Utilitarianism

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UTILITARIANISM

eighteenth-century origins
nineteenth-century utilitarianism
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One of the foundational doctrines of modern ethics in relation to political philosophy and public administration, utilitarianism has since the late eighteenth century pursued the implications of a number of interconnected ideas. These include the claim that the promotion of pleasure and avoidance of pain are the chief springs of human action, from which it was thought to follow, allowing for considerable complexities of measurement, that the concept of utility could be defined for each individual as the maximization of his or her happiness. The function of governments aiming to enhance public utility, it was argued, thus consisted in promoting "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Since such propositions were believed to accord with psychology, utilitarians contended that their doctrine was superior to classical, Christian, and natural law conceptions of virtue or duty, which were articulated only as abstract ideals. In putting forward policies they held to be beneficial and expedient, utilitarians judged that what should be done required assessments of human conduct's tangible consequences and less attention than had been given by other thinkers to its arcane motives. Their ethics therefore placed greater emphasis on manifest standards of the good than on presumed notions of what was intrinsically right.

eighteenth-century origins

These beliefs, as articulated by Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), James Mill (1773–1836), and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), owed much to both ancient and modern sources, including Greek sophists' denial of the existence of moral absolutes on the grounds that man is the measure of all things, as well as Epicurean portraits of our species' hedonism, Hobbesian conceptions of felicity, and French empiricist and materialist accounts of human nature's malleability. It was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, however, that utilitarianism came to be developed as a systematic doctrine amenable to implementation by progressive rulers and radical political movements alike. This was partly because it was in this period of European intellectual history that admirers of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution undertook to extend its scope from natural phenomena to human affairs, endeavoring to formulate a science of man that also included a science of ethics and government. Utilitarianism served that purpose admirably. It was designed to promote strategies of public policy based on an empirical understanding of human nature, to derive values from facts and to dispose of all prescriptions that masqueraded prejudice and intuition as truth. To define both individual and public utility it required no strictures of Christian altruism nor, apparently, any suppression of men's and women's actual ambitions.

If in these respects it seemed to provide a more democratic ethos than any competing philosophy and was hence suitable for an age of self-government, it in fact took root in the public domain in the late eighteenth century largely because progressively minded kings and queens embraced it. Although utilitarianism was to achieve its apotheosis in England in the course of the nineteenth century, many of its principles, and especially its commitment to legislative reforms designed to promote public happiness, were first adopted in regimes already at the time portrayed as examples of enlightened despotism. Frederick II of Prussia's (r. 1740–1786) prohibition of torture and Joseph II's (Holy Roman emperor, 1765–1790; and Habsburg ruler of Austria, 1780–1790) abolition of serfdom were each inspired by utilitarian doctrines as interpreted by German and Austrian proponents of cameralism who, like Bentham and his followers in England, sought to reorganize government's structures and functions to make it more rational and accountable to the public interest. In France physiocratic ministers and advisors of King Louis XVI (r. 1774–1792) likewise set themselves the task of reforming feudal systems of agriculture and trade, to avert an already perceptible crisis of the old regime that would in time provoke the French Revolution of 1789.

In both theory and practice eighteenth-century utilitarianism was perhaps more concerned with alleviating suffering than with securing happiness in a positive way, its chief proponents of the period addressing their attention above all to the criminal law. Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) made the distinction between crime and sin and the insusceptibility of religious beliefs to political enforcement central pillars of his tract of 1764, On Crimes and Punishment, where the expression "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," makes its first printed appearance (in Italian) in a work of political theory, although it had been anticipated by Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) in 1725 in his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Torture, argued Beccaria, served no rational purpose in the affairs of a civilized state, since it could not deter future crimes and only managed to brutalize its victims, propositions soon taken to heart by Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet; 1694–1778) in his own denunciations of the violence of religious bigotry sanctioned against Protestants by the Catholic Church in France.

In his Fragment on Government of 1776 Bentham invoked Hutcheson's and Beccaria's formulation of the expression that would come to be regarded as his legacy and to encapsulate utilitarianism's meaning, by this time given currency as well in Joseph Priestley's Essay on the First Principles of Government of 1768. In 1789, in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Bentham elaborated his conception of utility at greater length. Like Beccaria, he was initially most concerned with policies warranting the minimization of pain. In the late 1780s and early 1790s he developed a scheme for the reform of Britain's prison system through a strategy of benign surveillance, termed Panopticon, whose disciplinary character in the absence of physical violence would come to be regarded by Michel Foucault (1926–1984) as one of the modern state's insidious bureaucratic trappings. While most utilitarians after Bentham have been committed to liberal ideals, they have often been charged with inconsistency on the grounds that their principle of aggregating benefits for "the greatest number" is inescapably hostile to individual freedom.

nineteenth-century utilitarianism

Bentham welcomed the French Revolution and was eventually nominated a citizen of France, but he at first sought reform through philanthropy and not democracy and remarked that he would only agree to become a republican in Paris if permitted to remain a Royalist in London. In England it was less through his own endeavors than the influence of his chief and far more radical acolyte, James Mill, that utilitarianism became a potent political force. Under Mill's guidance Bentham began early in the nineteenth century to campaign for major constitutional and social reform in England by way of such instruments as a free press, a parliament more manifestly accountable to the British electorate, and, eventually, universal suffrage. His Plan of Parliamentary Reform of 1818, together with Mill's essays "Education" and "Government" for the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Westminster Review, a political journal that the two men founded in 1824, were to make the philosophy of English utilitarianism, by now described as philosophic radicalism, one of the principal motors of British constitutional change that was to culminate in the great Reform Act of 1832 and the transformation around this time of the old Whigs into the modern Liberal Party. Other currents of English radicalism, including the Chartist movement, also contributed to these developments, but none sprang from so deep a source of reflection on human nature in general or, thanks above all to Mill, from its by now tributary doctrine of political representation.

Mill's son was to prove Britain's preeminent, or at least most famous, political philosopher of the nineteenth century, less for his writings on utilitarianism than for his System of Logic and his essay On Liberty, still today liberalism's chief manifesto. That Benthamite utilitarianism was an insufficient foundation for ethics seemed plain to John Stuart Mill for much of his life, and in essays on Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) dating from the late 1830s he held that this doctrine, for all its admirable deconstruction of purely abstract ideals and blind intuitions, offered a defense of empiricism that lacked depth, subtlety, or any appreciation of aesthetic delight or the merits of received opinion. Utilitarianism as Bentham conceived it was a pragmatic and critical philosophy that had come to be compellingly radicalized, but it had never been informed by the terrors and passions of real experience, Mill remarked. In his essay Utilitarianism, dating from 1861, he continued to defend the principles of a philosophy he had mastered from his father, but he also set himself the task of distinguishing individuals' higher from their lower pleasures, insisting, contrary to Bentham's own scheme, that some kinds of pleasure, particularly of the mind, are more desirable and valuable than others.

Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), in his Methods of Ethics, first published in 1874, developed Mill's objections to pure utilitarianism by way of contrasting both its virtues and faults from those of egoism and intuitionism, with which it competed for pride of place among other ethical doctrines. According to Sidgwick, each of these approaches taken separately was ultimately at variance with the more complex conceptions of reasonable conduct that did not admit of the formal definitions of the concepts of obligation and duty advocated by their proponents. To Sidgwick's analysis in particular moral philosophers of the past century have owed many of their distinctions between consequentialist and duty-based or deontological moral philosophies, and between Benthamite consequentialism and the deontology of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in particular, some of which were already anticipated by Kant himself in his treatment of empiricism and the philosophy of David Hume (1711–1776).