Draft of 10-22-03
PHIL 13: Ethics; Fall 2003
David O. Brink; UCSD
Handout #5: Bentham and Utilitarianism

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was an influential moral and legal philosopher who advocated utilitarianism or “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as the appropriate standard for both private conduct and institutional design and reform and who was the leader of a group of utilitarians known as the Philosophical Radicals, including James and John Stuart Mill, who criticized existing political and legal institutions and proposed legislative reforms based on utilitarian principles.  (For more information about Bentham, consult The Bentham Project.)

HEDONISM AND UTILITARIANISM
Bentham begins his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation with a statement of psychological hedonism.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure [I 1].
We might equate utility with value or happiness.  Bentham does as well (I 3), and he equates pleasure and utility, thereby endorsing a hedonistic conception of utility or happiness.  He goes on to say that utility not only describes human motivation but sets the standard of right and wrong (I 1).
By the principle of utility is meant that principles which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question … [I 2].
It remains to be determined whose happiness matters.  One might imagine that it is the utility of the agent.  This would be the ethical counterpart to psychological egoism.  However, Bentham’s answer, and the answer characteristic of utilitarianism, is the happiness of the community or the happiness of all (I 4-10).  The natural way to understand this claim is as the claim that is sometimes called (hedonistic) act utilitarianism.
An agent should perform that action, of those available to her, that maximizes utility (pleasure).
It might help to understand Bentham’s hedonism to see different commitments it makes.  (1) Consequences Matter.  It’s a form of consequentialism, saying that individuals should perform actions with good consequences.  (2)  Which Consequences? It understands good consequences in terms of happiness or well-being.  (3) Happiness for Whom?  It is concerned with universal happiness, rather than the agent’s own happiness.  (4) Which Conception of Happiness?  It understands happiness or utility in terms of pleasure.  (5) How is Duty a Function of Happiness?  Bentham’s utilitarianism assesses actions directly in terms of their utility.

How can Bentham reconcile psychological egoism (hedonism) with (hedonistic) utilitarianism?  Here we seem to have a special case of the conflict we recognized earlier between psychological egoism and morality’s demands of altruism.

Bentham is not unaware of this tension.  He addresses part of the problem in the political context.  Here the problem is: How can we get self-interested rulers to rule in the interest of the governed, as they should?  Bentham’s answer is to make rulers democratically accountable  Bentham’s argument, elaborated by James Mill, is something like this.

  1. Each person acts only to promote his own interests.
  2. The proper object of government is the interest of the governed.
  3. Hence, rulers will pursue the proper object of government iff their interests coincide with those of the governed.
  4. A ruler’s interest will coincide with those of the governed only if he is politically accountable to the governed.
  5. Hence, rulers must be democratically accountable.
This is an ingenious response.  Unfortunately, it is inadequate.  Even in the political context it only reduces the conflict between egoistic motivation and impartial utilitarian demands.  Until such time as political leaders are made fully accountable, the political demands of utilitarianism must remain irrelevant.  Also notice that the coincidence Bentham seeks between the interest of the governed and the interest of the governors is artificial.  Political accountability will not effectively curb political egoism if rulers are sufficiently good at deceiving the public.  Finally, notice that Bentham’s solution to the tension has no obvious counterpart in the case of private, rather than public or political, conduct.  Perhaps we can make political leaders accountable to citizens.  How do we make one citizen accountable to others?

Once psychological egoism is rejected, there is no special motivational problem for utilitarianism.

HEDONISM
In Chapter IV Bentham sets out his conception of pleasure and utility in more detail.  First he sets out four aspects of pleasures, considered in themselves, that affect their value (IV 2-3).

  1. intensity
  2. duration
  3. certainty or uncertainty
  4. propinquity or remoteness
Hedonism says that pleasure is the one and only intrinsic good and that pain is the one and only intrinsic evil.  All other things have only extrinsic or instrumental value depending on whether and, if so, how much pleasure or pain they produce.  To make comparative assessments, therefore, we need to be able to determine the amount or magnitude of pleasure.

The first two dimensions of pleasurableness are pretty straightforward.  It’s easy to see how a pleasure’s intensity or duration might bear on its magnitude.  All else being equal, a more intense pleasure is more pleasurable than a less intense pleasure.  And, all else being equal, a longer lasting pleasure is more pleasurable than a more short lived pleasure.  The second two dimensions of pleasurableness are more problematic.  Certainty is a problematic dimension, because it seems to be a feature not of the pleasure itself, but of our cognitive relation to the pleasure.  Whereas intensity and duration affect a pleasure’s value, certainty seems to affect expected value.  Propinquity is also a puzzling dimension of pleasurableness.  Bentham implies that, all else being equal, a more remote pleasure is less valuable than a more proximate one.  But that sort of temporal bias is hard to defend.   A future pleasure is no less a pleasure than a present pleasure.  Why should it be any less valuable for the hedonist?  Indeed, temporal bias is typically viewed as a paradigmatic form of irrationality.  Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900), a later British utilitarian, criticizes Bentham on precisely this score.

[P]roximity is a property [of pleasures and pains] which it is reasonable to disregard except in so far as it diminishes uncertainty.  For my feelings a year hence should be just as important to me as my feelings next minute, if only I could make an equally sure forecast of them.  Indeed this equal and impartial concern for all parts of one’s conscious life is perhaps the most prominent element in the common notion of the rational – as opposed to the merely impulsive – pursuit of pleasure [Methods of Ethics 124n; cf. 111].
Later, Sidgwick rejects any pure time preference.
Hereafter as such is to be regarded neither less nor more than Now.  It is not, of course, meant, that the good of the present may not reasonably be preferred to that of the future on account of its greater certainty: or again, that a week ten years hence may not be more important to us than a week now, through an increase in our means or capacities of happiness.  All that the principle affirms is that the mere difference of priority and posteriority in time is not a reasonable ground for having more regard to the consciousness of one moment than to that of another.  The form in which it practically presents itself to most men is ‘that a smaller present good is not to be preferred to a greater future good’ (allowing for differences of certainty) ... [Methods 381].
If Sidgwick is right, then Bentham is wrong to say that propinquity is a distinct dimension of a pleasure’s value.  It has no intrinsic relevance.  It’s relevant only insofar as it affects a pleasure’s certainty, and certainty affects not a pleasure’s value, but its expected value.

These four dimensions are supposed to bear on the value of a pleasure itself.  Bentham mentions three other considerations affecting the value of pleasures, not of pleasures considered individually, but of pleasures considered in relations to others (IV 3-4).

  1. fecundity (= the tendency of a pleasure (pain) to be accompanied by more pleasures (pains))
  2. purity (= the tendency of a pleasure (pain) not to be followed by a pain (pleasure))
  3. extent (= the number of persons who experience the pleasure).
These three dimensions are reasonably straightforward.  However, the whole taxonomy is unnecessarily complex.  Because the utilitarian asks us to maximize value, he has to be able to make sense of quantities or magnitudes of value or pleasure associated with different options.  Intensity and duration are really the only two variables.  Each option is associated with various pleasures (and pains) both within a single life and across lives.  For any given option we must find out how many pleasures it produces, whether those occur in a single life or in different lives.  For every distinct pleasure, we must calculate its intensity and its duration.  That would give us the total amount of pleasure associated with each option.  Then we must do that option with greatest total (IV 5).  If there are two (or more) options with the greatest total, we are free to select any of these.

Bentham does not assume that our estimates of what will maximize utility will always be reliable.  Nor does he assume that we should always try to maximize utility (IV 6).  Doing so is costly, and we may sometimes promote utility best by not trying to promote it..  Nonetheless, utility, he thinks, is the standard of right conduct.

THE DEFENSE OF UTILITARIANISM
Why should we accept utilitarianism?  Bentham’s defense of utilitarianism is contained in Chapter I.

  1. The words “right” and “ought” mean “promotes utility” (I 10).
  2. First principles are incapable of proof (I 11).
  3. Commonsense morality is imperfectly and inchoately utilitarian (I 12).
  4. Attempts to refute utilitarianism necessarily presuppose it (I 13).
  5. The alternative to utilitarianism is moral anarchy (I 14).
(1) Ordinary speakers can doubt that it is one's duty to promote utility (either because they think that some actions are categorically wrong, no matter what the consequences, or because they think that the distribution, and not just the sum, of happiness matters), which shows utilitarianism is not true by definition.  (2) First principles cannot be derived from more ultimate principles (otherwise, they wouldn't be first principles), but they can be assessed by seeing how well their implications match or fit our considered judgments.  (3) This is why it would be significant if utilitarianism did provide a rough match with our considered moral judgments.  (4) Someone who objected that it was inexpedient to employ utilitarian reasoning would be presupposing utilitarianism.  But the proponent of categorical moral rules or strict principles of distributive justice need not presuppose utilitarianism.  (5) It's hard to see how utilitarianism enjoys any privileged position in relation to its rivals here.  The opponent of utilitarianism seeks to substitute, not intuition, but some rival principle or principles.  For any principle, agreement on that principle will, of course, reduce moral disagreement.  Reduce, not eliminate, because people can still disagree about how best to interpret or apply the principle.