Setting the stage for Utilitarianism

1. Setting the stage for Utilitarianism

2. Which is prior: the Good or the Right? • Can we develop a complete theory of the Good independently of the Right?

3. What is the ultimate Good? • That which is intrinsically good, and from which everything else derives its goodness • Traditional utilitarian answers: • Pleasure (and absence of pain) • Happiness • satisfaction of preferences, desires, or ends

4. The Rationality of Maximizing • How should our actions relate to the Good? • Why not maximize it? • Thus, the right action in any situation is the one that promotes the most overall utility (the one that maximizes the Good).

5. The utilitarian account of right actions • An act is right if and only if it is the one which, among the alternatives, maximizes overall happiness (aggregate happiness) • It is the consequences of an act that are crucial to determining its rightness. • not the intentions of the agent

6. Utilitarianism provides an impartial standard • My happiness is no more important than anyone else’s • Whose happiness a particular act promotes is (in principle) irrelevant to assessing its rightness. • The issue is how much happiness it promotes, not whose.

7. Utilitarianism Applied: Euthanasia • Freud’s case • Remaining life dominated by suffering • When, if ever, is a person’s continued life, on balance, of no benefit to that person?

8. Utilitarianism Applied: Marijuana • Relevant utilitarian considerations: • Positive: • Pleasure: people enjoy it. • Relatively harmless • Negative: • Some addiction • Some risk of cognitive damage • Decreases productivity • Smoking bad for lungs

9. Marijuana... • Legality—relevant utilitarian considerations: • Cost of enforcing laws against it (and taxes forgone) • Cost of imprisoning violators • Potential social effects of legalization • Replacing alcohol? • Decreasing overall productivity?

10. Utilitarianism applied: Animals • Recall: utilitarianism traditionally holds that pleasure or happiness is intrinsically good—pain/suffering intrinsically bad • The interests of animals deserve equal consideration • Speciesism: Discounting the interests of another individual simply because he/she/it is of another species --compare with racism, sexism

11. Animals continued… • Utilitarian evaluation of the use of animals • Experimentation on animals is justified only when it promotes overall happiness (taking the interests of the animals subjects fully into account). • Meat-eating is justified only if the pleasures gained from it outweigh the misery caused to the animals.

12. Objections to Utilitarianism • The problem of evil pleasures • The case of the “peeping Tom” • Incompatible with justice: • Convicting an innocent person to avert a riot.

13. Potential Utilitarian responses • Examples are far-fetched and highly unlikely to occur in real life. • How unlikely? What if they did? • Rule utilitarianism: acts are right if and only if they are in accordance with the set of rules which, if generally followed, would promote overall happiness more than any other set of rules.

14. Accepting counterintuitive results • Why place ultimate trust in our initial intuitions? • Reexamining the case of convicting the innocent. • Convicting the innocent person is horrible and unjust; but is the alternative not worse, and also unjust? • The distinction between committing injustice and allowing it to take place.