Utilitarianism and Anti-Utilitarianism

2008

In his metaethics and philosophy of language, Jeremy Bentham was strongly influenced by John Locke's empiricist framework. In his works on logic and mind (but also in his ethical writings), John Stuart Mill displayed a blend of empiricism and common sense philosophy, which he inherited from his father James. In addition to this, both Bentham and Mill viewed ethics and politics as empirical disciplines, based on human experience, and modeled after empirical, inexact disciplines, such as medicine. Despite his intuitionist leanings, even Henry Sidgwick presented his moral epistemology as a correction of an originally empiricist framework. Moreover, in Sidgwick's argument for utilitarianism, a lot of room is left to the power that a utilitarian ethical theory has in accounting for our common moral experience, embodied in our common sense moral judgements. Even through the twentieth century, utilitarianism has kept its connection with human experience, if only because of its frequent and numerous incursions in detailed applicative problems. Possibly, utilitarian ethical thinkers were the first to realize a turn to applied ethical theory. Paradoxically, the often repeated and most well-known objection to utilitarianism, namely its alleged counter-intuitiveness, concerns the relationship between utilitarian ethics and experience. This aspect of utilitarian moral theories was placed at the center of the three-day Conference "Utilitarianism: An Ethic of Experience?" (held at the University of Rome, June 12-14, 2007), where the papers published here were originally presented and discussed. From the many presentations, discussions, and informal talks that happened in those three days in Rome, it turned out that the question mark at the end of the conference title, originally indicating the ironic, yet provocative and wary spirit the organizers had toward the subject, could be removed safely. Experience is at the centre of utilitarianism, both in its historical and contemporary versions. Experience, however, is only a common point of departure, and it is not able to settle the various puzzles that scholars interested in utilitarianism must face. It is also for this reason that the title of the present collection was changed to a more neutral one, aiming to show the two directions assumed by the contemporary scholarship: an increasing penetration into the historical texts of eighteenth and nineteenth century utilitarians and a more detailed refinement of utilitarian ethical theories to respond classical and new objections and problems.

This article is an attempt to take an overview of the current position of utilitarian theory. It begins by providing a definition of utilitarianism as it is found in the works of Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick. These authors are all interpreted as intuitionists. It is claimed that the main rivals to utilitarianism are egoism on the one hand, and reflective non-egoistic pluralism, as found in the work of Ross, on the other. The significance of disagreement between proponents of these views is explained, and modern attempts to ground utilitarianism are found lacking. The article ends with a plea for history.

The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2005

2021

Philosophers have typically shown high confidence in their evaluations of Utilitarianism, whether as an endorsement or a disparagement. Rarely, however, has much effort been spent on investigating what utilitarianism means. In their recent 2020 book The Pursuit of Happiness: Philosophical and Psychological Foundations of Utility, the cognitive scientist Louis Narens and the philosopher of science Brian Skyrms have teamed up to address the question of how utility can be measured and aggregated for the purposes of ethics and policy-making. The Pursuit of Happiness constitutes a beautiful example of benefits of collaboration between scientists and philosophers. Narens, one of the leading experts on measurement theory in the behavioral and cognitive sciences, and Skyrms, a pioneer in mathematical philosophy with his work on evolutionary game theory and the evolution of conventions, make a perfect team for examining the foundations of utilitarianism. The majority of The Pursuit of Happin...

2021

KIT Scientific Publishing eBooks, 2021

Differently from scientific contexts utilitarianism continues to be a stumbling-block in many public debates, partly because of misunderstandings, partly because of conflicts with widespread moral convictions. These concern both its axiology and its theory of normativity. On the other hand, there are several context of ethical and public discussion in which characteristic elements of utilitarianism and widely shared normative position come remarkably close, such as the growing recognition of the moral status of nonhuman animals and the recognition of the responsibility for a sustainable use of natural resources. Historically, representatives of utilitarianism had an important share in driving this development. Furthermore, there is a remarkable affinity between utilitarianism and the "principle of responsibility" highlighted, among others, by Hans Jonas. First, there is an affinity between the concept of a prospective responsibility and the utilitarian conception of responsibility as directed at future events and states rather than at future actions and omissions. Another affinity is the utilitarian principle of extending responsibility to all foreseeable consequences instead of, as the theory of double effect has it, restricting responsibility to intended consequences. Finally, utilitarianism is more than its rivals able to satisfy the demands of universalizability implied by the moral nature of prospective responsibility by making the value of subjective well-being its one and only intrinsic value. There does not seem to be any other value on which the same degree of consensus gentium can be expected. I Utilitarianism-Between Academia and the Public Every practice-oriented ethicist knows the gap that from time to time requires an intellectual balancing act between the culture of discussion in the academic world and that of the public sphere: on the one hand a disciplinary expert, on the other a moralist. Many ethical theories discussed objectively and dispassionately in philosophical or economic seminars are met by the public with rejection or outrage, for example, when they conflict with common sense notions of everyday morality or with fundamental political norms.

2007

Abstract This article starts from a methodological position that fact and value are mutually related, both in the real world and in economic analysis. It then discusses deontological ethics. This approach is concerned with equality and dignity, as expressed in right and norms, and how these rights and norms constrain individual choices. Deontology is thus different from the utility maximisation of utilitarian ethics, where ethics appears in utility functions as moral preferences.

Economics and Philosophy

The original position together with the veil of ignorance have served as one of the main methodological devices to justify principles of distributive justice. Most approaches to this topic have primarily focused on the single person decision-theoretic aspect of the original position. This paper, in contrast, will directly model the basic structure and the economic agents therein to project the economic consequences and social outcomes generated either by utilitarianism or Rawls’s two principles of justice. It will be shown that when the differences in people’s productive abilities are sufficiently great, utilitarianism dominates Rawls’s two principles of justice by providing a higher level of overall well-being to every member of society. Whenever this is the case, the parties can rely on the Principle of Dominance (which is a direct implication of instrumental rationality) to choose utilitarianism over Rawls’s two principles of justice. Furthermore, when this is so, utilitarianism ...

2006

New Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory have given rise to a group of problems which lie on the frontier between Economic Theory and Ethics. The attempts to deal with these problems have generated a literature known as «on Ethics and Economics». The analytical developments of concepts like utility, preferences or well-being and notions like meta-preferences, agency or commitment (Sen) all connect directly to the ethical dimension that any Theory of Value presupposes. In relation with the Theory of Choice, concepts like rationality, consistent election and selfinterest impede the accommodation of behaviors like altruism or others whose consequences do not affect directly to the acting agent. The perceived difficulty to link ethical aspects of actions with standard Economic Theory allows us to qualify the relationship between Economics and Ethics as one of mere juxtaposition.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Harsanyi invested his Aggregation Theorem and Impartial Observer Theorem with deep utilitarian sense, but Sen redescribed them as "representation theorems" with little ethical import. This negative view has gained wide acquiescence in economics. Against it, we support the utilitarian interpretation by a novel argument relative to the Aggregation Theorem. We suppose that a utilitarian observer evaluates non-risky alternatives by the sum of individual utilities and investigate his von Neumann-Morgenstern (VNM) preference on risky alternatives. Adding some technical assumptions to Harsanyi's, we conclude that (i) this observer would use the utility sum as a VNM utility function, and crucially, (ii) any social observer would evaluate both risky and non-risky alternatives in terms of a weighted utility sum.