8.3 Some Implications of Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism has several positive implications. First, it makes ethics relevant to the real world, by defining ethical actions as those that have the best overall outcomes. Being ethical would not be a matter of personal conscience alone but would be something that would be good for everyone. Second, the ethical nature of an action or a decision is something that could be measured. This idea was particularly attractive to Jeremy Bentham – he was a strong advocate of legal reform and used as his criterion for evaluating laws the question of whether a given law was beneficial or harmful overall. Third, making ethical decisions would not require anything other than the ability to figure out how much our actions impact the interests of others. All of us are equally capable of adding up the expected good and bad results of our actions and deciding accordingly.
On the other hand, there are negative implications to the theory as well. We will be considering these in greater detail in the next section and in the next chapter, where Kantian ethics offers an explicit attempt to avoid the pitfalls of the utilitarian approach. Three problems stand out. First, since utilitarians claim that the moral worth of an action depends on it having better consequences than the alternatives, we may wonder how we can ever really determine these consequences when we are deciding. Of course, some actions have obviously bad consequences, like tossing a burning cigarette butt into a dry field of tall grass. But can we reliably predict the consequences of our actions in most cases? After all, moral problems seem to arise in just those cases where it is not entirely clear what the best thing to do really is. In addition, as many large scale engineering projects have shown, determining whether the consequences of a decision are for the best or not in part depends on when you ask the question. For example, the building of dams as sources of cheap power may seem like nothing but a win-win situation, but the long term environmental consequences of such projects may end up costing more than the proponents of the project could foresee.
Second, since utilitarianism depends on comparing the benefits and costs of different actions on everyone who is affected by those actions, it assumes that it is possible to compare the impact of one’s actions on different people. But how can we do this? Is there one neutral standard of comparison that might reveal that, for example, person A gets 3 units of utility from action X and 5 units of utility from action Y, while person B gets 5 units of utility from action X and only 1 unit of utility from action Y?
Finally, we have the problem that, if utilitarianism is correct, and the moral worth of an action is to be measured by the amount of good it does in the world, this seems to do away with the concept of rights. As long as an action leads to a sufficiently good outcome, anything goes. For example, suppose framing and executing an innocent person for murder would lead to great happiness for the whole of a community. As long as we could show that the benefits to everyone else outweigh the costs to this innocent person, a utilitarian would not have a problem with this. But, what about the rights of an innocent person not to be punished for a crime he or she did not commit? We will return to this question in the next chapter.
Despite some of the troubling consequences of utilitarianism, however, it remains a popular theory. Part of the reason for its popularity is the plausibility of the argument for this view. It to this that we now turn.
