Utilitarianism
Can the good be measured? Judging acts and institutions by their consequences for everyone's well-being, privileging no one.
1789 – …
Born in the England of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, utilitarianism extends the moral of and the arithmetic of pleasures of , which raises around 1789 into a single principle of reform. Facing an inherited and arbitrary body of law, prisons and institutions, he seeks a measurable, public criterion of the right, free of custom and of . refines its psychology and defence, tests its rigour in The Methods of Ethics, and the movement spreads from penal reform to 's animal ethics and to contemporary effective altruism. Against and ethics, it remains one of the major families of normative ethics.
An action is worth only its effects: right is what produces the most well-being, and nothing else, neither intention nor rule, makes it good.
The only thing desirable for its own sake is happiness: and the absence of suffering are the measure of all good.
Each counts for one, none for more than one: in the reckoning of the good, my happiness weighs no more than anyone's.
The question is not whether a being can reason or speak, but whether it can suffer: every sentient being enters the moral circle.
There are no natural rights prior to law: a right has worth only because securing it serves the well-being of all.
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Justification
Utilitarianism extends the British empiricism of Locke and Hume: all knowledge, moral as well as factual, derives from experience, from the observation of pleasures, pains and consequences. No innate ideas, no a priori truths: the mind starts from the sensible, and the calculation of observable effects replaces the rational deduction of principles.
Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation · Mill, A System of Logic
Justification
The utilitarian temper is empiricist and anti-metaphysical: knowledge, moral as well as factual, derives from experience and observable consequences, never from a priori intuitions held to be indubitable. Mill draws from this a strong thesis on fallibility: no opinion is certain to the point of forbidding that it be contested, and it is on this very fallibility that the need for free discussion rests. Knowledge therefore stays revisable, made of probable and amendable truths rather than definitive certainties.
Mill, On Liberty, ch. II
Justification
To fix what consequences ought to maximize, utilitarianism seeks the one thing desired for its own sake and never as a means: it is, the movement answers, happiness, that is pleasure and the absence of pain. 's argument is psychological, the only proof that something is desirable being that it is actually desired, and every desire reducing ultimately to happiness. This and welfarist thesis grounds the good in a fact of lived experience, not in an abstract perfection; adds a qualitative hierarchy of higher and lower pleasures that brings the framework close to a without leaving it.
Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 2 · Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Justification
For utilitarianism, suffering is a pure evil with no redemptive virtue: it enters the welfare calculus negatively and must be reduced as far as possible. The great utilitarian campaigns, penal reform, animal welfare, global poverty, are projects for abolishing suffering.
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation · Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality
Justification
Utilitarianism takes as its end the satisfaction of desires insofar as they produce pleasure, and rejects asceticism as contrary to happiness. But it sorts: by the calculation of quantities in Bentham, by the qualitative hierarchy of pleasures in Mill. An affirmation of pleasure, then, ordered by a rational sorting of desires according to their effects.
Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation · Mill, Utilitarianism
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Justification
Utilitarianism assigns life no transcendent end: its meaning is measured by the happiness it brings and the suffering it spares, for oneself and for the greatest number. Wholly immanent, this meaning is built in the enlightened pursuit of common welfare, without providential order or the vertigo of nothingness.
Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation · Mill, Utilitarianism
Justification
Utilitarianism, naturalistic and secular, rests on no firm doctrine of the hereafter: Bentham takes death to be the simple cessation of sensibility, Mill leaves immortality undecidable. Death is therefore above all the end of the capacity for pleasure and pain, which warrants seeking to postpone it and to reduce its sufferings, more than investing it with meaning.
Bentham, Auto-Icon; Mill, Three Essays on Religion
Justification
Utilitarianism takes as given a hedonic human nature, governed by pleasure and pain, the universal bedrock of the calculus of utilities. This common psychology grounds the moral science, even if Mill grafts onto it the demand for individuality and self-development, which tempers Bentham's essentialism.
Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation, I · Mill, Utilitarianism
Justification
Human conduct is governed by two springs, pleasure and pain, a broadly deterministic psychology that allows behavior to be predicted and reformed through sanctions. Responsibility here is no uncaused free will but is reinterpreted in compatibilist terms: utilitarianism attends to the causes that move wills rather than to their supposed spontaneity.
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, as well as to determine what we shall do.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §1
Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, I · Mill, A System of Logic, VI
Justification
Since an action has no worth in itself, only its effect on the world can make it good or bad: all that morally counts is the well-being it creates or destroys. From this ground springs consequentialism, which dismisses together the pure intention of and the excellence of character of ethics: reduces evaluation to a single measure, the act's tendency to augment or diminish the happiness of the parties concerned, against any rule or tradition claiming an authority independent of outcomes.
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, as well as to determine what we shall do.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. I, §1
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation · Mill, Utilitarianism
Justification
If only well-being counts, then the same pleasure is worth as much whoever feels it: no standpoint, neither the agent's, nor a nation's, nor a class's, holds any pre-eminence in the calculus. From this step come the formula, everybody to count for one and nobody for more than one, and the aggregation that sums individual happinesses without weighting them. This strict sets utilitarianism apart from moralities granting special weight to kin or compatriots: makes it the axiom of universal benevolence at the heart of The Methods of Ethics.
Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 5 · Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
Justification
Since the good is pleasure and the evil suffering, what grants moral standing can be neither reason nor speech but the capacity to suffer alone: every being with an interest in its pain ceasing counts in the calculus. draws from this criterion a consequence that rationalist moralities refused, the inclusion of animals; reads it as the principle of equal consideration of interests and denounces speciesism as a prejudice of the same structure as racism. The moral circle thus widens to all sentient life, by internal consistency rather than by sentiment.
The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ch. XVII
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 17 · Singer, Animal Liberation
Justification
Utilitarianism requires the agent's impartiality toward their own happiness: the maximization of the general good commands that everyone's interest count equally, one's own no more than another's. 's formula, everybody to count for one and nobody for more than one, is explicitly aimed against giving oneself priority.
Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 2 · Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
Justification
If the sole criterion of the right is utility, no right can precede the law or limit it in the name of nature: to speak of rights prior to any institution is, for , nonsense, and of imprescriptible rights nonsense upon stilts. The movement does not abolish rights, it re-founds them: they are protections society secures precisely because their stable observance maximizes the general well-being. This derivation from consequences sets it squarely against theories of natural right and against , which hold certain rights to be primary constraints, independent of any reckoning of outcomes.
Bentham, Anarchical Fallacies; Mill, Utilitarianism, V
Justification
For , all punishment is in itself an evil, since it inflicts suffering: it is justified only insofar as it prevents a greater evil, through deterrence and the offender's reform. Retributivism, punishing for punishment's sake, is rejected as a pointless addition of suffering.
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 13 · Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments
Justification
Utilitarianism was born as a reformist program: subjected law, prisons and institutions to the test of utility, rejecting respect for tradition as such. extended this drive toward emancipation, notably of women. Institutions are worth only the well-being they produce, which licenses reforming them as soon as they fall short.
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation · Mill, The Subjection of Women
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Justification
Impartial maximization of well-being tends toward a highly demanding morality: argues we ought to give up to the point where further sacrifice would cost something of comparable moral importance, which can absorb almost all of our surplus. On this point the movement remains divided, with restricting moral and legal interference to harms done to others.
Singer, Famine, Affluence, and Morality · Mill, On Liberty
Justification
Each person's happiness carries equal weight in the calculus, and the diminishing marginal utility of goods gives the movement a moderate redistributive leaning: the same resource benefits more those who have less. The tendency stays cautious, however, since utilitarianism is aggregative rather than strictly egalitarian: it maximizes the sum of welfare more than it equalizes its distribution, which could in principle justify increasing the suffering of a few to raise the total.
Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics · Mill, Utilitarianism, chapter 5
Justification
The is universal in scope, holding for all sentient beings everywhere, yet its ground is no moral law: the good is built from a natural fact, pleasure and pain. Utilitarianism thus combines a universalism of the rule with a naturalist anchoring, midway between moral realism and a constructivism of the good out of welfare.
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation · Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
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Justification
The ground of morality is wholly secular: utility, not divine will, measures the good. , frankly irreligious, attacks the religiously rooted principle of asceticism, and keeps a cautious agnosticism. The movement shifts the source of moral obligation from heaven to earthly welfare, without erecting atheism into a dogma.
Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, chapter 2 · Mill, Three Essays on Religion