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.
One also considers extent — the number of people affected by the action. Keeping track of all of these parameters can be complicated and time consuming. Bentham does not recommend that they figure into every act of moral deliberation because of the efficiency costs which need to be considered. Experience can guide us.
We know that the pleasure of kicking someone is generally outweighed by the pain inflicted on that person, so such calculations when confronted with a temptation to kick someone are unnecessary. It is reasonable to judge it wrong on the basis of past experience or consensus. Bentham's view was surprising to many at the time at least in part because he viewed the moral quality of an action to be determined instrumentally.
It isn't so much that there is a particular kind of action that is intrinsically wrong; actions that are wrong are wrong simply in virtue of their effects, thus, instrumentally wrong. This cut against the view that there are some actions that by their very nature are just wrong, regardless of their effects. Some may be wrong because they violate liberty, or autonomy. Again, Bentham would view liberty and autonomy as good — but good instrumentally, not intrinsically.
Thus, any action deemed wrong due to a violation of autonomy is derivatively wrong on instrumental grounds as well. This is interesting in moral philosophy — as it is far removed from the Kantian approach to moral evaluation as well as from natural law approaches. It is also interesting in terms of political philosophy and social policy. On Bentham's view the law is not monolithic and immutable.
Since effects of a given policy may change, the moral quality of the policy may change as well. A law that is good at one point in time may be a bad law at some other point in time. Thus, lawmakers have to be sensitive to changing social circumstances.
To be fair to Bentham's critics, of course, they are free to agree with him that this is the case in many situations, just not all — and that there is still a subset of laws that reflect the fact that some actions just are intrinsically wrong regardless of consequences.
Bentham is in the much more difficult position of arguing that effects are all there are to moral evaluation of action and policy. This left him open to a variety of criticisms. First, Bentham's Hedonism was too egalitarian. Simple-minded pleasures, sensual pleasures, were just as good, at least intrinsically, than more sophisticated and complex pleasures. The pleasure of drinking a beer in front of the T.
Second, Bentham's view that there were no qualitative differences in pleasures also left him open to the complaint that on his view human pleasures were of no more value than animal pleasures and, third, committed him to the corollary that the moral status of animals, tied to their sentience, was the same as that of humans. While harming a puppy and harming a person are both bad, however, most people had the view that harming the person was worse.
Mill sought changes to the theory that could accommodate those sorts of intuitions. To this end, Mill's hedonism was influenced by perfectionist intuitions. There are some pleasures that are more fitting than others. Intellectual pleasures are of a higher, better, sort than the ones that are merely sensual, and that we share with animals.
To some this seems to mean that Mill really wasn't a hedonistic utilitarian. His view of the good did radically depart from Bentham's view. However, like Bentham, the good still consists in pleasure, it is still a psychological state. There is certainly that similarity. Further, the basic structures of the theories are the same for more on this see Donner The rationale for all the rights he recognizes is utilitarian.
He doesn't attempt a mere appeal to raw intuition. Instead, he argues that those persons who have experienced both view the higher as better than the lower. Who would rather be a happy oyster, living an enormously long life, than a person living a normal life?
Moore — criticized this as fallacious. He argued that it rested on an obvious ambiguity:. The distinctions he makes strike many as intuitively plausible ones. Bentham, however, can accommodate many of the same intuitions within his system.
This is because he notes that there are a variety of parameters along which we quantitatively measure pleasure — intensity and duration are just two of those. His complete list is the following: intensity, duration, certainty or uncertainty, propinquity or remoteness, fecundity, purity, and extent. Thus, what Mill calls the intellectual pleasures will score more highly than the sensual ones along several parameters, and this could give us reason to prefer those pleasures — but it is a quantitative not a qualitative reason, on Bentham's view.
When a student decides to study for an exam rather than go to a party, for example, she is making the best decision even though she is sacrificing short term pleasure. That's because studying for the exam, Bentham could argue, scores higher in terms of the long term pleasures doing well in school lead to, as well as the fecundity of the pleasure in leading to yet other pleasures.
However, Bentham will have to concede that the very happy oyster that lives a very long time could, in principle, have a better life than a normal human. Mill's version of utilitarianism differed from Bentham's also in that he placed weight on the effectiveness of internal sanctions — emotions like guilt and remorse which serve to regulate our actions.
This is an off-shoot of the different view of human nature adopted by Mill. We are the sorts of beings that have social feelings, feelings for others, not just ourselves. We care about them, and when we perceive harms to them this causes painful experiences in us. When one perceives oneself to be the agent of that harm, the negative emotions are centered on the self.
One feels guilt for what one has done, not for what one sees another doing. Like external forms of punishment, internal sanctions are instrumentally very important to appropriate action. Mill also held that natural features of human psychology, such as conscience and a sense of justice, underwrite motivation.
The sense of justice, for example, results from very natural impulses. Like Bentham, Mill sought to use utilitarianism to inform law and social policy.
The aim of increasing happiness underlies his arguments for women's suffrage and free speech. We can be said to have certain rights, then — but those rights are underwritten by utility. If one can show that a purported right or duty is harmful, then one has shown that it is not genuine.
Improving the social status of women was important because they were capable of these cultivated faculties, and denying them access to education and other opportunities for development is forgoing a significant source of happiness. Further, the men who would deny women the opportunity for education, self-improvement, and political expression do so out of base motives, and the resulting pleasures are not ones that are of the best sort.
Bentham and Mill both attacked social traditions that were justified by appeals to natural order. The correct appeal is to utility itself. In the latter part of the 20th century some writers criticized utilitarianism for its failure to accommodate virtue evaluation. However, though virtue is not the central normative concept in Mill's theory, it is an extremely important one.
In Chapter 4 of Utilitarianism Mill noted. In Utilitarianism Mill argues that virtue not only has instrumental value, but is constitutive of the good life. A person without virtue is morally lacking, is not as able to promote the good. Wendy Donner notes that separating virtue from right allows Mill to solve another problem for the theory: the demandingness problem Donner This is the problem that holds that if we ought to maximize utility, if that is the right thing to do, then doing right requires enormous sacrifices under actual conditions , and that requiring such sacrifices is too demanding.
With duties, on Mill's view, it is important that we get compliance, and that justifies coercion. Henry Sidgwick's — The Methods of Ethics is one of the most well known works in utilitarian moral philosophy, and deservedly so. It offers a defense of utilitarianism, though some writers Schneewind have argued that it should not primarily be read as a defense of utilitarianism. On Sidgwick's view, utilitarianism is the more basic theory. A simple reliance on intuition, for example, cannot resolve fundamental conflicts between values, or rules, such as Truth and Justice that may conflict.
Further, the rules which seem to be a fundamental part of common sense morality are often vague and underdescribed, and applying them will actually require appeal to something theoretically more basic — again, utilitarianism. Yet further, absolute interpretations of rules seem highly counter-intuitive, and yet we need some justification for any exceptions — provided, again, by utilitarianism. Sidgwick provides a compelling case for the theoretical primacy of utilitarianism.
Sidgwick was also a British philosopher, and his views developed out of and in response to those of Bentham and Mill. His Methods offer an engagement with the theory as it had been presented before him, and was an exploration of it and the main alternatives as well as a defense.
Sidgwick was also concerned with clarifying fundamental features of the theory, and in this respect his account has been enormously influential to later writers, not only to utilitarians and consequentialists, generally, but to intuitionists as well. Sidgwick's thorough and penetrating discussion of the theory raised many of the concerns that have been developed by recent moral philosophers.
One extremely controversial feature of Sidgwick's views relates to his rejection of a publicity requirement for moral theory. He writes:. This accepts that utilitarianism may be self-effacing; that is, that it may be best if people do not believe it, even though it is true.
One issue raised in the above remarks is relevant to practical deliberation in general. To what extent should proponents of a given theory, or a given rule, or a given policy — or even proponents of a given one-off action — consider what they think people will actually do, as opposed to what they think those same people ought to do under full and reasonable reflection, for example? Extrapolating from the example used above, we have people who advocate telling the truth, or what they believe to be the truth, even if the effects are bad because the truth is somehow misused by others.
On the other hand are those who recommend not telling the truth when it is predicted that the truth will be misused by others to achieve bad results. Of course it is the case that the truth ought not be misused, that its misuse can be avoided and is not inevitable, but the misuse is entirely predictable. Sidgwick seems to recommending that we follow the course that we predict will have the best outcome, given as part of our calculations the data that others may fail in some way — either due to having bad desires, or simply not being able to reason effectively.
The worry Williams points to really isn't a worry specifically with utilitarianism Driver And of course, that heavily influences our intuitions. Sidgwick raised issues that run much deeper to our basic understanding of utilitarianism. For example, the way earlier utilitarians characterized the principle of utility left open serious indeterminacies.
The major one rests on the distinction between total and average utility. He raised the issue in the context of population growth and increasing utility levels by increasing numbers of people or sentient beings :.
For Sidgwick, the conclusion on this issue is not to simply strive to greater average utility, but to increase population to the point where we maximize the product of the number of persons who are currently alive and the amount of average happiness. So it seems to be a hybrid, total-average view. This discussion also raised the issue of policy with respect to population growth, and both would be pursued in more detail by later writers, most notably Derek Parfit Moore strongly disagreed with the hedonistic value theory adopted by the Classical Utilitarians.
Moore agreed that we ought to promote the good, but believed that the good included far more than what could be reduced to pleasure. He was a pluralist, rather than a monist, regarding intrinsic value.
For example, an officer tasked with policing a large pro-marijuana protest group may observe a person within the group selling marijuana. Legally, the officer has the duty to charge that person with trafficking in a controlled substance under the Controlled Drug and Substance Act, a serious indictable offence.
However, from a utilitarian position, the officer may elect not to arrest and charge the suspect for two reasons:. From a rule utilitarianism perspective, the officer should consider what the consequences would be if there were a rule that everyone was allowed to smoke and sell marijuana. If the officer believes that society would be well served by this rule, then the officer should allow the sale to continue. Should the officer believe the rule would be detrimental to society, the officer should consider this as well, and at least consider making the arrest.
Like all normative theories of ethics, utilitarianism cannot address all of the ethical dilemmas we face. Sometimes using utilitarian principles may be harmful to a group of people or to an individual.
Some of the major problems with utilitarian consequentialist ethics include the following:. In teleological reasoning, a person will do the right thing if the consequences of their actions are good. Skip to content Chapter 2: Ethical Systems. Previous: 2. Studies such as these provide ammunition for those who defend organized football as an institution.
However, many such studies were funded or carried out by the NFL, owners of NFL franchises, universities that earn millions of dollars from football, and other interested parties.
Given the obvious conflict of interest, the studies have been criticized on that ground. The NFL has taken other concrete steps to respond to the controversy. On the other hand, while football helmets can prevent fractured skulls, they will likely never be able to prevent concussions.
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. Bry believes that this will never happen. John York. Prior, The Slave Side of Sunday
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