Utilitarianism

Staunchly standing by the principle of unqualified egoism, Bentham rids himself of the task of reconciling self-interest and altruism:

Dream not that men will move their little finger to serve you, unless their advantage in doing so is obvious to them. Men never did so and never will while human nature is made of its present materials. But they will desire to serve you when by so doing they can serve themselves, and the occasions on which they can serve themselves by serving you are multitudinous (Deontology, ii, 1834; posthumous work).

In the hands of Bentham and his disciples Utilitarianism dissociates morality from its religious basis and, incorporating Determinism with its other tenets, becomes pronouncedly Positivistic, and moral obligation is resolved into a prejudice or a feeling resulting from a long-continued association of disagreeable consequences attending some kinds of actions, and advantages following others. The word ought Bentham characterizes as an authoritative impostor, the talisman of arrogancy, indolence, and ignorance. It is the condemnation of Utilitarianism that this estimate of duty is thoroughly consistent with the system; and no defender of the utility theory has been able, though some have tried, to indicate the claims of moral obligation on Positivistic Utilitarian grounds. Bentham drew up a curious scheme for computing the worth or weight to be assigned to all sorts of pleasures and pains, as a practical norm to determine in the concrete the moral value of any action. He assumes that all pleasures are alike in kind and differ only in quantity, that is in intensity, certainty, duration, etc. His psychological analysis, besides the original defect of making self-interest the sole motive of human action, contains many errors. Subsequent writers have abandoned it as worthless for the very good reason that to calculate, as its employment would demand, all the results of every action, and to strike a balance between the advantages and disadvantages attendant upon it, would require an intellect much more powerful than that with which man is endowed.

The classic expression of the system is John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism, which endeavours to raise the Utilitarian ideal to a higher plane than that of the undisguised selfishness upon which Bentham rested it. As the foundation of his structure Mill asserts that every man necessarily acts in order to obtain his own happiness; but finding this ground logically insufficient to furnish a basis for an adequate criterion of conduct, and prompted by his own large sympathies, he quickly endeavours to substitute "the happiness of all concerned" for "the agent's own happiness". The argument over which he, the author of a formidable work on logic, endeavours to pass from the first to the second position, may serve as an example suitable to submit to the beginner in logic when he is engaged in the detection of sophisms. The argument, in brief, is that, as each one desires and pursues his own happiness, and the sum total of these individual ends makes up the general happiness, it follows that the general happiness is the one thing desirable by all and provides the Utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct. "As well might you argue", says Martineau, "that because of a hundred men each one's hunger is satisfied by his dinner, the hunger of all must be satisfied with the dinner of each." To escape some of the criticisms urged against the doctrine as stated by Bentham, who made no distinction in the various kinds of pleasure, Mill claimed that Utilitarianism notes that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity; that in the judgment of those who have experience of different pleasures, some are preferable to others, that it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. Then he slips from "preferable" to "higher", thus surreptitiously introducing a moral classification among pleasures. The only legitimate grounds for attaching higher and lower moral values to various pleasures, is to estimate them according to the rank of the faculties or of the kinds of action to which they belong as results. But to do this is to assume some moral standard by which we can measure the right or wrong of action, independently of its pleasurable or painful consequences. To answer the objection that virtue is desired for its own sake, and men do right frequently without any calculation of the happiness to be derived from their action, Mill enlists the association theory; as the result of experience, actions that have been approved or condemned on account of their pleasurable or disagreeable consequences at length come to be looked upon by us as good or bad, without our actually adverting to their pleasant or painful result.

Since Mill's time the only writer who has introduced any modification into strictly Utilitarian thought is Sidgwick (Methods of Ethics, 1874), who acknowledges that the pleasure-and-pain standard is incapable of serving universally as the criterion of morality; but believes it to be valuable as an instrument for the correction of the received moral code. The general happiness principle he defends as the norm of conduct but he treats it rather as a primary than a demonstrable one. Although he vigorously denounced Utilitarianism, Herbert Spencer's ethical construction (Data of Ethics, 1879), which may be taken as the type of the Evolutionist school, is fundamentally Utilitarian. True, instead of happiness he makes the increase of life, that is, a fuller and more intensive life, the end of human conduct, because it is the end of the entire cosmic activity of which human conduct is a part. But he holds pleasure and pain to be the standard which discriminates right from wrong so that in reality he looks upon the moral value of actions as entirely dependent upon their utility. His account of the genesis of our moral ideas, of conscience, and of our moral judgments is too lengthy and complicated to enter into here. Suffice it to say that in it he sets forth the influence of association with that of heredity as the source of our moral standards and judgments. Our sense of moral obligation is but a transitory feeling, generated by the confluence of our inherited racial experience of the results of action with another feeling that the remote present themselves to our consciousness as possessing more "authoritativeness" than the immediate results. The arguments urged against Hedonism in general are effective against Utilitarianism. Its own peculiar weakness lies in its failure to find a passage from egoism to altruism; its identification of self-interest and benevolence as a motive of conduct; and its claim that the ideas morally right and useful are identical at bottom.