Utility : The measure of virtue

By Ronalyn R. Tagudin

Doctor of Philosophy Major in Development Management Student

ABSTRACT

            The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or, the one. Act always so as to promote the greatest good for the greatest number of persons - utilitarianism.

            The moral rightness or wrongness of an action is to be judged by its results or consequences. Consequences of an act determine its value. If an act produces happiness of the people on a large scale, it is morally right; if it produces unhappiness on a large scale, it is said to be morally wrong. However, the result of an act may be actual or probable. An act may produce immediate pleasure or happiness or it may produce happiness in remote future. So the act that produces happiness in general is considered as morally right.

            If the principle of utility be a right principle to be governed by, and that in all cases, it follows from what has been just observed, that whatever principle differs from it in any case must necessarily be a wrong one. To prove any other principle, therefore, to be a wrong one, there needs no more than just to show it to be what it is, a principle of which the dictates are in some point or other different from those of the principle of utility: to state it is to confute it (Wiley, 2008).

Keywords: greatest good, utility, happiness, greatest number of persons, moral

INTRODUCTION

            According to Jeremy Bentham, utilitarianism is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if it tends to produce the reverse of the happiness – not just the happiness of the performer of the action but also that of everyone affected by it (Duignan, 2019).

            Utilitarianism is an effort to provide an answer to the practical question “What ought a person to do?” The answer is that a person ought to act so as to produce the best consequences possible. So, given that thought, are we obligated to act to promote overall wellbeing when that is incompatible with our own? Admitting that people do sometimes act benevolently – with the overall good of humanity in mind. The view that utility is the measure of virtue.

The Classical Approach

            If anything could be identified as the fundamental motivation behind the development of Classical Utilitarianism it would be the desire to see useless, corrupt laws and social practices changed. Accomplishing this goal required a normative ethical theory employed as a critical tool. What is the truth about what makes an action or a policy a morally good one, or morally right? But developing the theory itself was also influenced by strong views about what was wrong in their society. The conviction that, for example, some laws are bad resulted in analysis of why they were bad. And, for Jeremy Bentham, what made them bad was their lack of utility, their tendency to lead to unhappiness and misery without any compensating happiness. If a law or an action doesn’t do any good, then it is isn’t any good (Driver, 2014).

            In this view, actions are approved when they are such as to promote happiness, or pleasure, and disapproved of when they have a tendency to cause unhappiness, or pain. We should be actively trying to promote overall happiness thus, promote the overall well-being when that it is incompatible with one’s own.

The Principle of Utility

            According to Wiley (2008), there are principles of utility that should be considered as follows: (a) The principle of utility is the foundation of the present work: it will be proper therefore at the outset to give an explicit and determinate account of what is meant by it. By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness; (b) By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual; (c) The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur; (d) It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual and; (e) An action then may be said to be comfortable to the principle of utility, or, for shortness sake, to utility, when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.

            Further, Jeremy Bentham (1843) formulated a theory of ethics and jurisprudence which is remarkable for its clarity and consistency. He began with the psychological generalization that all actions are motivated by the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain. Hence he claimed,

“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. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other hand the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think...”

            Therefore, by the principle of utility, Bentham maintains that the ideal method for determining whether an individual’s action or a legal act is right or wrong would be through evaluation of its total tendency to promote happiness or to promote unhappiness to the other. In such a situation if the former predominates then the action is right, if the latter then it is wrong.

            However, Rasdall (1907) said that “…again one’s own interest is taken into account in doing good to others. For it is hoped that the others also will do good to one in return. An individual lives in a society. As he is not self-sufficient, needs the assistance of others. An enlightened self-interest is manifested in the cooperative spirit among the individuals which is in order to secure their own interest.” In this regards, Bentham claimed that benevolent actions are rewarded with pleasure as:

The pleasures of benevolence are the pleasures resulting from the view of any pleasures supposed to be possessed by the beings that may be the objects of benevolence…there may also be called the pleasures of good will, the pleasures of sympathy, or the pleasures of the benevolent or social affections.

            Bentham thought that if doing well to others makes the agent happy, then there can be no real opposition between self-interest and the principle of utility; to promote the public happiness is the way to make happy oneself.

Self-Sacrifice

            Only while the world is in a very imperfect state can it happen that anyone’s best chance of serving the happiness of others is through the absolute sacrifice of his own happiness; but while the world is in that imperfect state, I fully admit that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue that can be found in man.

            The utilitarian morality does recognize that human beings can sacrifice their own greatest good for the good of others; it merely refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. It regards as wasted any sacrifice that doesn’t increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness. The only self-renunciation that it applauds is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means to happiness, of others. . . . (Bennett, 2017).

            Moreover, Bennett (2017) states that as the practical way to get as close as possible to this ideal, the ethics of utility would command two things. (1) First, laws and social arrangements should place the happiness (or what for practical purposes we may call the interest) of every individual as much as possible in harmony with the interest of the whole. (2) Second, education and opinion, which have such a vast power over human character, should use that power to establish in the mind of every individual an unbreakable link between his own happiness and the good of the whole; especially between his own happiness and the kinds of conduct (whether doing or allowing) that are conducive to universal happiness.

            If it is done properly, it will tend to have two results: (a) The individual won’t be able to conceive the possibility of being personally happy while acting in ways opposed to the general good and; (b) In each individual a direct impulse to promote the general good will be one of the habitual motives of action, and the feelings connected with it will fill a large and prominent place in his sentient existence. This is the true character of the utilitarian morality.

Common Criticisms of Utilitarianism

            Again, to repeat something that the opponents of utilitarianism are seldom fair enough to admit, namely that the happiness that forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct is not the agent’s own happiness but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator.

            By far and away the most common criticism of utilitarianism can be reduced simply to: "I don't like it" or "It doesn't suit my way of thinking". Producing the greatest good for the greatest number is fine as long as you are not hurting someone you really love in the process. This is the case when utilitarianism runs into problems when sentiment is involved.

            In addition, it is impossible and too difficult to apply. The happiness cannot be quantified or measured, that there is no way of calculating a trade-off between intensity and extent, or intensity and probability, or comparing happiness to suffering. We cannot calculate all the effects for all the individuals (either because of the large number of individuals involved, and/or because of the uncertainty). The principle of utility is, essentially, a description of what makes something right or wrong - so in order for it to fail, someone must give an example of something which is useful but obviously wrong. The principle does not imply that we can calculate what is right or wrong - completely accurately, in advance, or at all! It does not harm the principle of utility at all merely to comment that it is difficult for us to work out what is right - it is merely a lament against the human condition (https://www.utilitarian.org/criticisms.html).

CONCLUSION

            The doctrine that the basis of morals is utility, or the greatest happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong in proportion as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

            The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible is that people actually see it. The only proof that a sound is audible is that people hear it; and similarly with the other sources of our experience. If happiness, the end that the utilitarian doctrine proposes to itself, were not acknowledged in theory and in practice to be an end, nothing could ever convince any person that it was an end.

            No reason can be given why the general happiness is desirable, except the fact that each person desires his own happiness, so far as he thinks it is attainable. But this is a fact; so we have not only all the proof there could be for such a proposition, and all the proof that could possibly be demanded, that happiness is a good, that each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and therefore that general happiness is a good to the aggregate of all persons. Happiness has made good its claim to be one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one of the criteria of morality (Bennett, 2017).

REFERENCES

Bentham, J. (1843). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.

Bennett, J. (2017). Utilitarianism.

Driver, J. (2014). The History of Utilitarianism.

Duignan, B. & West, H. (2019). Utilitarianism Philosophy. http://www.britannica.com/topic/utilitarianism-philosophy/Historical-survey. Retrieved, January 11, 2020.

Most Common Criticisms of Utilitarianism. Retrieved, from https://www.utilitarian.org/criticisms.html January 11, 2020.

Rasdall, H. (1907). the Theory of Good and Evil, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Wiley, J & Sons. (2008). Utilitarianism and on liberty: Including Mill’s’ Essay on Bentham and selections from the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin.

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