Utilitarianismo

Intro to Ethics: Utilitarianism
Category: Consequentialist
Basis of value: pleasure or happiness
Principle of action: choose the action that maximizes total positive value (pleasure or happiness) minus total negative value (pain or unhappiness) for everyone affected.

Assessing Utilitarianism: the positive case

* Does the theory identify a plausible basis of value?

Pleasure andhappiness both seem like plausible candidates to be the basis for value. They have three things going for them. Each is:

-intrinsically valuable: valuable in its own right, not merely valuable as the means to an end. This is important in order to justify the claim that we have identified the basis of value. If you find something (say, money) desirable only because it will help you accomplishsome other goal (say, being powerful), then you aren’t treating that thing (money) as the basis of value, but merely as instrumentally good (a means to an end). You’re treating the power the money will give you as the basis of value. But pleasure and happiness both seem to be things we pursue for their own sake, and not just because they help us achieve some other goal.

-universally sought:all other valuable things trace their value back to it (it is the ONLY intrinsically valuable thing). This is an important feature for the ground of value to have. If our ethical theory is to be applicable to every situation, it must be built on a basis that is considered valuable by people in every situation. Suppose we tried to pick “juicy steak” as the basis for value, and built an ethicaltheory that said the right action is the one that will bring a person closest to eating a juicy steak. Then our theory would obviously not apply to situations where the person trying to choose what to do is Hindu (cows are not eaten in their culture) or vegetarian. Billions of people would find our theory unacceptable. So would anyone who happens to not be in the mood for juicy steak at themoment. But pleasure and happiness seem to be reasonable candidates to be the desired end of all of our actions.

-necessary for meaningful choice: suppose no being anywhere ever was capable of feeling pleasure/pain or happiness/unhappiness. Any action you could perform simply made everyone feel exactly the same as any other action would have, even in the long run. In that situation, would therebe any point in trying to figure out what to do? It seems not.

* Does the theory provide a plausible principle of action?

Well, its goal sounds plausible for a moral theory: morality should be about making the world as happy as possible. And it seems to be highly anti-discriminatory: it treats equal amounts of pleasure/happiness equally, no matter whose pleasure/happiness it is. Animalrights activists especially like this aspect of the theory: animals can feel pleasure and pain, so utilitarianism allows the well-being of animals to count, too. Our human minds allow us to be made happy or unhappy in more ways than animals, but that just means we need to take more facts into account when figuring out the consequences of our actions for people.
* Can the theory be applied todetermine right/wrong action in all situations?

It does give us a step-by-step procedure to follow in any case where we’re trying to decide what to do:
1 List the options you are considering as possible actions.
2 List everyone who will be affected by each of your possible actions.
3 Estimate how much pleasure/happiness minus pain/unhappiness each of them will receive.
4 Calculate thetotal pleasure/happiness minus pain/unhappiness for each list.
5 Perform whichever action yields the highest total.

A few things should be said about Step 3. First, the estimate involves creating a numerical representation of levels of positive and negative experiences for people. The important thing is to keep all numbers properly scaled. So, it doesn’t really matter how you choose your...