John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism (A critique)
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Utilitarianism is a philosophical epidemic in contemporary social and political dialogue. In one form or another, the notion of a “greater good” above the good of individual agents has taken root in group-centric ideologies. Dictators have invoked it on nationalistic or ethnocentric grounds; leftists have promoted it in the name of “mankind”; even the most individualistic of nations, such as the United States, are overrun by policy concerns for the “national interest. ” Part of its appeal is intuitive: if happiness is good, and we want more of good things, then the greatest happiness is what we ought to look for. This looks decent enough in words, but it is only a connection of similar sounds that holds it together. What is meant by “happiness,” and what is the sense in which it is “good”? To whom does the “greatest happiness” pertain, and why “ought” we to pursue it? Utilitarianism, even in its most “complete” form, fails to address these questions with valid answers. –more–>Overall, utilitarianism is a philosophical mess. Its moral implications are strange; its practice is filled with difficulties and absurdities; and its justification arises from, principally, nowhere. Mill’s treatment of utilitarianism, in particular, is one with egregious flaws. Its essential characteristics can be listed as follows: pleasure (in the non-degrading sense) is all that is intrinsically valuable; each person’s pleasure is valued equally, with allowance for “kind”; an action’s morality is measured by its positive productive correspondence with pleasure (for all); and agents must be disinterested spectators in order to consider their decisions correctly. [1] Problems with utilitarianism can be generally summarized in three, often inter-related, categories: the alienation of agents from themselves, problems of moral calculation, and lack of justification.
The doctrine of consequentialism[2] is the principal cause of bizarre moral demands expressed by utilitarianism. As Philippa Foot notes, there is a very compelling idea behind suggesting that no one would ever consider it morally acceptable to choose a worse state of affairs over a better one. [3] Using that idea as an argument against non-consequentialist theories, however, either begs the question or causes friction with pre-existing, weak intuition, depending on the senses of the words “better” and “worse. ” If they are used normatively, clearly no deontological[4] moral theorist would reject a morally “better” state of affairs (more duties fulfilled) for a “worse” one to do so would be antithetical to having a moral theory in the first place, and thus this case is trivial. [5] If they are used supposing some usage which is non-normative but somehow value-based, then they essentially ignore the moral theory under criticism, instead imposing a standard from a foreign hierarchy of values, i. e. a floating abstraction. For example, one might criticize Ayn Rand’s Objectivism for providing no political guarantee for the care of physically handicapped (beyond protection from coercion), indicating an alleged problem with the consequences of Objectivism. However, Objectivism establishes a direct relationship between its principles (e. g. non-interventionism) and concretes (e. g. nature of reality, nature of humans, validity of the senses, etc. so this criticism merely involves some relativistic view of a “good” state of affairs being used as a standard to judge a reasoned moral theory.
Consequentialism affects the role of the agent in moral decision-making quite severely. Under consequentialist utilitarianism, an action’s morality can be defined thusly: that action is moral which brings about the intrinsically desirable state of affairs. An agent is as much morally responsible for those states which arise from his action as those from his inaction. Therefore, at any given point in time, he must decide which action will produce the proper state from that point forward, regardless of the past.
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