2.  Background

3.  Defining Utilitarianism
 -- Mill
 -- 2 components to the theory

4.  Discussion of component 2.
Conscience?  Convention?
 

Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom.  Well I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it?  Why me.  I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way…It hadn’t ever come home to me, before, what this thing was that I was doing.  But now it did; and it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more.  I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and say, every time: “But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.”  That was so—I couldn’t get around that , no way.  That was where it pinched Conscience says to me: “What had poor Miss Watson done to you, that you could see her [slave] go off right under your eyes and never say one single word?  What did that poor old woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean?…”  I got to feeling so mean and miserable I most wished I was dead.”
 

Example 1

Pat and Chris are going to the movies.  The following table represents the utilities for each movie for Pat and Chris  (from –10 to +10):

                                 Pat Chris   Total
Big Budget Action      +7    -3
Tear-jerker Drama     -2   +5
Art-house Indy          +3   +2
 

Example 2

You are part of a village in the middle of a plague for which there is no cure.  Some people in town have come down with the plague, but you don’t know what percentage of the town has been affected.  You can either:

(1)  Impose a quarantine, knowing that this will likely result in the death of almost all of the villagers, but will prevent the disease from spreading.

Or:

(2)  You can let anyone who is not yet symptomatic leave, knowing that there is a very high probability that some of these people carry the virus.
 
 

Mill:

“The Creed which accepts as the foundation of morals ‘utility’ or the ‘greatest happiness principle’ holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.  By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain the privation of pleasure…pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things…are desirable either for pleasure inherent in themselves or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.”

Two Components:

1.
2.

An act is right to the extent that it brings about the overall utility (value, good, well-being) of all those with moral standing who are affected by the act.

An act is wrong to the extent that it diminishes the overall utility (value, good, well-being) of all those with moral standing who are affected by the act.
 

“The ends justifies the means”

1.  Source

Hedonism ® pleasure

By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain the privation of pleasure…pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things…are desirable either for pleasure inherent in themselves or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.”

Bentham: quantity
Mill: competent judge test:

“of two pleasure if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable [i.e. higher] pleasure…
If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.”
 

Elitist?

“Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties.  Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs.”

Autobiography
I, for the first time, gave its proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual.  I ceased to attach almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward circumstances, and the training of the human being for speculation and for action.
     I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities, and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided.  I did not, for an instant, lose sight of , or undervalue, that part of the truth which I had seen before; I never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement.  But I thought that it had consequences which required to be corrected, by joining other kinds of cultivation with it.  The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of primary importance.  The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.
 

Virtue as end-in-itself
“…it is palpable that [people] do desire things which, in common language, are decidedly distinguished from happiness.  They desire, for example, virtue and the absence of vice no less really than pleasure and the absence of pain.  The desire of virtue is not as universal, but it is as authentic a fact as the desire of happiness.  And hence the opponents of the utilitarian standard deem that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of approbation and disapprobation.”

P1.  Utilitarianism holds that only happiness is desired for its own sake.
P2.  But people desire other things, such as virtue, for its own sake.
C.  Thus, utilitarianism cannot provide the ultimate ground of morality.

“But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a thing to be desired?  The very reverse.  It maintain not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself…they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to the ultimate end, but they also recognize as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it; and hold that the mind is not in a right state, not in a state conformable to utility…unless it does love virtue in this manner—as a thing desirable in itself.”

Criteria of rightness  vs.       Object of desire
 

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