quality, in addition to those of intensity, among pleasures. Thus, whereas Bentham maintained that the “quality of pleasure being equal, push-pin [a child's game] is as good as poetry,” Mill contended that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” that is, human discontent is better than animal fulfillment. By this statement Mill seems to have rejected the identification of the concept “happiness” with “pleasure and the absence of pain” and the concept “unhappiness” with “pain and the absence of pleasure,” as found in Bentham's works and in his own earlier formulations. The British philosopher Henry Sidgwick, a contemporary disciple of Mill, gave a comprehensive presentation of Mill's utilitarianism in his Methods of Ethics (1874). Somewhat later, the British philosophers Herbert Spencer and Sir Leslie Stephen, the former in his Data of Ethics (1879), the latter in his Science of Ethics (1882), sought to synthesize the utilitarian theory with the principles of biological evolution as expounded in the works of Charles Darwin. Both the American philosopher and psychologist William James and the American philosopher, psychologist, and educator John Dewey were influenced by utilitarianism. Dewey substituted intelligence for pleasure, or happiness, both as the supreme value and as the most reliable method of achieving other desirable values.