UTILITARIANISM

Prepared by: MR. JULFER P. FRANCISCO, MAEM

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY?
UTILITARIANISM
1. Let us imagine that a man planted a bomb in your school, and it will
explode in two hours unless the police are able to find it. Due to time
constraint and the impossibility of evacuating the school, is it legal for
the police to use torture to draw information from a suspended bomber?
2. Based on your answer in number 1, what if the man who planted the
bomb will not say its location unless his two-year-old is tortured? Will it
be legal for the police to torture the two-year-old child, if doing so will
reveal the location of the bomb?
UTILITARIANISM
• Utilitarianism is a theory in Ethics by which actions are
judged to be right or wrong solely according to their
casual consequences.

• Utility – An act is good or morally right if it promotes

happiness, and bad or immoral if it tends to produce
pain.

• Under the utilitarian theory of morality, an individual

should seek only those things that tend to produce “the
greatest happiness of the greatest number”. Moral
assessment of acts, therefore, involves the calculation of
casual consequences: actions are right if they promote
the greatest happiness or pleasure to the greatest
• Utilitarian morality as a rational enterprise
includes not solely the pursuit of happiness,
but the prevention and mitigation of
unhappiness.

• Utilitarianism is consequentialist. It means

that the moral value or actions and decisions
is based solely or greatly on the usefulness of
their consequences.
For Bentham and Mill, utility refers
to a way of understanding the
results of people’s actions.
Specifically, they are interested on
whether these actions contribute or
not to the total amount of resulting
happiness in the world.
The utilitarian value pleasure and
happiness; this means that the
usefulness of actions is based on its
promotion of happiness. Bentham and
Mill understand happiness as the
experience of pleasure for the greatest
number of persons, even at the
expense of some individual’s rights.
TWO GENERAL FORMS OF
PLEASURE
 PLEASURE CAN BE...
PHYSICAL PLEASURE MENTAL PLEASURE
 PHYSICAL PLEASURE
• These are sensual indulgences or bodily
gratifications that include among others, sexual
intercourse, eating, drinking, rest, etc. Ill-
regulated desires make man pursue pleasure to
the injury of health, even if man knows that
health is a greater good.
• This kind of pleasure is considered by the
utilitarian as animalistic or beastly and make up
the lower forms or inferior types of pleasure.
• Physical pleasure appeals to people’s lower
faculties and persons desiring nothing, but
physical pleasure are considered lowly and less
dignified.
 MENTAL PLEASURE
• Refers to intellectual, spiritual and moral
pleasures. Mental pleasures feed man’s noble
feelings, imaginations and moral sentiments.
• Higher or a superior form of pleasure, more
desirable and more valuable as compared to
those mere sensation.
• Generally more difficult to achieve but make man
more dignified. They include, among others, the
enjoyment of free will and intellect, social
recognition and regards feeling of self-worth and
respect, feeling of peace and security.
 JEREMY BENTHAM
Jeremy Bentham was born on February 15, 1748 in London,
England. He was teacher of James Mill, father of John Stuart
Mill. Bentham first wrote about the greatest happiness
principle of ethics and was known for a system of penal
management called panopticon. He was an advocate of
economic freedom, women’s rights, and the separation of
church and state among others. He was also an advocate of
animal rights and the abolition of slavery, death penalty, and
corporal punishment for children. Bentham denied individual
legal rights nor agreed with the natural law. On his death on
June 6, 1832, Bentham donated his corpse to the University
of London, where his auto-icon is in display to this day to
serve as his memorial.
JOHN STUART MILL

John Stuart Mill was born on May 20, 1806 in

Pentonville, London, United Kingdom. He was the son
of James Mill, a friend and disciple of Jeremy
Bentham. He studied Greek at the age of 3 and Latin at
the age of 8. He wrote a history of Roman Law at age
11, and suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of 20.
He was married to Harriet Taylor after 21 years of
friendship. His ethical theory and his defense of
utilitarian views are found in his long essay
Utilitarianism (1861). Mill died in May 8, 1873 in
Avignon, France from erysipelas.
THE PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY
THE PRINCIPLE OF UTILITY
• In the book An introduction to the Principles
of Morals and Legislation (1789), Jeremy
Bentham begins by arguing that our actions
are governed by two “sovereign master”
–which he calls pleasure and pain. These
“masters” are given to us by nature to help
us determine what is good or bad and what
ought to be done and not; they fasten our
choices to their throne
• The principle of utility is about our subjection to
these sovereign masters: pleasure and pain.
On one hand, the principle refers to the
motivation of our actions as guided by our
avoidance of pain and our desire for pleasure.
It is like saying that in our everyday actions, we
do what is pleasurable and we do not do what
is painful. On the other hand, the principle also
refers to pleasure as good if, and only if,
they produce more happiness than
unhappiness. This means that it is not enough
to experience pleasure, but to also inquire
whether the things we do make us happier.
Having identified the tendency for pleasure and
the avoidance of pain as the principle of utility,
Bentham equates happiness with pleasure.
• Mill supports Bentham’s principle of utility. He
reiterates moral good as happiness and,
consequently, happiness as pleasure. Mill
clarifies that what makes people happy is
intended pleasure and what makes us unhappy
is the privation of pleasure. The things that
produce happiness and pleasure are
good.
• Clearly, Mill argues that we act and do things
because we find them pleasurable and we
avoid doing things because they are painful. If
we find our actions pleasurable Mill explains, it
is because they are inherently pleasurable in
themselves or they eventually lead to the
promotion of pleasure and the avoidance of
pain. Bentham and Mill characterized moral
value as utility and understood is as whatever
produced happiness or pleasure and the
avoidance of pain.
• In determining the moral preferability actions, Bentham
provides a framework for evaluating pleasure and pain
commonly called felicific calculus.

• Felicific calculus is a common currency framework that

calculates the pleasure that dome actions can produce.

• In this framework, an action can be evaluated on the basis of:

 INTENSITY or strength of pleasure;
 DURATION or length of the experience of pleasure;
 CERTAINTY or the likelihood that pleasure will occur; and
 PROPINQUITY or how soon there will be pleasure.

• These indicators allow us to measure pleasure and pain in an

action.
Formula:
HAPPINESS - PAIN = BALANCE
 The intense (intensity) the pleasure, the
better; the longer (duration) it lasts, the
better; the more certain (certainty) that it
will happen, the better; the clearer
(propinquity) that it occur, the better; the
greater the possibility (fecundity) that it
will be followed by another pleasure, the
better; the purer (purity) the pleasure the
better; the greater the number of people
that it benefits (extent) the better.
LET'S FEEL TODAY!