Utilitarianism

Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation

Chapter I. Of the Principle of Utility

I. Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters ...

II. The principle of utility is the foundation of the present work....  By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever....  I say of every action whatsoever; and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.

III.  By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all the same) or (what again comes to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness.

The interest of the community then is, what? — the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.

V. It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.

VI. An action then may be said to be conformable to the principle of utility ... when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.

VII.  Also a measure of government.

Etc.

Chapter IV. Value of a Lot of Pleasure or Pain, How to be Measured

I. Pleasures, then, and the avoidance of pains, are the ends that the legislator has in view.  It will be more or less according to the following:

1. Intensity

2. Duration

3. Certainty or uncertainty

4. Propinquity or remoteness

5. Fecundity (chance of being following by sensations of the same kind — pleasure or pain)

6. Purity (chance of not being following by sensations of the opposite kind — pain or pleasure)

7. Extent (number of persons to whom it extends, who are affected by it.

VIII.  In all this there is nothing but what the practice of mankind, wheresoever they have a clear view of their own interest, is perfectly conformable. [True?  What about the question after the Mill selection on other cultures — say, in China?  Is this the morality of a bourgeois, capitalist, Western culture?]

Very hard to get people in America not to think as utilitarians: stem-cell research, buying organs, abortion.

Editor’s question: Can the utility principle support the idea that certain individual rights should be upheld even if doing so makes the majority very unhappy?  If not, which should give way — respect for individual rights, or the utility principle itself? [But of course if the utility principle gives way, then what is your defense of rights, if your defense of rights is based on the utility principle?  Then you have simply revealed that you follow Locke, not Bentham or Mill; or that you’re confused.]

Speaking of confused, now to Mill.