The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (284 page)

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The most famous definition of utilitarianism equates it with the belief that, ‘That action is best which procures the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. Although generally associated with
Bentham
, who quoted it with approval, the statement was first made by Francis Hutcheson in his
Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
(1725). The doctrine that actions should be judged on their capacity to produce happiness is an ancient one, recognizable as the classical Greek
eudaemonism
. However, it was only in the secular and commercial milieu of eighteenth-century Britain that it became an important and respectable philosophy, if not yet a dominant one. The works of Bentham, especially
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
, provide the most explicit statement of utilitarianism, but
Hume
and
Burke
were also utilitarians to some degree.
The ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is an indication of the spirit and purpose of utilitarianism, but perhaps also a pointer of the intellectual problems which bedevil the philosophy. It seems to imply a prescription to maximize the population, since the maximization of
xy
is as well achieved by increases in
y
as in
x
. In so far as more people means less happiness
per capita
(as it means less space and fewer resources), then the definition sets up an indeterminate tension between numbers and individual happiness. It is clear that most utilitarians, including Bentham, intend the greatest happiness of a given number of people or of the whole existing population. ‘Happiness’ has not been successfully developed as a concept; nor have ‘pain’, ‘pleasure’, or ‘ utility’. Bentham offers a ‘felicific calculus’ to measure these concepts by considering their ‘intensity’, ‘fecundity’, ‘duration’, and so on, but even the most sympathetic contemporary utilitarian would not claim that the calculus actually offers us anything precise or capable of implementation. It is even crucially ambiguous as to whether ‘pain’ refers to states of very low pleasure, tending towards zero, or of negative pleasure, worse than death. Only biologists and behaviourists, by concentrating on the physical concomitants of pain and pleasure rather than the sensations, have succeeded in making scientific concepts out of pain and pleasure. But these scientific meanings suggest that utilitarian policy-makers should look to pleasure machines or pleasure drugs as their principal instruments of policy, an implication which has been generally taken to be a
reductio ad absurdum
of the use of behavioural concepts of pleasure in utilitarian philosophy. The general aggregate which utilitarians would seek to maximize has been given several names including, recently, ‘satisfaction’ and ‘human flourishing’, but in the wake of the failure of the central concept, the philosophy has developed in two different directions, which can be called economic and broad utilitarianism. Economic utilitarianism replaces happiness as the central concept by the extent to which individuals get what they choose (or would choose, if they had a choice). It is thus able to develop a precise and sophisticated theory based on real and hypothetical choices and to allocate monetary values to outcomes; it generates such political and administrative applications as cost-benefit analysis.
Economic utilitarianism uses very different concepts from those used by Bentham, but it can be said to have developed in a Benthamite spirit. Broad utilitarianism, as it has been developed by moral philosophers, is more in the spirit of Hume and J. S. Mill in so far as it tends to eschew precise calculation in favour of more general utilitarian judgement and abandons the rigorous unidimensionality of the Benthamite concept of pleasure (‘the quantity of pleasure being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry’) to allow more qualitative judgements. The weakness of this approach is that it endangers the distinction between utilitarian moral and political philosophy and rival traditions. If we allow the possibility of qualitative judgement such as a presumption in favour of the profundity of the pleasure derived from poetry as against the triviality of that gained from pushpin, then have we not lost the rigorous insistence on the unbiased comparison of all goods which is typically utilitarian? Similarly, there is a problem about rules. Strictly, a utilitarian should acknowledge that ‘rules are made to be broken’ and calculate each individual act of obedience and disobedience on its consequences. But we are likely to be happier if at least some rules are obeyed habitually and generally. The doctrine of ‘rule utilitarianism’ suggests that we should always obey the rule which, if always obeyed, would have better consequences than any other rule, always obeyed. Arguably, this cannot be called utilitarianism at all, its insistence on strict adherence to rules having crossed a philosophical boundary into neo- Kantianism. Perhaps a more convincingly utilitarian solution to the problem of rules is John Rawls's conception of ‘summary rules’, practices which we should generally, though not ‘religiously’, conform to in order to avoid the costs of endless calculations and to enjoy the benefits of social order.
A broad utilitarian outlook, by allowing a range of judgements about the quality of pleasure and the consequences of actions, is bound to allow utilitarian judgement to be informed by other philosophies to which the person making the judgement leans, whether traditionalist, libertarian, feminist, or whatever. However, even broad utilitarianism has its boundaries; the limits of what constitutes utilitarianism and what lies clearly in non-utilitarian territory can be delineated by three conditions, individually necessary and collectively sufficient to define it as a distinct form of political philosophy. Utilitarianism is necessarily:

(1)  Consequentialist. It judges, evaluates, and proposes actions according to their consequences and not, as deontological moralists do, according to conformance to a rule or rules, whether derived from reason, revealed religion, or the human condition.
(2) 
Aggregative
. It sums benefits for a population. This can be a state population (as a kind of summary rule about responsibility) or the global population. It may or may not take account of the interest of creatures other than
homo sapiens
, but what it does not do is to allow any individual claims or rights to be wholly immune from inclusion in the aggregate sum.
(3) 
Sensualist
. What is aggregated must be reducible to the feelings of well- and ill-being of living entities. No virtue or advantage shall be counted which is not so reducible.

The political interpretation of utilitarianism
. Utilitarianism entered politics as a radical philosophy, challenging orthodoxy, since its most famous development was stimulated by Bentham's hostility to Sir William Blackstone's lectures on law (published as
Commentaries on the Laws of England
). Blackstone attempted to derive English law from natural law, while Bentham was keen to establish that laws were made and not discovered by men and therefore could and should be chosen because of their consequences. Nor does utilitarianism necessarily support existing property rights, and early practical utilitarians such as Edwin Chadwick were instrumental in increasing the regulation of industry and the provision of public services. Utilitarianism does, after all, start from an egalitarian premiss: Bentham insisted that ‘each is to count for one and no-one for more than one’.
But it is unlikely that a doctrine which seeks to maximize happiness over a foreseeable future could counsel revolution or even rapid social change.
In Anarchical Fallacies
Bentham rigorously opposed the natural rights doctrines of the French revolutionaries as ‘nonsense on stilts’, a new version of the old error of natural law. Utilitarianism has been, typically, the basis of liberal-conservative positions, realistic and reformist. With the demise of many of the traditional positions in political theory after 1945, utilitarianism came to hold a dominant position in non-Marxist thought. In 1979, Herbert Hart referred to this as ‘the widely accepted old faith that some form of utilitarianism, if only we could discover the right form,
must
capture the essence of political morality’.
Since 1970 this ‘old faith’ has come under vigorous attack from a revival of the traditions of individualist and contractarian thought. However, what it has lost as an academic philosophy it retains as a practical philosophy, being still dominant in many parts of the Western world and increasingly popular in the former communist countries. This dominance is more real in England where many administrators, including Treasury economists and Department of the Environment inspectors, operate on a specifically utilitarian rubric, than in the United States where constitutional considerations partially imbue decisions with a doctrine of natural rights.
The strengths and weaknesses of utilitarianism
. Economic utilitarianism is often attacked for the narrowness of its considerations and for its bogus precision. Broad utilitarianism meets two alternative criticisms: either it is treated as so broad and bland that it lacks proper boundaries as a philosophy or it is immoral in that the utilitarian approach to ethics profoundly contradicts our intuitive sense of right and wrong, most often our sense of justice or fairness. It is difficult to deny, for example, that utilitarianism must countenance the punishment of innocent persons if that produces a better aggregate of consequences than their non-punishment. The most important defence of utilitarianism is that there is no alternative to it as a public philosophy—in a secular and ethically pluralist age. Politicians cannot avoid causing the death of innocent people if they try to keep public expenditure in check or to help maintain a semblance of international order. Utilitarianism, uniquely, accepts this and yet makes an important moral demand of those who make policy: they must always consider the ‘bottom line’ of their decisions, who is gaining and who is losing and whether the net aggregate of well-being might not be better served by an alternative. Thus as a ‘government house philosophy’ (as Robert Goodin puts it) utilitarianism retains a leading, even unique, role.
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