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WillowOne's Positions

Utilitarianism

Overview

Utilitarianism is the ethical theory that the right action is the one that produces the greatest overall well-being (originally, in Jeremy Bentham's version, the greatest balance of pleasure over pain) for everyone affected. It is the best-known form of consequentialism, the family of views on which the rightness of an action depends only on its outcomes. John Stuart Mill refined it in Utilitarianism (1861); Peter Singer is its leading contemporary advocate.

Notes

  • My approach to ethics is consequentialist in practice: a moral rule is to be judged by whether it serves the interests of those bound by it (Morality), and punishment is justified by what it achieves, not by desert (Death Penalty, Freewill vs Determinism). In that sense I am close to utilitarianism.
  • I am not a utilitarian in the strict sense, for two reasons. First, utilitarianism is usually presented as a theory of objective moral fact, and I hold that there are none (Objective morality); on my account the preference for well-being is a near-universal human interest, not a feature of the universe. Second, the aggregation problem is real: the Trolley Problem's transplant case, in which one healthy person is harvested to save five, is a conclusion the theory delivers and almost nobody accepts, and I think the refusal is correct, because a society in which that could happen to you is worse for everyone than the arithmetic suggests. Rule-based heuristics (Deontology) are, in the end, justified by their consequences.
  • The theory's great merit is that it makes moral disagreement empirical. If we agree that well-being is the aim, the rest is a question of what actually produces it, and that can be argued (Moral claims are incomplete assertions).

Also see