Teleological thinking or Deontological
thinking?
• We should permit the abortion because she’s
too young and too poor to look after the child.
• You should help your mother because it’s your
duty.
• Do what your father days.
• It’s okay to steal if you’re staring.
• If you tell her the truth she’ll be really upset.
• Whatever you say, just tell the truth.
Ethical theory to be studied
• Utilitarianism
ethical theory by which actions are judged
according to their anticipated results.
• Teleological
• Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
• Bentham was concerned about social reform –
the conditions in which people lived and worked,
becoming particularly involved both with
hospitals and prisons.
• Bentham wanted to find a way of defining right
and wrong without a need for a transcendent
authority.
• He sought a moral theory in which whatever was
done in a society would be judged right or wrong
according to whether or not it benefited a
majority of its citizens.
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
• He argued for the ‘Principle of Utility’ In
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (1789), by which an action is
judged good or bad according to the results it
achieved.
• Simplest form is ‘Principle of Utility’
• Jeremy Bentham – John Stuart Mill – Henry
Sidgwick
Motivation of human beings
• Bentham maintained that humans were motivated by
pleasure and pain.
• Hedonist (hedone – Greek for pleasure)
• “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.” (Bentham, 1789, Chapter
1,1)
• Pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain was a moral fact
as pleasure and pain identified what we should and
shouldn’t do.
• Hedonic Utilitarianism
Principle of Utility
• The rightness or the wrongness of an action is
determined by its ‘utility’ or usefulness.
• Usefulness refers to the amount of the
amount of pleasure or happiness caused by
the action.
• Good is the maximisation of pleasure and the
minimisation of pain.
• His theory is democratic – the pleasure can’t
just be for one person.
Hedonic Calculus
The hedonic calculus weighs up the pain and pleasure
generated by the available moral actions to find the best
option. It considers 7 factors:
1) The intensity
2) Its duration
3) Its certainty or uncertainty
4) Its propinquity or remoteness
5) Its fecundity, or the chance it has of being followed by,
sensations of the same kind.
6) Its purity, or the chance it has of being followed by,
sensations of the opposite kind.
7) Its extent; the number of persons to whom it extends
Strengths
• There is simplicity in Bentham’s calculation and a radical
equality.
• The telos of increasing human welfare is attractive and
common sense.
• His ideas drove social reform and he designed a more
humane prison called a panopticon, never built in the UK,
but in Barcelona.
• Bentham believed “pushpin as good as poetry.” Pleasure is
purely quantative. There is a lack of snobbery in his
classification of all pleasures as equally valid – why should
Mozart be thought better than Rap music (at least at giving
pleasure).
• Everyone’s hedons have equal value (the Queen or me.)
Weaknesses
• Bentham only focuses on actions so we have to keep on
calculating (he doesn’t allow us to have rules to make life
easier)
• He equates pleasure with happiness – but they don’t seem
to be equivalent (ask the athlete training for the Olympics
whether the toil is pleasurable – but it doesn’t mean a lack
of contentment with training)
• We can always ask “you’re going to the nightclub, but is
that a ‘good’ idea? (Good meaning ‘promoting your
welfare’) Bentham implies pleasure is measurable (it isn’t –
how can we compare my hedon with yours?)
• What is Bentham’s answer to Smart’s pleasure machine or
Huxley’s Soma tablet.
John stuart Mill
• Developed this theory
• Moving from Quantative to Qualitative
“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied
than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
Mill distinguished between:
Higher pleasures
Lower pleasures
Pleasures associated
with the mind
Intellectual pursuits,
mental disciplines,
cultural activities,
spiritual reflection…
Pleasures associated
with the body
Satisfying the bodily
need for food, water,
sleep…
Higher pleasures are more desirable than the lower ones
• Act Utilitarianism
• Bentham
• Rule Utilitarianism
• Mill
• Each action should
be judged on its
ability to bring
about the greatest
happiness for the
greatest number
• Rules should be
formulated first,
based on utilitarianist
principles. The
individual then judge
whether specific acts
are acceptable.
The issue
• Happiness is subjective under Bentham's and
Mills utilitarianism it was presupposed that
there was one single idea of happiness.
Preference - Hare and Singer
• Act and rule utilitarianism has given way to
Preference Utilitarianism
• The satisfaction of people’s preferences rather
than aiming to achieve the greatest balance of
pleasure over pain.
• Easier to manage than classical utilitarianism –
pleasure is difficult to calculate, people can
express their preferences (things which are
important to them)
Peter Singer
• Singer suggests that pleasure should not be
the principle consideration in a utilitarian
ethical decision
• He proposes a utilitarian system with the best
‘interest’ of the individuals concerned at the
heart of ethical decision making.
• His utilitarianism approach is to weigh up the
interest of all those affected by an individual
decision.
RM Hare 1919-2002
• He argues for preference utilitarianism
• The Utilitarian evaluation of an action would
include the preferences of the person, unless
those preferences conflicted with those of
others.
• The right thing to do is to maximize the
satisfaction of each individual involved.
Preference Utilitarianism
• A marathon runner, trying to get a pb
• A prisoner may rather face death than betray
his comrades.
• Neither is achieving happiness in the crudely
hedonic sense, but they are acting on
preferences or ideals that are more important
to them than mere happiness.
Preference Utilitarianism
• Preference utilitarianism does not require any
experience either because people can express
their preference, for example not to be
tortured, without having ever experienced
torture. They know without prior experience
that it would not increase their overall wellbeing and would only result in negative
effects.
Issues - Preference Utilitarianism
• Sometimes preferences may be exercised as duties.
• The duty the prisoner feels to his comrades to save
them from death leads him to prefer torture to
betrayal…..here we creep closer to deontology.
• Is he acting under genuine preference or is he bound
by duty?
• Is he keeping his moral hands clean or is he making a
choice where others were genuinely available and
which could legitimately lead to a better personal
outcome?
• Nowadays –duty has negative connotations – despise
or fear the call of duty.
Motive Utilitarianism
• Sidgwick’s main work (the Methods of Ethics,
1874) was not a new version of utilitarianism,
but rather an attempt to see how we could
arrive at a rational basis for taking certain
actions.
Motive Utilitarianism
• The consequence in terms of happiness of an
action needs not be the motive for the action.
Sidgwick considered it possible to look at the
motives for an action in terms of utility.
• An action could be considered good if its
motive was to bring about the maximum good
for the maximum number regardless of the
actual outcome.
Negative Utilitarianism
• 1990- Richard Ryder
• Instead of broadening the definition of good,
negative utilitarianism seeks to avoid the
problems associated with desiring happiness
or pleasure, by narrowing it further
• The only good is that which seeks to minimize
pain.
Negative Utilitarianism
• Strength – discounts sadistic or violent
preferences (guards beating the prisoner)
• Weakness – is this approach to narrow?
Irenaeus argues that this world is a ‘vale of
soul making’ and that suffering can bring
reward. eg physical training, patient
endurance, breaking a bone and resetting it.