UTILITARIANISM
CONCEPTS OF UTILITY, PLEASURE, HEDONISM AND HAPPINESS
Utility: The property which helps to measure which actions lead to the most happiness. The more
utility an action has, the more pleasure it produces and pain it reduces.
Pleasure: A feeling of happy satisfaction or enjoyment.
Hedonism: A belief that the only good in life is pleasure or happiness.
Happiness: The state of being happy.
SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL INFLUENCES
The Enlightenment was a cultural movement, and its key thinkers Locke and Hume influenced
Bentham. Both were empiricists who focused on information that was available from the world,
reflected in Bentham’s focus on empirical human experience and deducing from human behaviour
that humans work to achieve happiness. Locke also influenced Bentham on his view that reason was
more important than custom or tradition, shown through his rejection of Christian ethics.
The Industrial Revolution influenced Bentham as it was a time of great change which caused many
social problems.
THE CONTRIBUTION OF BENTHAM AND MILL
Bentham argued that humans are ruled by pain and pleasure, and that we must seek pleasure and
avoid pain.
‘Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and
pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what
we shall do’ – Bentham
His Principle of Utility states that when faced with an ethical decision, we should choose the course
of action which maximises pleasure and minimises pain for the greatest number of people. He
devised the Hedonic Calculus to determine quantitatively the right course of action, listing the
factors which must be considered when calculating the amount of pleasure an act will produce:
intensity, duration, certainty, remoteness, fecundity, purity, extent. It maintains that ethical
decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis, so it is known as Act Utilitarianism.
Mill was concerned with the quality of the pleasure and separated between higher and lower
pleasures.
‘Pleasure P1 is more desirable than pleasure P2 if: all or almost all people who have had
experience of both give a decided preference to P1, irrespective of any feeling that they
ought to prefer it’ – Mill
Mill argued that happiness was too complex to be calculated in every ethical situation, so he thought
that rules should be developed which guide moral agents as to what will result in happiness,
developed through trial and error rather than the utility calculus.
