Course content
Made of:
Normative ethical theories
Utilitarianism
Kantian deontological ethics
Aristotelian virtue ethics
**Application to 4 situations
o Stealing
o Simulated killing
o Eating animals
o Telling lies
Meta-ethics
Moral realism
Moral anti-realism
Normative ethical theories
An account of morality that is supposed to serve as a guide to action – one that sets out
rules or guidelines governing action.
Utilitarianism
The best known example of a consequentialist normative ethical theory. The right thing to
do is the action (out of the available) that will maximize utility.
Consequentialism is the broader view that right and wrong is determined by their causal
consequences - the value of the states of affairs that they bring about. The states of affairs
explain the way the world is.
Utilitarianism as a ‘family’ of theories:
Different theories offer different accounts of what ‘utility’ consists of
o Pure quantitative hedonistic (pleasure vs pain)
o Qualitative hedonistic (higher and lower pleasures)
o Non-hedonistic (preference utility as well as ‘well-being’ where this is broader
than mere ‘pleasure and lack of pain’
Different theories offer different accounts of whose ‘utility’ matters
o All humans
o Humans and all sentient animals
o People living now only or future people too (is there a differential weighting –
greater importance for ‘close’ people)
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) : Quantitative hedonistic utilitarianism
Starts with the factual observation that human beings seek pleasure and seek to avoid pain
(psychological) hedonism.
Utility = pleasure in the absence of pain.
Moral claim : we should act to maximize utility – with everything that can suffer being taken
into consideration, all counting equally.
,It is the crudest and simplest form of utilitarianism. The sophistication within it is variables
are taken into account in the calculation.
Variables include: intensity, duration, certainty (how likely the good/bad consequence is
given the action(s) under consideration), propinquity (how close in time it is), fecundity
(fertility= how likely the current pain is likely to generate further pleasure e.g.
jabs/operations/education etc.), purity (likelihood the pleasure will cause pain or vice versa).
Mill’s quantitative + qualitative hedonistic utilitarianism
For Bentham, the source of the pleasure doesn’t matter. It is prejudice and wrong to prefer
“intellectual” pursuits to trivial games.
Mill thought this was a mistake, as did contemporary critics, who labelled this^ form of
utilitarianism ‘a doctrine worthy of swine’.
Mill preferred a doctrine that valued, for example, poetry above push pin; it is ‘better to be
Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’.
Two routes:
a) Claim some superiority (e.g. more fecundity) of intellectual over bodily pleasures in
Bentham’s utilitarianism.
b) Mill’s distinctive contribution: a qualitative evaluation among pleasures (making the
difference intrinsic to the pleasures, whereas the first idea makes it extrinsic)
It would be absurd to consider only quality and not quantity.
You can use competent judges to decide the level of quality: one pleasure is higher
than another if a majority of people with experience of both rate it as higher.
Evaluative thoughts for Mills competent judges
1. It is not clear that competent judges will have consistent preferences of the sort
that Mill thinks his criterion will yield. e.g. honest people will probably say they
prefer sex to poetry
2. The reality, in any case, is that judges’ preferences will vary from time to time.
The reasons why are complex:
We like variety
Diminishing marginal utility
Inability to enjoy one indefinitely
Limitations of our physical nature
Delaying pleasure can itself be a pleasure anticipation keeping things special
Clear elements of arguable truth/plausibility behind Mill’s desire to distinguish higher and
lower pleasures:
a) Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied
(seems right, provided that Socrates isn’t permanently frustrated)
b) No intelligent person would elect to be a fool
Furthermore:
, c) We need to account for the fact that we value our shorter lives, including ‘firework’
movements of success/achievement or other extreme pleasures MORE HIGHLY than
we would a much longer life of a singular, unvarying, mild sensation of pleasure
Therefore: Utility shouldn’t be thought of as a single type of sensation of which
smaller chunks can be aggregated. (If this was the case, the oysters life would be
better than ours).
d) The sorts of experiential pleasure that we get from different activities are so
different that it seems impossible to easily compare them on the same scale
e) Masochists seem hard to fit into a conception of utility as experiential pleasure of
any kind.
These kinds of consideration lead philosophers to reject a view of ‘utility’ as any sort of
sensation/experience.
They tempt us towards PREFERENCE UTILITARIANISM: utility consists in the satisfaction
of people’s preferences/desires [Can take into account different strengths of desires].
But even preference utilitarianism has counterintuitive consequences: e.g. it is not in the
best interest of a junkie to satisfy their desires.
Perhaps we need some form of ‘ideal utilitarianism’ where utility consists of people
having the best kind of lives that they can. This would lean on some notion of ‘well-
being’ encompassing long life, good health, access to education etc.
(Good objection to utilitarianism: affair where partner is unaware. Common sense = not
moral, utilitarianism = moral).
Mill’s proof for utilitarianism
Stage 1: Denial that strict proof can be given
Mill says that there is no strict proof of any principle related to morals but that it is possible
to offer considerations that suffice rationally to persuade people to accept them
"Questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof”
Stage 2: The proof that each person’s happiness is a good
Mill says: “the only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people
actually see it… The sole evidence that it is possible to produce anything is desirable, is that
people desire it”
Problem 1
Line of reason is flawed:
Visible = capable of being seen
Audible = capable of being heard
Desirable DOES NOT EQUAL capable of being desired
Desirable = such that it ought to be done
, The second problem with the line of reason is that, if it were correct, it would strictly
prove this principle but Mill has just claimed that ANY principle of morality cannot be
proved
Problem 2: Moore’s criticism of Mill
Moore alleged that Mill commits what he called the “naturalistic fallacy” – the label he
gave to what he thought was the mistake of trying to analyze or define ‘good’,
Moore thought that the term ‘good’ was the name of a simple, unanalyzable, and ‘non-
natural’ property (see later under non-naturalism/intuitionism)
We do not tend to accept this criticism as:
a) Mill was not defining the term ‘good’
b) Moore is probably wrong about the nature of the term ‘good’
Stage 3: General happiness as desirable
Each person’s happiness is desired by him/her. Therefore, the general happiness is desired
by everyone.
“Each person’s happiness is a good to that person, and the genera happiness, therefore, a
good to the aggregate of all persons.”
Problem 1: The fallacy of composition
Just because every person has a mother does not mean there is some individual woman
who is everyone’s mother.
Each person’s happiness may be good for him/her without there being anything that is
good for all people.
This is plainly, a fallacious form of argument, and the inference, as it is stated by Mill, is
not legitimate.
Solution to save Mill’s proof (stage 2+3)
The problems arise due to Mill’s careless statement of his argument.
1. Every persons happiness is a good. There is no proof of this, but it has a good deal of
intuitive plausibility: people behave as if they thought that their own happiness
mattered. It’s hard to believe that everyone is completely wrong about this. So it is fair
to say they are correct.
Mill’s key point was that Utilitarianism agrees with ordinary commonsense moral
thinking. It is a virtue of the theory that is describes what we already believe.
2. If my happiness is a good, then so, presumably, is yours. There is no obvious difference
between me and you that would make it plausible that my happiness matters morally
and yours doesn’t. And this is true for all subjects capable of enjoying happiness and
suffering pain.
So,
It’s morally desirable that each of us be happy. And the more happiness, the better. SO
the best state of affairs is the one in which people as a whole are as happy overall as can
be.
