1. Chapter 7: Ethics Utilitarianism
Introducing Philosophy, 10th edition
Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins, and Clancy Martin

2. Utilitarianism
A conception of morality developed by Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and his son John Stuart Mill

3. Jeremy Bentham ( )
A leader in the legal reform movement in England; founding father of utilitarianism
His principle of utility, that one should act to produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people, was the central theme of utilitarianism and slowly worked its way into the confusion of rules and statutes that constituted the English legal system of his day
His best-known work is his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)

4. Utilitarians wished to consider the consequences as well as the “will” of an action and to consider the particular circumstances of an action in an attempt to determine what is morally right

5. Utilitarianism and Pleasure
Hedonism: the good life in which ultimate good is pleasure; in the final analysis we want and ought to want this pleasure
Traditional hedonism is concerned with one’s personal pleasure; utilitarianism is concerned with pleasure of one’s own and of others
Central principle is often summarized as “the greatest good for the greatest number”
The procedure we use to implement the principle of utility is called the happiness calculus

6. Problems with Bentham’s Theory
It can be used to morally justify actions that many of us consider to be immoral, such as a secret but adulterous “fling” in a marriage
Suppose many people would get a great deal of pleasure out of seeing some innocent person tortured and slaughtered. The victim would suffer a great deal of pain, but by increasing the size of the crowd we could eventually obtain an amount of pleasure on the part of everyone else that more than balanced the suffering of the victim

7. John Stuart Mill ( )
Son of philosopher James Mill and one of the documented geniuses of modern history
Intellectual feats by age ten would have been to the credit of most scholars at age sixty
Suffered nervous breakdown in 1826 at twenty and turned attention from the “hard” sciences to poetry and political reform
Best known for his moral and political writings On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1861)

8. Mill’s logic and epistemology are the best to be found in the British empiricist tradition of the nineteenth century
His views on mathematics, for example, became one of those positions that every writer on the subject had either to accept or to fight forcefully

9. Mill’s Refinements on Utilitarianism
Mill’s version of utilitarianism added an important distinction:
It is not only the quantity of pleasure that counts but also the quality

10. Mill’s Refinements on Utilitarianism
The “swine objection” to utilitarianism
Is the life of a satisfied pig preferable to that of an unsatisfied human?
Mill’s response: distinguish between higher and lower pleasures
A dissatisfied human may live a better life than a satisfied pig because the human has access to a higher quality of pleasures than the pig does