Mill objected to this idea – he thought his poetry hedon was worth more than your football hedon.The problem is – how do I know my hedon equals your hedon?.Purity Remoteness Richness Intensity Certainty Extent Duration).
He calls this the hedonic calculus (acronym P.R.R.I.C.E.D.Bentham (a hedonic act utilitarian) thought we could measure the hedons (pleasure units) we get from an action.If a good act is one that maximises pleasure over pain, how do we measure pleasure?.There is a radical equality in this – whether you’re the Queen or a homeless person, “everyone is to count for one and no-one more than one” (Bentham).This objective basis is the maximisation of happiness – something is good if it maximises the greatest happiness of the greatest number.There is an empirical (measurable) way to calculate goodness – goodness has an objective basis.This principle is called “the principle of utility” or the “greatest happiness principle”. It’s important to see that the utilitarians are trying to find an objective way of advancing social welfare and for judging between competing claims. Here in outline is the logic of the utilitarian position. To explore this link between Aristotelean virtue and Mill’s view of happiness as requiring some traits of character, follow this link for an excellent discussion by Martha Nussbaum, or go to the extract here on Wordsworth’s The Happy Warrior. Then in the final section on justice he appears to defend the idea of rights and rules as being principles of utility. He later argues that virtue is a key means to obtaining happiness – the virtue of sacrificing one’s own happiness to gain the happiness of others, for example, which can produce a greater sense of contentment. Yet as MacIntyre points out, neither Bentham nor Mill are consistent utilitarians (MacIntyre 1974:232), for Bentham appears to espouse a theory of psychological hedonism (as we shall see), but at the same time was a social reformer who, amongst other things, designed a special, more humane type of prison called a Panopticon (see picture).Īnd in his famous essay, Mill appears to start out as an act utilitarian who believes pleasures can be designated as either “higher” or “lower” depending on our nobleness of character. Some people have classified Bentham as an egoistic act utilitarian, and Mill as a rather snobbish rule utilitarian. JS Mill sought to establish morality on one supreme principle – the Greatest Happiness Pirnciple.īentham and John Stuart Mill.
In this section we will consider two classical utilitarians who emerged in an era of social reform and revolution: Jeremy “Goodness” becomes a property of something in the natural world which utilitarians believe we can measure, that something being pleasure (the hedonistic utilitarians) or happiness (the act and rule utilitarians) or preferences (the preference utilitarians like Sidgwick and Singer). And thirdly it is naturalistic because an “ought” is derived from an “is”: what “is” the happiest state of affairs is the one we “ought” to create.
It is teleological because the calculation concerns consequences which result from pursuing the end or telos of pleasure or happiness. Utilitarianism is an empirical philosophy because it claims happiness or pleasure can be measured and calculated and then applied to real-life situations. There are three features of utilitarian philosophy: Utility means “usefulness”, as the claim of the Utilitarian philosophers such as Bentham ((1748-1832) and Mill (1806-1873) is that their philosophy is useful for two reasons: it helps define what is good and it helps us make decisions on a personal level by examining the consequences of our choices, and on a collective level by giving us an indicator of welfare for society. This handout is a much reduced summary of the detailed treatment of three forms of utilitarianism (Bentham, Mill and Singer) in my book Utilitarianism and Situation Ethics.