It also has a propositional aspect, so that animals, which are not lacking in other senses are lacking in this one. The virtuous person is one whose affections, motives, dispositions are of the right sort, not one whose behavior is simply of the right sort and who is able to reflect on goodness, and her own goodness [see Gill]. Similarly, the vicious person is one who exemplifies the wrong sorts of mental states, affections, and so forth. Shaftesbury approached moral evaluation via the virtues and vices.
His utilitarian leanings are distinct from his moral sense approach, and his overall sentimentalism. However, this approach highlights the move away from egoistic views of human nature — a trend picked up by Hutcheson and Hume, and later adopted by Mill in criticism of Bentham's version of utilitarianism. For writers like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson the main contrast was with egoism rather than rationalism. Like Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson was very much interested in virtue evaluation.
He also adopted the moral sense approach. However, in his writings we also see an emphasis on action choice and the importance of moral deliberation to action choice. Hutcheson, in An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil , fairly explicitly spelled out a utilitarian principle of action choice. Joachim Hruschka notes, however, that it was Leibniz who first spelled out a utilitarian decision procedure. Scarre notes that some hold the moral sense approach incompatible with this emphasis on the use of reason to determine what we ought to do; there is an opposition between just apprehending what's morally significant and a model in which we need to reason to figure out what morality demands of us.
But Scarre notes these are not actually incompatible:. Scarre then uses the example of telling a lie to illustrate: lying is harmful to the person to whom one lies, and so this is viewed with disfavor, in general. However, in a specific case, if a lie is necessary to achieve some notable good, consequentialist reasoning will lead us to favor the lying.
But this example seems to put all the emphasis on a consideration of consequences in moral approval and disapproval. Stephen Darwall notes , ff. It is the motives rather than the consequences that are the objects of approval and disapproval. But inasmuch as the morally good person cares about what happens to others, and of course she will, she will rank order acts in terms of their effects on others, and reason is used in calculating effects.
So there is no incompatibility at all. Hutcheson was committed to maximization, it seems. Hume was heavily influenced by Hutcheson, who was one of his teachers. His system also incorporates insights made by Shaftesbury, though he certainly lacks Shaftesbury's confidence that virtue is its own reward.
In terms of his place in the history of utilitarianism we should note two distinct effects his system had. Firstly, his account of the social utility of the artificial virtues influenced Bentham's thought on utility. Secondly, his account of the role sentiment played in moral judgment and commitment to moral norms influenced Mill's thoughts about the internal sanctions of morality.
Bentham, in contrast to Mill, represented the egoistic branch — his theory of human nature reflected Hobbesian psychological egoism. The Classical Utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, were concerned with legal and social reform. 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 isn't any good. Jeremy Bentham — was influenced both by Hobbes' account of human nature and Hume's account of social utility. He famously held that humans were ruled by two sovereign masters — pleasure and pain.
Yet he also promulgated the principle of utility as the standard of right action on the part of governments and individuals. 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 PML.
Combine this criterion of rightness with a view that we should be actively trying to promote overall happiness, and one has a serious incompatibility with psychological egoism. Thus, his apparent endorsement of Hobbesian psychological egoism created problems in understanding his moral theory since psychological egoism rules out acting to promote the overall well-being when that it is incompatible with one's own. For the psychological egoist, that is not even a possibility.
This generates a serious tension in Bentham's thought, one that was drawn to his attention. He sometimes seemed to think that he could reconcile the two commitments empirically, that is, by noting that when people act to promote the good they are helping themselves, too. But this claim only serves to muddy the waters, since the standard understanding of psychological egoism — and Bentham's own statement of his view — identifies motives of action which are self-interested.
Yet this seems, again, in conflict with his own specification of the method for making moral decisions which is not to focus on self-interest — indeed, the addition of extent as a parameter along which to measure pleasure produced distinguishes this approach from ethical egoism.
Aware of the difficulty, in later years he seemed to pull back from a full-fledged commitment to psychological egoism, admitting that people do sometimes act benevolently — with the overall good of humanity in mind.
Bentham also benefited from Hume's work, though in many ways their approaches to moral philosophy were completely different. Hume rejected the egoistic view of human nature. Hume also focused on character evaluation in his system. Actions are significant as evidence of character, but only have this derivative significance.
In moral evaluation the main concern is that of character. Yet Bentham focused on act-evaluation. There was a tendency — remarked on by J. Schneewind , for example — to move away from focus on character evaluation after Hume and towards act-evaluation.
Recall that Bentham was enormously interested in social reform. Indeed, reflection on what was morally problematic about laws and policies influenced his thinking on utility as a standard. When one legislates, however, one is legislating in support of, or against, certain actions. Character — that is, a person's true character — is known, if known at all, only by that person. If one finds the opacity of the will thesis plausible then character, while theoretically very interesting, isn't a practical focus for legislation.
Further, as Schneewind notes, there was an increasing sense that focus on character would actually be disruptive, socially, particularly if one's view was that a person who didn't agree with one on a moral issues was defective in terms of his or her character, as opposed to simply making a mistake reflected in action.
But Bentham does take from Hume the view that utility is the measure of virtue — that is, utility more broadly construed than Hume's actual usage of the term.
This is because Hume made a distinction between pleasure that the perception of virtue generates in the observer, and social utility, which consisted in a trait's having tangible benefits for society, any instance of which may or may not generate pleasure in the observer.
But Bentham is not simply reformulating a Humean position — he's merely been influenced by Hume's arguments to see pleasure as a measure or standard of moral value. So, why not move from pleasurable responses to traits to pleasure as a kind of consequence which is good, and in relation to which, actions are morally right or wrong? Bentham, in making this move, avoids a problem for Hume. On Hume's view it seems that the response — corrected, to be sure — determines the trait's quality as a virtue or vice.
But on Bentham's view the action or trait is morally good, right, virtuous in view of the consequences it generates, the pleasure or utility it produces, which could be completely independent of what our responses are to the trait.
So, unless Hume endorses a kind of ideal observer test for virtue, it will be harder for him to account for how it is people make mistakes in evaluations of virtue and vice.
Bentham, on the other hand, can say that people may not respond to the actions good qualities — perhaps they don't perceive the good effects.
But as long as there are these good effects which are, on balance, better than the effects of any alternative course of action, then the action is the right one. Rhetorically, anyway, one can see why this is an important move for Bentham to be able to make. He was a social reformer.
He felt that people often had responses to certain actions — of pleasure or disgust — that did not reflect anything morally significant at all. Bentham then notes that people are prone to use their physical antipathy as a pretext to transition to moral antipathy, and the attending desire to punish the persons who offend their taste.
This reduces the antipathy to the act in question. This demonstrates an optimism in Bentham. This is distinct from the view that a pain or pleasure based on a false belief should be discounted.
Bentham does not believe the latter. Thus Bentham's hedonism is a very straightforward hedonism. The one intrinsic good is pleasure, the bad is pain. We are to promote pleasure and act to reduce pain. When called upon to make a moral decision one measures an action's value with respect to pleasure and pain according to the following: intensity how strong the pleasure or pain is , duration how long it lasts , certainty how likely the pleasure or pain is to be the result of the action , proximity how close the sensation will be to performance of the action , fecundity how likely it is to lead to further pleasures or pains , purity how much intermixture there is with the other sensation.
And for the same reason, a helmet alone will not prevent CTE. Some people accuse the media and others of hysterically overhyping the dangers of tackle football to the brain.
Bailes et al. Montenigro et al. McKee et al. See Bennet I. Lawrence et al. See also Ann C. Alosco et al.
Lehman et al. Guskiewicz et al. Collins et al. Lovell et al. Kelly et al. Cobb et al. Campolettano et al. Stamm et al. Rao et al. Kerr et al. Heary et al. And How Will It Change in ? ORG , Jan. Is Getting Soft. Pamela R. Acting on Utilitarianism Utilitarianism has important implications for how we should think about leading an ethical life. Read: Acting on Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham. John Stuart Mill. Harriet Taylor Mill. Henry Sidgwick. Richard M. Peter Singer. It is, in my opinion, the most underrated and misunderstood idea in all of moral and political philosophy.
This website has benefited immensely from the input of our academic advisors: Prof. Peter Singer, Princeton University Prof. Joshua Greene, Harvard University Prof. Finally, in defending impartiality, Mill argues that equal amounts of happiness are equally desirable, whether the happiness is felt by the same person or by different persons. We may wonder, however, whether this last argument is truly adequate.
Utilitarianism claims that we should thus calculate, to the best of our ability, the expected utility that will result from our actions and how it will affect us and others, and use that as the basis for the moral evaluation of our decisions.
But then we may ask, how exactly do we quantify utility? Here there are two different but related problems: how can I come up with a way of comparing different types of pleasure and pain, benefit or harm that I myself might experience, and how can I compare my benefit and yours on some neutral scale of comparison?
Suppose the following are the case:. Since, on all of these measures, drinking a pint of beer is more pleasurable than reading Hamlet , it follows according to Bentham that it is objectively better for you to drink the pint of beer and forget about reading Hamlet , and so you should.
Of course, it is up to each individual to make such a calculation based on the intensity, duration, certainty, etc. This brings us back to the problem we mentioned before that, realistically, we cannot be expected to always engage in very difficult calculations every single time we want to make a decision.
In an attempt to resolve this problem, utilitarians might claim that in the evaluation of the moral rightness and moral wrongness of actions, the application of the principle of utility can be backward-looking based on hindsight or forward-looking based on foresight. That is, we can use past experience of the results of our actions as a guide to estimating what the probable outcomes of our actions might be and save ourselves from the burden of having to make new estimates for each and every choice we may face.
Mill, for example, would respond to our claim that drinking beer is objectively more pleasurable than reading Hamlet by saying that it overlooks an important distinction between qualitatively different kinds of pleasure.
Mill justifies this claim by saying that between two pleasures, although one pleasure requires a greater amount of difficulty to attain than the other pleasure, if those who are competently acquainted with both pleasures prefer or value one over the other, then the one is a higher pleasure while the other is a lower pleasure. For Mill, although drinking a pint of beer may seem to be more pleasurable than reading Hamlet , if you are presented with these two options and you are to make a choice—each and every time or as a rule—you should still choose to read Hamlet and forego drinking the pint of beer.
Reading Hamlet generates a higher quality although perhaps a lower quantity of pleasure, while drinking a pint of beer generates lower quality although higher quantity of pleasure. In the end, these issues may be merely technical problems faced by utilitarianism—is there some neutral scale of comparison between pleasures?
The more serious problem, however, remains, which is that utilitarianism seems willing in principle to sacrifice the interests and even perhaps lives of individuals for the sake of the benefit of a larger group. And this seems to conflict with our basic moral intuition that people have a right not to be used in this way.
While Mill argued that the notion of rights could be accounted for on purely utilitarian terms, Bentham simply dismissed it. Let us conclude by revisiting the question we started with: can the ends justify the means? I stated that as far as utilitarianism is concerned the answer to this question is in the affirmative.
While the answer is plausible and right for utilitarians, it is implausible for many others, and notably wrong for deontologists. As we have seen in this chapter, on a close examination utilitarianism is less persuasive and less reasonable than it appears to be when it is far away. Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Anarchical Fallacies. In The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring. Vol 2. Edinburgh: William Tait. Driver, Julia.
Edward N. Hooker, Brad.
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