Kirk is certain to die within a week but is being kept alive on a life-support system. His heart and kidneys happen to be a perfect match for Scottie and Bones, who are certain to die before him if they do not get the transplants they need but who have excellent prospects of recovery if they do. There are no other suitable donors on the Enterprise . Is it right to let Kirk die – or perhaps even to kill him – in order to save Scottie and Bones? On the one hand, it seems clear that the net outcome of letting Kirk die is beneficial; on the other, we may feel that choosing to let someone die, or killing them, is wrong, however good the consequences may be.
‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do.’
Jeremy Bentham, 1789
Many philosophers have been attracted to the idea that it is the consequences of our actions that should be considered when we assess whether those actions are right or wrong (an approach known as ‘consequentialism’). Utilitarianism, the most influential of consequentialist theories, is the more specific view that actions should be judged right or wrong to the extent that they increase or decrease human well-being or ‘utility’. Scenarios like the Kirk case may seem far-fetched, but in fact situations that are similar in morally relevant ways arise all the time. Politicians, for instance, are obliged to make many decisions about the use of public money and priorities in the health service that cause the death of innocent people. If the sum of human well-being is accepted as the appropriate standard, as utilitarians suggest, there appears to be some prospect of reaching and justifying such decisions on a rational basis.
The classic formulation of utilitarianism was given by its founder Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. For him, utility lay solely in human pleasure or happiness, and his theory is sometimes summarized as the promotion of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. One of the chief recommendations of utilitarianism for Bentham was that it apparently promised a rational and scientific basis for moral and social decision-making, in contrast to the chaotic and incoherent intuitions on which so-called natural rights and natural law were based. To this end, he proposed a ‘felicific calculus’, according to which the different amounts of pleasure and pain produced by different actions could be measured and compared; the right action on a given occasion could then be determined by a (supposedly) simple process of addition and subtraction.
‘Better to be Socrates dissatisfied’ Critics were quick to point out just how narrow a conception of morality Bentham had given. By supposing that life had no higher end than pleasure, he had apparently left out of the reckoning all sorts of things that we would normally count as inherently valuable, such as knowledge, honour and achievement. It was, as his younger contemporary and fellow utilitarian J.S. Mill recorded the accusation, ‘a doctrine worthy only of swine’. Bentham himself, a bluff egalitarian splendidly unmoved by his theory’s rougher edges, confronted the accusation head-on: ‘Prejudice apart,’ he declared, ‘the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.’ In other words, if a greater overall quantity of pleasure was produced by playing a popular game, that game was indeed more valuable than the more refined pursuits of the intellect.
‘Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.’
J.S. Mill, 1861
Mill himself was uncomfortable with Bentham’s forthright conclusion and sought to modify utilitarianism to deflect the critics’ charge. While Bentham had allowed only two variables in measuring pleasure – duration and intensity – Mill introduced a third, quality, thereby creating a hierarchy of ‘higher and lower pleasures’. According to this distinction, some pleasures, such as those of the intellect and the arts, are by their nature more valuable than base physical ones, and by giving them greater weight in the calculus of pleasure, Mill was able to conclude that it was ‘better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’. This accommodation was made at some cost, however. One of the apparent attractions of Bentham’s scheme – its simplicity – was clearly diminished. More seriously, Mill’s notion of different kinds of pleasure seems to require some criterion other than pleasure to tell them apart. If something other than pleasure is a constituent of Mill’s idea of utility, it is questionable whether his theory remains strictly utilitarian at all.
Utilitarianism today The classical utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill has since been modified in many ways, but the basic idea remains as influential today as ever. More recent variants typically recognize that human happiness depends not only on pleasure but also on the satisfaction of a wide range of desires and preferences.
There are also different views on how utilitarianism is to be applied to actions. According to direct or act utilitarianism, each action is assessed directly in terms of its own contribution to utility. In contrast, according to rule utilitarianism, an appropriate course of action is determined by reference to various sets of rules which will, if generally followed, promote utility. For instance, killing an innocent person might in certain circumstances lead to the saving of many lives and hence increase general utility, so for the act utilitarian this would be the right course of action. However, as a rule, killing innocent people decreases utility, so the rule utilitarian might hold that the same action was wrong, even though it might have beneficial consequences on a particular occasion.
the condensed idea
The greatest happiness principle