Ethics: Utilitarianism

Primary Source: John Stuart Mill, "Utilitarianism," 1861, as published in James E. White's, "Contemporary Moral Problems", Tenth Edition, 2012

A Quick Look

What is it?

Utilitarianism is an outcome-based morality focused on the "greatest happiness principle." This states that a morally good decision produces lots of happiness, or pleasure, and decreases pain, or displeasure.

Strengths:

-Highly adaptive to any situation

-Easy to understand

-Generally accepted outcomes, producing wide social acceptance

-Focused on "the greater good"

Weaknesses:

-Allows for any action to occur if and only if those actions lead to greater happiness

-Easy to manipulate and sometimes difficult to decide which choice will provide the most pleasure

-Due to the closure principle, the entire theory can fall apart given that it is impossible to know the exact outcome of our actions

-Vagueness of the greatest happiness principle can often lead to confusion about what it actually intends

Full Analysis:

Utilitarianism relies on the "greatest happiness principle." It is an outcome based ethical system wherein the most ethical actions are ones that cause the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people. Now you may already be saying to yourself, "We have a lot of people with perfectly good organs out there, and plenty more people who need those organs. We could easily take 5 organs from one healthy person to greatly prolong the lives of 5 sick people!" We will get to that topic in just a moment.

The greatest happiness principle tends to be confusing for most people. "Does this mean we should just eat, drink, have sex, and ride roller-coasters all day, since that would make everyone ultra-happy?" Only someone who has not experienced those things enough would agree with that statement (although roller-coasters are really cool.) As the saying goes, "'tis better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." (I believe the saying goes on to say "But the pig turns into bacon, and bacon is delicious.")

Although primal needs should be satisfied to a point, the intellectual curiosities are far more valuable and can result in much greater unhappiness if left to atrophy for too long. For instance, think about a band you used to love, or an ex-lover who has since cheated on you. You used to love it, and would spend all day with it. You would listen to that band all the time, or constantly text that person. Then one day, you start skipping songs since its getting stale, or they don't reply to you for a few hours. Finally, you hit the point where if you hear that song again you're going to kill someone, and you find your now ex making out with some douche in a beret. No matter how good an animalistic pleasure is, you will either become desensitized to it after a while or it will break up with you even though you said you could forgive it. That is why the intellectual pleasures outweigh an excess of primal pleasures.

Now then, Mill  emphasized that the greatest happiness principle is living ones life as far from pain as possible and as rich in enjoyment as possible, both in quantity and quality. (White, 41) The only time it is ok to cause pain is when that pain will lead to more happiness than caused by the pain. In the case of the organs, that is not possible when done involuntarily. It is assumed that if killing someone requires a LOT of happiness to be a result, which may not be the case of the 5 people saved. This is distinctly different from the movie Seven Pounds, since *SPOILER ALERT* Will Smith sacrifices himself voluntarily to save others, because Will Smith is the man. Since Will does it to himself, it is his own moral choice to bring others happiness, which maximizes his own happiness and ridding him of the grief of the terrible deaths he caused.

The most obvious time utilitarian ethics comes into play is the retributive justice system we have here in America. We as a nation have decided that it is better to deprive an individual of pleasures and inflict mental pain (sometimes even physical pain) for a prolonged period of time. Some crimes are even worthy of killing the individual. There are some other schools of thought that allow this but more often than not the reasoning behind retributive justice is utility. We don't want them to cause anymore pain, and suppressing the convicts happiness will lead to more happiness for all non-convicts (more or less.) So that's why prisons exist.

Bringing about happiness and reducing pain is pretty agreeable, so why aren't more people utilitarians? Utilitarianism has a few inadequacies for its only rule. Firstly, that organ thing? Some people interpret it that if the man with the organs is homeless, hopeless, and shoeless, he SHOULD be killed to give his organs to the educated, wealthy, young, etc. Essentially, if you are worthless to society and bring about virtually no happiness then you lose your rights. All of them. At once. Until you bring about more happiness. Which may very well be by dieing.

Another reason for rejecting utilitarianism is that it often involves the lesser of two evils. A famous example is that of a tourist in a jungle stumbling upon a small militia about to kill a village by firing squad. The general of the militia is ecstatic that the visitor is there and, to celebrate his appearance, agrees that if the visitor kills only one of the villagers, the rest will be spared. You are to take on the viewpoint of the visitor, but sometimes I like to also take on the viewpoint of one of the trees. Anyways, utilitarianism states that you (as the visitor, not the tree) should kill the one person to save the others. That is to be the most ethical decision. Now, imagine being President of the U.S. when the decision had to be made to drop the bomb on Hiroshima in an effort to save over 1 million American troops that would die in an invasion of Japan. WHAT WOULD YOU DO? Well, if you were a utilitarian, you would drop the bomb. Literally.

My biggest qualm with utilitarianism is that it often involves the lesser of two evils in any action, but either way you are still choosing evil. That is a flaw with any outcome based ethical system. Sometimes it is a smart tool for decision making and it is easy for most people to understand. However, it fails in extreme circumstances and does not account for the fact that we cannot know for certain what the outcome of any action will be in actuality. We can predict with 90% certainty that it will be sunny tomorrow, but if it rains our picnic will be all wet.

10 second version: Make happiness, decrease pain. Being smart is better than sex. Don't kill people unless they're homeless. Shoot the villager, save the village. Nuke Japan to stop THE WAR.

Steve