Utilitarianism
(Lat. utilis, useful) is a modern form of the Hedonistic ethical
theory which teaches that the end of human conduct is happiness,
and that consequently the discriminating norm which distinguishes
conduct into right and wrong is pleasure and pain. In the words of
one of its most distinguished advocates, John Stuart Mill,
the creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, utility or
the greatest happiness principle, holds that actions are right in
proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend
to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended
pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the
privation of pleasure (Utilitarianism, ii, 1863).
Although the term Utilitarianism did not come into vogue until it
had been adopted by Bentham, and until the essential tenets of the
system had already been advocated by many English philosophers, it
may be said that, with the important exception of Helvetius (De
l'esprit, 1758), from whom Bentham seems to have borrowed, all the
champions of this system have been English. The favour which it
has enjoyed in English speculation may be ascribed in a great
measure to the dominance of Locke's teaching, that all our ideas
are derived exclusively from sense experience. This
epistemological doctrine, hostile to all shades of intentionalism,
finds its ethical complement in the theory that our moral ideas of
right and wrong, our moral judgments, and conscience itself are
derived originally from the experienced results of actions.
Tracing the stream of Utilitarian thought from its sources, we may
start with Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), whose fundamental ethical
axiom is that right conduct is that which promotes our own
welfare; and the social code of morals depends for its
justification on whether or not it serves the wellbeing of those
who observe it. A Protestant divine, Richard Cumberland (De
legibus natur�, 1672), engaged in the refutation of Hobbes's
doctrine, that morality depends on civil enactment, sought to show
that the greatest happiness principle is a law of the Gospel and a
law of nature: "The greatest possible benevolence of every
rational agent towards all the rest constitutes the happiest state
of each and all. Accordingly common good will be the supreme law."
This view was further developed by some other theologians of whom
the last and most conspicuous was Paley (Principles of Moral and
Political Philosophy, 1785), who reasoned that since God wills the
happiness of all men it follows that if we would conform our
conduct to God's will we must act so as to promote the common
happiness; and virtue consists in doing good to all mankind in
obedience to the will of God and for the sake of everlasting
happiness. Moral obligation he conceived to be the pressure of the
Divine will upon our wills urging us to right action. More in
harmony with the spirit of the later Utilitarians was Hume, the
slightest of whose preoccupations was to find any religious source
or sanction of morality. In his "Inquiry concerning the Principles
of Morals" (1751) he carried out an extensive analysis of the
various judgments which we pass upon our own character and conduct
and on those of others; and from this study drew the conclusion
that virtue and personal merit consist in those qualities which
are useful to ourselves and others. In the course of his
speculation he encounters the question which is the irremovable
stumbling block in the path of the Utilitarian theorist: How is
the motive of self-interest to be reconciled with the motive of
benevolence; if every man necessarily pursues his own happiness,
how can the happiness of all be the end of conduct? Unlike the
later thinkers of this school, Hume did not discuss or attempt
systematically to solve the difficulty; he dismissed it by resting
on the assumption that benevolence is the supreme virtue.
In Hartley (Observations of Man, 1748) we find the first
methodical effort to justify the Utilitarian principle by means of
the theory of association to which so large a part in the genesis
of our moral judgments is assigned by subsequent speculators,
especially those of the Evolutionist party. From sensations and
the lower elementary or primary emotions, according to Hartley,
result higher feelings and emotions, different in kind from the
processes out of which they have arisen. The altruistic motives,
sympathy and benevolence, are then accounted for. With Bentham
arises the group of thinkers who have appropriated the name of
Utilitarians as their distinctive badge. The leaders after Bentham
were the two Mills, the two Austins, and Godwin, who are also
known as the Philosophic Radicals. While the members of this party
devoted considerable thought to the defence and development of
theoretical Utilitarianism and made it the starting-point of their
political activity, they became remarkable less as philosophic
speculators than as active reformers of social and economic
conditions and of legislation. The keynote of their doctrines and
policy is struck by Bentham in the opening of his "Principles of
Morals and Legislation" (1789):
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 what we shall do. On the one hand the
standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of cause and
effect are linked to their throne. They govern us in all we do,
every effort we can make to throw off their subjection will serve
but to demonstrate and confirm it. In a word man may pretend to
abjure their empire; but in reality he will remain subject to it
all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this
subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system the
object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hand of
reason and law.
Staunchly standing by the principle of unqualified egoism, Bentham
rids himself of the task of reconciling self-interest and
altruism:
Dream not that men will move their little finger to serve you,
unless their advantage in doing so is obvious to them. Men never
did so and never will while human nature is made of its present
materials. But they will desire to serve you when by so doing they
can serve themselves, and the occasions on which they can serve
themselves by serving you are multitudinous (Deontology, ii, 1834;
posthumous work).
In the hands of Bentham and his disciples Utilitarianism
dissociates morality from its religious basis and, incorporating
Determinism with its other tenets, becomes pronouncedly
Positivistic, and moral obligation is resolved into a prejudice or
a feeling resulting from a long-continued association of
disagreeable consequences attending some kinds of actions, and
advantages following others. The word ought Bentham characterizes
as an authoritative impostor, the talisman of arrogancy,
indolence, and ignorance. It is the condemnation of Utilitarianism
that this estimate of duty is thoroughly consistent with the
system; and no defender of the utility theory has been able,
though some have tried, to indicate the claims of moral obligation
on Positivistic Utilitarian grounds. Bentham drew up a curious
scheme for computing the worth or weight to be assigned to all
sorts of pleasures and pains, as a practical norm to determine in
the concrete the moral value of any action. He assumes that all
pleasures are alike in kind and differ only in quantity, that is
in intensity, certainty, duration, etc. His psychological
analysis, besides the original defect of making self-interest the
sole motive of human action, contains many errors. Subsequent
writers have abandoned it as worthless for the very good reason
that to calculate, as its employment would demand, all the results
of every action, and to strike a balance between the advantages
and disadvantages attendant upon it, would require an intellect
much more powerful than that with which man is endowed.
The classic expression of the system is John Stuart Mill's
"Utilitarianism," which endeavours to raise the Utilitarian ideal
to a higher plane than that of the undisguised selfishness upon
which Bentham rested it. As the foundation of his structure Mill
asserts that every man necessarily acts in order to obtain his own
happiness; but finding this ground logically insufficient to
furnish a basis for an adequate criterion of conduct, and prompted
by his own large sympathies, he quickly endeavours to substitute
"the happiness of all concerned" for "the agent's own happiness".
The argument over which he, the author of a formidable work on
logic, endeavours to pass from the first to the second position,
may serve as an example suitable to submit to the beginner in
logic when he is engaged in the detection of sophisms. The
argument, in brief, is that, as each one desires and pursues his
own happiness, and the sum total of these individual ends makes up
the general happiness, it follows that the general happiness is
the one thing desirable by all and provides the Utilitarian
standard of what is right in conduct. "As well might you argue",
says Martineau, "that because of a hundred men each one's hunger
is satisfied by his dinner, the hunger of all must be satisfied
with the dinner of each." To escape some of the criticisms urged
against the doctrine as stated by Bentham, who made no distinction
in the various kinds of pleasure, Mill claimed that Utilitarianism
notes that pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity; that
in the judgment of those who have experience of different
pleasures, some are preferable to others, that it is better to be
a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be
Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. Then he slips from
"preferable" to "higher", thus surreptitiously introducing a moral
classification among pleasures. The only legitimate grounds for
attaching higher and lower moral values to various pleasures, is
to estimate them according to the rank of the faculties or of the
kinds of action to which they belong as results. But to do this is
to assume some moral standard by which we can measure the right or
wrong of action, independently of its pleasurable or painful
consequences. To answer the objection that virtue is desired for
its own sake, and men do right frequently without any calculation
of the happiness to be derived from their action, Mill enlists the
association theory; as the result of experience, actions that have
been approved or condemned on account of their pleasurable or
disagreeable consequences at length come to be looked upon by us
as good or bad, without our actually adverting to their pleasant
or painful result.
Since Mill's time the only writer who has introduced any
modification into strictly Utilitarian thought is Sidgwick
(Methods of Ethics, 1874), who acknowledges that the pleasure-and-
pain standard is incapable of serving universally as the criterion
of morality; but believes it to be valuable as an instrument for
the correction of the received moral code. The general happiness
principle he defends as the norm of conduct but he treats it
rather as a primary than a demonstrable one. Although he
vigorously denounced Utilitarianism, Herbert Spencer's ethical
construction (Data of Ethics, 1879), which may be taken as the
type of the Evolutionist school, is fundamentally Utilitarian.
True, instead of happiness he makes the increase of life, that is,
a fuller and more intensive life, the end of human conduct,
because it is the end of the entire cosmic activity of which human
conduct is a part. But he holds pleasure and pain to be the
standard which discriminates right from wrong so that in reality
he looks upon the moral value of actions as entirely dependent
upon their utility. His account of the genesis of our moral ideas,
of conscience, and of our moral judgments is too lengthy and
complicated to enter into here. Suffice it to say that in it he
sets forth the influence of association with that of heredity as
the source of our moral standards and judgments. Our sense of
moral obligation is but a transitory feeling, generated by the
confluence of our inherited racial experience of the results of
action with another feeling that the remote present themselves to
our consciousness as possessing more "authoritativeness" than the
immediate results. The arguments urged against Hedonism (q. v.) in
general are effective against Utilitarianism. Its own peculiar
weakness lies in its failure to find a passage from egoism to
altruism; its identification of self-interest and benevolence as a
motive of conduct; and its claim that the ideas morally right and
useful are identical at bottom.
JAMES J. FOX
Transcribed by Tomas Hancil and Rick McCarty
From the Catholic Encyclopedia, copyright � 1913 by the
Encyclopedia Press, Inc. Electronic version copyright � 1996 by
New Advent, Inc.
Taken from the New Advent Web Page (www.knight.org/advent).
This article is part of the Catholic Encyclopedia Project, an
effort aimed at placing the entire Catholic Encyclopedia 1913
edition on the World Wide Web. The coordinator is Kevin Knight,
editor of the New Advent Catholic Website. If you would like to
contribute to this worthwhile project, you can contact him by e-
mail at (knight.org/advent). For more information please download
the file cathen.txt/.zip.
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