Utilitarianism

(From Mariano Fazio, History of Contemporary Philosophy)

1. Jeremy Bentham1

 1.1 Life and works. Jeremy Bentham was born in London in 1748. He belonged to a
family of jurists and studied law at Oxford. He never practiced the legal profession, but
rather devoted himself to studying and proposing legal reforms for the England of his day.
 His reformist zeal is explained by the changing times that he lived in, the product of the
economic and social transformations of the industrial revolution, and the American and
French political revolutions.
 Although during his lifetime he wrote extensively, he did not leave us a systematic
treatise on his ideas. The most significant publication in this regard, which outlines the
basic principles of utilitarianism, is the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (1789).
 In 1785, he traveled to Russia, where he hoped that some of his proposed reforms would
arouse the interest of the Tsarina Catherine II. In particular, he brought with him the plan
for his Panopticon, a model prison where all prisoners could be seen at all times by
hidden guards.
 In 1788 he returned to England. His fame grew slowly on the continent, and in 1792 he
received honorary citizenship in the French Republic. Some of the English legal reforms
of the first half of the nineteenth century respond to Bentham’s ideas, such as the famous
Reform Bill of 1832. Bentham died in 1832, leaving many unpublished texts behind. On
the express wish contained in his will, his body was embalmed, clothed, and placed in a
chair at University College in London.
 1.2 Utilitarianism. What is the doctrine of utilitarianism? According to Bentham, man is
driven primarily by two passions: the pursuit of happiness, identified with pleasure, and the
rejection of pain and suffering.
 “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.”
 For him, these feelings should be the focus of the investigation of the moralist and the
legislator: the principle of utility subordinates everything to them. Those things that
enable the achievement of happiness are useful.
 Without departing from mere hedonistic materialism, Bentham explains that there are
not only bodily pleasures and pain, but also those of the soul. Therefore, one must
sometimes engage in austere conduct, because happiness does not necessarily
coincide with immediate pleasure.

1
Cf. Fazio, 2011.

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  Bentham believed it was possible to quantify pleasures and pains (duration, intensity,
real possibility of enjoying/suffering them, and so on). This calculus of pleasures and
pains therefore could be used to establish the rules of moral behavior and social
legislation.
 To this hedonistic vision of human nature we must add a radical individualism.
According to Bentham, man is selfish and seeks only his own interest. Social
relationships are fictions, in the sense of being unnatural, and therefore the body politic is
artificial and is formed by the sum of the individual interests of those who constitute it.
 What is the principle of utility as applied to politics? If the goal of the individual man is
happiness, so too will the goal of society be the general happiness, which is the sum of all
individual happiness.
 Bentham defines the principle of social utility in the form of an axiom: “It is the greatest
happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong” (A Fragment on
Government, 1776).
 Empirical knowledge of human workings shows us that if men seek their own utility,
the interdependence between individuals in society will produce the general utility.
 For example, in searching for individual utility—that is, one’s own interests—
individuals realize that they need a government, because without it there is neither
security nor property nor welfare. This is the reason that governments exist: their
utility.
 This axiom should be put in practice after careful consideration of changing social
circumstances. Bentham criticized the abstract tendencies of French political
revolutionaries, who were inclined to assert the absolute rights of man and citizen without
taking into account the fact that there is no abstract human.
 What we have are real men living in the midst of finite and defined circumstances.
Men have always lived in society: there is no prior state of nature, nor natural rights
nor natural law that precedes the social order.
 Rights are established by law, and this is simply a decision of the sovereign.
According to Bentham, the term “natural rights” is a perversion of language, because
it is ambiguous, emotional, and figurative and leads to anarchic consequences.
 “Real” rights are provided by the law, which tends to establish the greatest happiness
for the greatest number. Such rights are, therefore, changeable, since if in a given
circumstance a real right runs contrary the general happiness it should be abolished.
 With the principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number Bentham
democratized liberalism. It was not a matter of constitutional and economic freedom
reduced to an exclusive elite, but a doctrine aimed at extending these goods to the
greatest number of individuals, and striving to extend them to all. At the same time, with
his moral naturalism and his legal positivism, Bentham was enlisted by the secularist
camp that opposed a transcendent vision of human existence.

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2. John Stuart Mill2

 2.1 Life and Works. John Stuart Mill would become the main torchbearer of
utilitarianism, although, as we shall see, he would revise Bentham’s doctrine, moving away
from the hedonistic materialism of his teacher.
 John Stuart Mill received a careful education from his father, the philosopher James Mill,
and from Bentham, and the younger Mill became interested in the most diverse branches
of knowledge. His father tried to provide John Stuart with a utilitarianist training—the
younger Mill read the works of Bentham when was fifteen years old— and required his
son to devote himself to study almost exclusively.
 However, when he reached the age of 21, Mill suffered a nervous breakdown from the
demands of his education, and it took him a few months to recover.
 He wrote many works within the field of general philosophy, as well as in morality and
political philosophy. His works of general philosophy include his System of Logic (1843)
and An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865); among his important
political works are Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), and
Utilitarianism (1861).
 He was influenced by certain Romantic thinkers, along with Comte, with whom he
maintained a lengthy correspondence and with whom he would share the theory of the
Humanist religion.
 The influence of positivism is also evident in his System of Logic, which he sent to
Comte. Mill’s logic is based on a theory of association: the truth of any proposition has to
be directed back to its basis in facts, which are gathered by the elementary sensations.
Through inductive generalization we can lay the foundations for scientific knowledge,
which is always empirical and phenomenal.
 2.2 About Morals. According to Mill, an individual’s purpose in life is happiness. In this
he agrees with Bentham, although he would modify parts of his teacher’s utilitarian theory.
 Mill, still following the Benthamian orthodoxy, defines utilitarianism as a creed that
accepts “utility” or the “principle of maximum happiness” as the foundation of morality
[which] holds that actions are good insofar as they tend to promote happiness, and bad
insofar as they tend to produce the opposite of happiness.
 “Happiness” is understood to be pleasure and the absence of pain; while
‘unhappiness’ is defined as pain and deprivation of pleasure.”
 But Mill added that the distinction between pleasures lies primarily in their
qualitative, and not quantitative, differences. There are pleasures that in themselves
are superior to others: pleasures that contribute to the spiritual perfection of man,
leading to the development of his specific powers and qualities in the most
harmonious manner possible are the loftiest and most valuable pleasures, not because
they last longer or are more intense, and so on—quantitative categories—than others,
but because they are qualitatively better.

2
Cf. Fazio, 2011.

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  This entails no small number of philosophical difficulties and problems of internal
consistency for utilitarianism. If pleasures are qualitatively distinguished from one
another, we are assuming that there is a value higher than pleasure itself which is the
objective ground for those distinctions.
 As he implicitly recognized, if you have a certain conception of human nature (Mill
spoke of the sentiment of one’s own dignity and the sentiment of duty), the notions of
good and evil will be related to the suitability of that notion.
 He introduced certain ethical elements that provide a view of human nature that is
more comprehensive that the one Bentham could propose. The question that remains
is whether we can continue to talk of utilitarianism when we introduce moral notions
other than the mere quantitative calculus of pleasures.
 2.3 His Socio-Political Theory. If man’s purpose is happiness, this end will be
achievable only insofar as the material and spiritual barriers that prevent it are eliminated
from society. Happiness is an individual right for each person, and general happiness is that
which is good for a group of people.
 Men, through morals—associated with a sense of sociality—must coordinate their
common goals to create a just society that eliminates barriers to the general happiness.
 But we must keep in mind the fact that individual freedom forms part of the general
happiness: “The free development of individuality is one of the main ingredients of
human happiness, and one of the main ingredients in individual and social progress.”
 Therefore, it is a matter of finding a form of social organization that moves in the
direction of happiness for the greatest number, without hindering individual freedom.
 Taking up some of the themes from the political doctrines of Wilhelm von Humboldt and
Alexis de Tocqueville, Mill believes that society should intervene in the autonomous
sphere of the individual only to defend itself, or when the irresponsible use of individual
freedom could harm other members of society.
 But outside of this, no one has the right to compel an individual to behave in a
determined manner with the goal of achieving happiness.
 There is an intangible realm where the individual sets himself up as sovereign judge in
regard to the most suitable means for achieving happiness.
 For this reason, to Mill’s political project freedom of thought (full and absolute
freedom of opinion and sentiments in every practical and speculative sector, whether
scientific, moral, or theological) and freedom to make our views publicly known, that
is, freedom of the press, are of particular importance.
 Mill’s idea of freedom tends towards a full autonomy that leads to moral
subjectivism: the final judge in moral matters is the individual’s conscience, which
does not have objective parameters on which to judge, beyond his own personal
opinions.
 On the other hand, he does not clearly establish in which cases individual freedom
injures or harms the freedom of others, and who is the authority that may establish
this.

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  As we have said, it seems that Mill seeks to drastically reduce the functions of the state.
However, his political doctrine represents a break with the liberal tradition of the minimal
state.
 The changes that European society underwent in the nineteenth century must lead to
greater social and political development of the working class. Workers must move
from being mere salaried workers to worker-owners, who self-manage industrial
factories.
 Mill sought to replace an aristocratic society based on privilege with a social
organization where the middle class is the broadest and most decisive segment of
society.
 Social reforms should be aimed at a more equitable distribution of material goods, so
that individuals do not fall into economic reductionism: that is, the reduction of the
goal of existence itself to the accumulation of material wealth. A more equitable
society is a prerequisite for being able to learn the art of life, identified with the
Platonic virtues of a sense of justice and temperance.
 The philosopher was aware that competition can lead to evil, but the consequences of
socialism are even more devastating, as it stagnates society and squelches individual
initiative.
 Free competition is a manifestation of freedom, and this alone is the purpose of the
state.
 Mill realizes that in modern societies there is a risk of standardization, of uniformization,
of the tyranny of the majority. Because of this, he wished for a broad debate and clash of
opinions, which in the political field is institutionalized in the system of political parties.
 The majority-minority dialectic, already discussed by Tocqueville, reappears with a
similar force in Mills writings. Universal suffrage, women’s legal equality, the central
element of the popular—these are the characteristic elements of Mill’s political proposal.
 The specific characteristic of all utilitarian theory is a teleological structure reasoned as
follows: The good of the citizen is defined prior to and independent of that which is
politically just, and the politically just (the just state) is then defined as that system of
political relations (of laws, institutions, customs and so on) that maximizes the good of
citizens in society.
 Utilitarianism identifies notions such as that which “ought to be” or “justice of political
society” with the “utmost satisfaction of our desires” and “maximum distribution of
welfare.”
 These categories can be mathematically expressed, implying that its practical
implementation is, fundamentally, a problem of a technical nature.
 The maximization of the good described by Bentham, Mill, and other utilitarians—
despite its good intentions—disregards the unique value of the human person, which
supersedes a purely mathematical treatment of happiness.
 The concept of the dignity of the person would produce the most radical rupture
between the Christian position and that of the utilitarians. Man naturaliter liber et

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 propter seipsum existens—and even more so, man made in God’s image—prevents
the oppression of the minority and the weakest, which from a calculated utilitarian
point of view cannot not be avoided.
 Man is not just part of a whole: It will never be ethically rational to consider man as a
simple unit in the service of the greater good for the greatest number, one part that
can be sacrificed in view of the good of the whole of society.