Utilitarianism

‘The majority rules, OK?!’

One of the most useful and popular approaches to ethics is Utilitarianism. This was first debated fully in the early to mid-19th century by the English philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill although the ideas had been around in politics for a lot longer.
In its simplest form it is expressed by the famous idea –
‘The greatest good for the greatest number.’
Early utilitarians were discussing the ways in which an individual, a group or a government should behave. At the time, England was moving into a modern democratic system and good governance was a topic of importance. They argued that if you were in a position of power over others, then you had a duty to maximise the good, the benefit for as many people as you possibly can. You should not give yourself or your friends a huge advantage but instead you should spread it over as many people as possible. At all times you should try to provide the greatest benefit possible for as many people as possible. This seems obvious now but it wasn’t so obvious then.

Example:
You are the State Government and you have a fixed and limited budget to fix up the roads. You can’t do all of the bad ones, just the worst. Should you (as one Australian state premier did) arrange that a new road be built right up to the gate of your farm out in the bush because that will benefit your family, friends, employees and neighbours? In some nations that would be seen as quite reasonable behaviour and the whole point of getting elected. Or should you work out a way of spending that money to improve the roads used by the greatest number of motorists?

Seems obvious doesn’t it? After all, that is the guiding principle of all democratic governments isn’t it, to look after as many people as they possibly can as well as they can? Well, you can run into a few problems. Not all needs are equal – some have greater needs than others.
What if next to the State Premier’s farm there is a small rural community which desperately needs a decent road? They need it so badly that the this great need of a small number of people outweighs the minor need of a large number of people. If I spend millions widening a busy city road by a metre then several thousand people will get to work just one minute earlier every morning but if I build that country road instead, then that little town of two hundred people save hours of their time and their community attracts new visitors, businesses, jobs, residents and even avoids an average of one serious vehicle accident per year.
Cost/Benefit Analysis
The usual response is to do the sums. What are the financial and social costs and what are the benefits for each case? You can do a purely economic analysis and make a reasonable decision, so long as you have factored in every variable and not just the financial ones. But when it comes to ethics and acting fairly, things are not so easy because we introduce ideas of rightness and wrongness. We start to talk about what we ought to do.

Discussion Scenarios
People have to make almost impossibly awful decisions. Utilitarian decisions are made in governments, hospitals and even schools every day. Before we look at different types of utilitarianism, we should examine some typical and actual cases.

The Classroom
You know how it is. The class runs well, the course is good, everyone wants to work, the teacher knows her stuff and you like her. Perfect. Except for Jason that is. He’s really annoying. He probably isn’t that bright and he can’t keep up with the work so he gets bored and causes trouble, wandering around, flicking spitballs, picking fights, arguing…all the usual. Most of the teacher’s time is spent trying to control him so she doesn’t have much time to help other students or even just teach. The answer is simple and obvious. Expel him for the good of the others so that they can learn. Don’t mess around trying to reform him or entertain him – it hasn’t worked and it never will. Get rid of the idiot.

The Beaconsfield Mine Disaster
Two men were trapped together in the Tasmanian mine and fortunately both were rescued after ten days or so with enormous effort, expense and media attention. You could have saved an entire third world country from starvation with less cost. But, what if the situation was slightly different? Imagine that they had been trapped some distance apart and you only had the time and equipment to save one of them before the air ran out. How do you decide which one? What will give the best result?
Let’s pretend that one of them is a young single man and the other is has a wife and three kids. Easy, right? Ah yes, but what if that young lad is a university graduate with a fiancée, loving parents, brothers, sisters, a star of the footy team and a really nice guy who has a great life ahead – while the married man is a miserable, ungrateful and demanding character with a criminal record. No one likes or trusts him, his wife is about to divorce him and she would prefer having the accident compensation to getting him back. Changed your mind yet?
Now you discover that the young bloke is badly injured and may not survive long enough to be rescued. What now?

Siamese Twins
About five years ago, two girls were born in Malta; Siamese twins conjoined at the chest. Siamese twins often share an internal organ or two and a blood supply, which makes separation very difficult. These girls were flown to England for assessment and treatment. The surgeons quickly realised that one of them, Jodie, was alert and reasonably healthy. However, the other, Mary, was in serious trouble. Her heart and lungs were undeveloped and non-functional so Jodie was doing the blood circulation and breathing for both. Worse, Mary’s brain was rudimentary – she could never be conscious or aware. She was what is referred to unkindly as a ‘vegetable’ and one surgeon described her as a parasite on her healthy sister. If the girls were left attached, they would both die within months despite any level of care. If they were separated, Mary would die immediately but Jodie had a good chance of survival, although with some level of handicap. A truly lousy choice to have to make.
To complicate matters, the parents are devout Catholics and the idea of taking a course of action that would result in Mary’s death was unacceptable to them. They preferred that nature take its course. The British legal and medical authorities take a more utilitarian approach in this case and they base it on the rights of the child, not the parent. This is accepted in cases of Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing a blood transfusion for their child – the law overrides them and takes the child into ‘care.’ The right to life is seen as having a better outcome than the right to a religious belief – after all, people lose their faith sometimes or change heir minds. A viable child like Jodie would not be allowed to die to protect the rights of another who could not support itself or the rights of the parents to their beliefs. Jodie was made a ‘ward of the state’ and the operation proceeded. She survived and Mary died immediately.

Guantanamo Bay
Most of us are terrified of terrorists these days. It matters not that we are far more likely to die on the roads than in a terrorist attack or from many other causes – that’s the one that scares us most. The United States established a prison after it invaded Afghanistan, just for those that they believed planned terror actions against their country. Cleverly, they built it at Guantanamo Bay, a small chunk of Cuba that they occupy under a very old treaty (the present Cuban government hates it but can do nothing). It is used mainly as a naval base. At this facility, they can lock up terror suspects like Australian David Hicks without the usual laws of their country applying – it is not part of the USA! People can be held for years without trial in a military prison and the law can do nothing about mistreatment or even torture.
Most Americans approve of this – after all it makes them feel safer to know that these dangerous people are confined a long way away. Not only that, many would be happy or at least unconcerned that conditions are bad, treatment harsh and they would even approve torture if it was needed to extract vital information. This is a classic utilitarian quandary – a small group of people are treated badly for the benefit of the great majority. Is it a fair thing to do?
Under what circumstances would you allow someone to be tortured? Write a scenario.

The Broken Heart
There are two youngish patients in a major hospital, both seriously ill. One has a brain cancer and is slipping in and out of consciousness. Although otherwise healthy, he will die within two weeks. The other has a heart disease caused by a rare virus and he will die in two or three days if he doesn’t get a transplant. There are no hearts available and he’s a long way down the waiting list anyway. By sheer coincidence, the cancer patient has a compatible tissue type – his heart would be perfect and he has a card in his wallet indicating that he has joined an organ donor list. His organs will be harvested when he dies anyway. Unfortunately the heart patient will certainly die first if nothing is done. This is a simple decision for a basic utilitarian. The cancer patient’s death must be brought on quickly so that the heart patient can live. The law and medical ethics will not allow this.
One month of life in a coma 30+ years of productive life. What can be done? Argue through the possibilities.

Rule Utilitarianism
This is a more modern version of the philosophy, which manages to avoid most of the problems in the scenarios above. It suggests that rather than measure each single case or act for cost and benefit (act-utilitarianism) we establish those rules of law or morality that usually bring about the greatest benefit. In the case above, the heart, we allow the heart patient to die because it is very rarely beneficial to actually kill someone or even hasten their death. This is unfortunate for just one person but remember, there is a waiting list and the heart will not be wasted – it may even go to someone more deserving.
Equally, for a rule utilitarian we never, ever torture an enemy because the results almost never outweigh the benefits. We may find out where a bomb is planted but the downside is huge. It becomes easier to torture other prisoners in future on less important matters and we are degraded by that. Remember that the Nazis claimed very good reasons for their behaviour. Then there is the reciprocal problem – we want to look better than our enemy, more moral. If we torture then we encourage them to do the same or give them the moral high ground from which to criticise us. Also, we try and keep that bad child in school, not just because it is wrong to throw a child away but because we know that some of the best adults were problem students. We live in hope and try to cope.
So the rule utilitarian looks at the ‘big picture’ rather than individual cases and makes general rules that tend to maximise the benefit, even though they may cause grief at times in specific cases.

Measuring the Benefit
It can be hard to define what we mean by costs and benefits. Bentham suggested a very old answer – hedonism. This is an ancient philosophy which claims that the purpose of life is to seek and maximise pleasure. There have been philosophers who recommended a life of sex and drugs and rock and roll but most hedonists are more sensible, pointing out that such a life is destructive and brings great pain. Most hedonists have a more modest view of pleasure – Epicurus said that pleasure was merely the absence of pain and if you’ve ever been really ill and in severe pain, you’d tend to agree with that very strongly.
So original utilitarianism recommended maximising the pleasure and minimising the pain and distress for as many people as possible. The problem is that some of the actions that we see as morally good are not always pleasurable and some of the bad ones aren’t that painful! We may see someone laying down his life in a warfare situation as admirable but it isn’t pleasurable for any of us and brings grief as well. Some of our recreations come with a cost as well but we allow and even encourage each other to drink or go skiing despite the hangovers and busted legs. Ancient hedonists like Epicurus recognised this and recommended the simple life as the most satisfying.
Ideal Utilitarianism suggests that we forget pleasure and pain and simply measure costs and benefits in terms of those things we know intuitively to be good or bad. So, benefits are those things we know to be good in a moral sense.
Preference Utilitarianism suggests that we should maximise consequences that fulfil people’s preferences. We would prefer not to be hungry, cold and wet so we make sure that all the members of our community are fed, clothed and housed. Peter Singer based his work on animal liberation on this principle, pointing out that animals would prefer not to die or be distressed so we have no right to be cruel to them or kill them. He makes no distinction between humans and those animals capable of feeling pain in the same way that we do – pain and distress are universal principles and we know that animals avoid pain. Therefore they would prefer not to experience it and we must respect that preference. Preference utilitarians are particularly concerned about exploitative relationships and Singer was once famously trapped into saying that sex with an animal (bestiality) was acceptable so long as both parties enjoyed the act. Logical, but still abhorrent to just about everyone.
However, most of us make a distinction between humans and other animals and prefer not to give up eating meat, although we insist that the killing is as humane as possible. A rule utilitarian might take a different approach. While they could claim that ‘killing is wrong’ is a general rule and turn vegetarian, there is a counter-argument that points out that those species that have allowed themselves to be domesticated have been massively advantaged – we have spread them across the world. Pet animals like cats and dogs; working animals like dogs and horses; meat animals like cattle and sheep; wool animals like sheep and alpaca – all have improved their survival enormously by this. It is tough on the individual animal but very advantageous for the species and species survival is a higher order of preference. It has utility. Thus we have a rule that insists that we don’t act cruelly to animals for the same reason that we don’t torture people – it degrades us and we consider it to be sick. In fact, it can be an indicator of mental illness. The person who can do it lacks empathy and may display sociopathic tendencies. However we recognise the big picture in seeing that our exploitation of individual or small groups of animals is beneficial for the species as a whole.
This is of course highly contentious but it does illustrate the different approaches of different types of utilitarian.