Today: Which Utilitarian Equation? How to Maximize? Act or Rule?

1. Mill and the Utilitarian TraditionPhilosophy 2B - Ray CritchLecture 2 - The Utilitarian Equation • Today: • Which Utilitarian Equation? • How to Maximize? • Act or Rule?

2. Which Utilitarian Equation? • Utilitarianism as a consequentialism • Value + Maximization • Value = Utility • Utility + Maximization • Two questions? • 1) What counts as utility? - Next Class • 2) How does one go about maximizing? - Today

3. Moral or Political? • Bentham - Moral or Political Formulation • ‘the principle 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 interests are in question • A moral formulation - focuses on the interests of an individual

4. Moral or Political? • Bentham - Moral or Political Formulation • ‘a measure of government may be said to conform to or be dictated by the principle of utility when in like manner the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to diminish it.’ • Political - formulated for government. • BUT

5. Moral or Political? • Bentham - Moral or Political Formulation • ‘‘The community is a fictitious body … the interest of the community is, what? - the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.’ (PML - 1.4) • Shows a closeness between the moral and the political - one achieves a good political result by improving the moral situation. Political acts are judged by a moral standard.

6. Moral or Political • Mill - Agrees with Bentham, generally… • Utilitarianism is ‘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 produce happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.’ • BUT

7. Moral or Political • Mill - Distance from Bentham • Different Characterizations of Happiness • Both Experiential - what counts about happiness is the experience of it • Bentham’s Felicific Calculus • Mill’s Hierarchy of Pleasures • More Next Week

8. Act or Rule? • General • Not from Mill or Bentham • Imposed on them after. • Not a great fit, in Mill’s case • About how to maximize, rather than what is of value • Neither acts, nor rules, have value except in their tendency to be conducive of utility.

9. Act or Rule? • Act Utilitarianism • Maximize actions that lead to greater utility and minimize actions that lead to less utility. • Rule Utilitarianism • Follow rules that, were they to be generally or universally followed, would maximize utility.

10. Act or Rule • Which is the more Utilitarian Formulation? • Is there a problem with rule utilitarianism leading to counter-utilitarian results? • Universalization implicit in all rules - Hare. • Universalization leads to mixed results. • Are they really different? • Does rule utilitarianism end up as act utilitarianism to be truly utilitarian? • Can Rule utilitarianism avoid universalization? • If it can’t, can it avoid mixed consequences? • Is Act Utilitarianism actually a very general form of Rule Utilitarianism?

11. Act or Rule? • Is this another Moral/Political problem? • What might work for one person won’t work if everyone else did it too. • Act might be more consistent, but don’t we need rules? • Tragedy of the Commons - The Politics of Act Utilitarianism • My Ecumenical [tentative] Conclusion