Abstract
Utilitarianism is located in the realistic naturalism area of ethics. A school is realistic when it asserts that there are actual moral facts that are true or false. It is naturalistic when its outcomes are set by examining facts in the natural world. These facts can be examined and debated in an intersubjective context. This characterization of ethics makes ethics “the science of right and wrong in human action.”
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Notes
- 1.
I set out this definition in my book, Basic Ethics 2nd ed. (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2008): 2.
- 2.
*The author of this essay has reason for believing himself to be the first person who brought the word “utilitarian” into use. He did not invent it, but adopted it from a passing expression in Mr. Galt’s Annals of the Parish. After using it as a designation for several years, he and others abandoned it from a growing dislike to anything resembling a badge or watchword of sectarian distinction. But as a name for one single opinion, not a set of opinions—to denote the recognition of utility as a standard, not any particular way of applying it—the term supplies a want in the language, and offers, in many cases a convenient mode of avoiding tiresome circumlocutions.
- 3.
I encourage the reader to think about whether “pleasure” and “happiness” (and their opposites) are synonymous.
- 4.
The reader should consider whether he or she thinks this is indeed the case for the most part. If it is, then Mill is correct in his refutation of utilitarianism’s critics. Are there any empirical data that could prove the point?
- 5.
The reader might like to compare this assertion to Aristotle’s argument about weakness of the will (above).
- 6.
The fictional character of Sherlock Holmes (1887) might be just such a character. He aspired to a rational existence and yet he had a cocaine habit. This comes 26 years after the publication of Utilitarianism.
- 7.
Thomas Carlyle, 1795–1881, was a Scottish philosopher, essayist, and satirical voice as a prominent public intellectual of his time.
- 8.
‘Novalis’ was the pen name for the 19th century German poet, Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), who was a polymath who wrote poetry in accord with the German Romantic Movement.
- 9.
*An opponent, whose intellectual and moral fairness it is a pleasure to acknowledge (the Rev. J. Llewellyn Davies), has objected to this passage saying, “Surely the rightness or wrongness of saving a man from drowning does depend very much upon the motive with which it is done. Suppose that a tyrant, when his enemy jumped into the sea to escape from him, saved from drowning simply in order that he might inflict upon him more exquisite tortures, would it tend to clearness to speak of that rescue as ‘a morally right action’? Or suppose again, according to one of the stock illustrations of ethical inquiries, that a man betrayed a trust received from a friend, because the discharge of it would fatally injure that friend himself or someone belonging to him, would utilitarianism compel one to call the betrayal ‘a crime’ as much as if he had been done from the meanest motive?”.
I submit that he who saves another from drowning in order to kill him by torture afterwards does not differ only in motive from him who does the same thing from duty or benevolence; the act itself is different. The rescue of the man is, in the case supposed, only the necessary first step of an act far more atrocious than leaving him to drown would have been. Had Mr. Davies said, “The rightness or wrongness of saving a man from drowning does not depend very much”—not upon the motive, but—“upon the intention,” no utilitarian would have differed from him. Mr. Davies, by an oversight too common not to be quite venial, has in this case confounded the very different idea of Motive and Intention. There is no point which utilitarian thinkers (and Bentham pre-eminently) have taken more pains to illustrate than this. The morality of the action depends entirely upon the intention—that is, upon what the agent wills to do. But the motive, that is, the feeling which makes him will so to do, if it makes no difference in the act, makes none in the morality: though it makes a great difference in our moral estimation of the agent, especially if it indicates a good or a bad habitual disposition—a bent of character from which useful, or from which hurtful actions are likely to arise.
- 10.
Mill is talking about a member of the ruling party in Parliament.
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Boylan, M. (2019). Utilitarianism. In: Teaching Ethics with Three Philosophical Novels. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24872-7_3
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