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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 6

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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 6

BENTHAM

  • father of utilitarianism

Consequentialism: an act is good if and only if the consequences are good
- ‘good’ can mean anything

Deontology: consequences don’t matter, act is good if it corresponds to an absolute moral rule (like Kant, Bentham is against this)

Utility: whatever realizes pleasure and happiness

  • both individual and communal

Calculating Morality:
1. Choose individual action that presents most utility (sum of pleasures, minus all pains)
2. Community: add up all the individuals before making laws (anti-minority approach)

Intentionality plays no role

  • no moral conscience, pure pleasure-mathemathics
  • everything that produces pleasure is equal to everything else that produces pleasure
  • no bad pleasures, all are good

Taboos are useful only if the acts lead to unhappiness (drunk driving)

  • breaks taboos is also okay in certain cases

Universal Scope: includes animals, anyone who can feel pleasure
- not about rationality-based agency, but suffering-based agency

Greatest Happiness Principle

  • only pleasure and pain can tell us what we should and shouldn’t do
  • normative and descriptive
  • happiness of the greatest number, not of all

ALL VALUE EMINATES FROM PLEASURE, NOTHING ELSE

Different pleasures, some better than others, but only via conscious personal preference, no universal pleasure-hierarchy

pleasure itself is value neutral, all acts are judged according to it

PETER SINGER: effective altruism, charity as mandatory, and we should we praised only when we go above the requirement (which is higher for him than for us)

Two kinds of utilitarianism: Total (all Ns summated), vs Average (the average of all Ns)

NOZICK: utilitarianism is just hedonism [experience machine argument]

Preference Utilitarianism: not pleasure, but preference
- looking for greatest preference satisfaction

Bentham & Singer - hedonists; now there’s more preference utilitarians

Rule vs Act Utilitarianism:
- analyzing the pleasure sum of all individual acts
- vs analyzing the pleasure sum of different sets of rules
- rule utilitarianism can justify universal laws

Critiques:

  • no special relations (mom-children)
  • R. GOODIN: person relations possible, nations too

RAWLS:

  • utilitarianism does not respect one’s personhood
  • it allows us to disregard one minority to bolster the majority
  • liberties must always be prioritized
  • for him utilitarians cannot hold human rights as a universal, just a useful tool for bolstering pleasure

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