Utilitarianism is the moral, social and political theory originated by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, and further developed by John Stuart Mill. At its core is a simple equation between ‘the good’, and ‘happiness’ or pleasure. The basic thesis states that whatever measure, policy, choice or decision maximizes the positive balance of pleasure over pain across a population, or for a single individual if only they are concerned, is what is ‘good’ and therefore ‘right’. The theory expressly denies, in its earlier versions, any ordering, moral or otherwise, of the sources of pleasure. In Bentham’s own words, ‘pushpin is as good as poetry’. Except for the distribution principle, ‘that each man should count as one, and none for more than one’, utilitarianism allows no other moral or political criteria of decision. Bentham argued that it ought, in principle, to be possible directly to quantify and sum the positive and negative consequences, in terms of pleasure, of any act by what he called the ‘felicific calculus’. Policy-making for a society, as much as private moral decision-making for an individual, would then become essentially an automatic process. Naturally there have been many adjustments and refinements to this basic utilitarian theory over the years. Two may be identified as of particular importance.
John Stuart Mill attempted to get away from the over-hedonistic emphasis by suggesting that there were, in fact, hierarchies of desirability. He argued that those who had experienced both of what he defined as ‘gross’ and ‘refined’ pleasures would always opt for the less basic or gross.
He also attempted, though somewhat unconvincingly, to demonstrate how our other basic politico-moral values, for example a desire for justice or a high value on freedom, could be derived from the utility principle. The other broad area of development, mainly the work of modern moral philosophers, can produce some unfortunate consequences of utilitarian argument when applied as a public political philosophy as well as a private moral code. The problem has tended to be that what maximizes the interests or happiness of a single individual might, were everyone to act in the same way, be disastrous as a public policy. Thus there has come about a distinction between ‘rule’ versus ‘act’ utilitarianism. An ‘act’ utilitarian requires that each individual ensures that their every act maximizes their own utility, whereas the more plausible ‘rule’ utilitarian requires that laws and regulations be decided so that, on balance across the population, the rule maximizes the sum of individual utilities, even though in particular cases individuals would not, as selfish utility maximizers, choose to act as the rule requires. The whole aim of utilitarianism is to escape, as much as possible, from reliance on any source of moral authority, whether it be religion, another metaphysic or appeal to such abstractions as natural law. Although it is not immediately obvious, nearly all modern parties and governments in the Western world have in fact operated according to a utilitarian approach. Most of economic theory, and the whole of ‘welfare economics’ (see welfarism), and many of the theoretical models and justifications for democracy, are frankly utilitarian. Policy analysis, especially as developed by civil servants and academic specialists in the 1960s, is equally based on a utility calculus, and until recently the prevailing theories of law and jurisprudence were derived from utilitarianism. Only in the 1970s did political theorists of a non-Marxist kind even begin to develop non-utilitarian general political philosophies, so total was the hold of the Benthamite tradition over Western intellectuals. Even then it is instructive to note that the new approaches, by thinkers like Rawls, Nozick and Dworkin, were based on a return to a tradition of political theory, mainly that of John Locke, which was the original competitor to the thinkers from whom utilitarianism itself derived, such as Hobbes and David Hume. In a secular society, and one without the intellectual armoury of ‘scientific socialism’, which has to operate with a minimum of coercion and in a more or less democratic manner, there is really little alternative to an appeal to rational self-interest, which is what utilitarianism amounts to.
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