Utilitarianism

This page brings together my views on utilitarianism.

Value-first utilitarianism

I see utilitarianism as being primarily a framework for thinking about what is of value and, only secondarily, about how to act. It is a theory of ultimate ends, a view that states of the world should be rated in terms of the aggregate welfare they contain and that actions should, where appropriate, be directed towards improving aggregate welfare.

As a framework for thinking about what matters, utilitarianism may be relevant across all practical decision-making. It is not particularly a ‘moral theory’ in the narrower sense of a societal code, and is sometimes unfairly criticised for not being on its own a workable rules-based moral system.

The elements of utilitarianism

Utilitarianism can be seen as a family of consequentialist views with three structural features:

1. Sentient welfare (or perhaps more narrowly valenced experience) is the sole (or main) ultimate end.

2. Total value is the sum of the welfare of individuals, weighed impartially over time and persons.

3. Actions, rules and institutions should (to some extent) be evaluated in terms of the aggregate welfare they produce.

My version of utilitarianism is strict on the first two points but softer on the third.  I think that the momentary valenced conscious experience of sentient beings is the sole source of value.  I also think that total value is the impartial aggregation of valenced experience.  But I do not think that maximising this common good should be our sole decision criteria.  

I will take these three elements in order.

Welfare and valenced experience

The first element of utilitarianism concerns where value lies. For the utilitarian, value has a particular structure. While we may value many things, the utilitarian claims that they are ultimately valued because they contribute to welfare. I may value money, for example, but only because it is instrumental to my happiness, which has intrinsic value. On this view, value has an instrumental-intrinsic structure, and sentient welfare is the sole or main intrinsic good.

Some utilitarians stop at this point and simply say that welfare matters. But I think we can be more precise. What matters, it seems to me, is whether experienced moments in a life are good or bad. Bentham spoke of pleasures and pains, but I would use the modern terminology of positive and negative valence. On my view, elements of consciousness have positive or negative valence, and each moment has an overall net valence. The happiness of a period in a life is the accumulation over time of these momentary net valences.

An attraction of this narrower view is that it offers a clear bridge from fact to value. Good and bad are encountered directly in experience rather than inferred from preference alone. We are directly aware that some experiences feel good and others bad. There is also some support here from affective neuroscience, which has identified brain systems involved in ‘liking’, suggesting that the felt quality of experience has a distinct role in value.

The view that value consists in momentary valenced experience is strikingly monistic and atomistic, and it may be too narrow to capture everything that matters. A broader view might use a wider sense of welfare, allow that other things also have intrinsic value, or soften the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental goods. But even if one steps back from this narrow view of value, it remains hard to deny that momentary pleasures are a major part of what matters.

Impartiality

The second element of utilitarianism is impartial aggregation. This follows just from a simple principle of consistency: similar enjoyment or suffering has similar value wherever it occurs. Consistency also means that numbers matter.  For example, ten good moments are ten times better than one.

We recognise impartiality when we weigh pleasures and pains across our own lives. But once that step is taken, consistency pushes further. If moments of good and bad experience can be aggregated within a life, it is hard to see why they should not also be aggregated across lives. Rationality therefore requires us to expand the circle: from me now, to me over my lifetime, then to family, friends, strangers, future people, and non-human animals. This is not how we instinctively see things. We are naturally local, partial, and present-focused. That is why the demand for impartiality is so radical.

There are, however, major difficulties in applying this idea. Comparisons of welfare are often rough and uncertain even within a single life, and they become more difficult when we compare across different people. The hardest cases arise with non-human animals. We know little about the overall character of many animal lives, and do not know whether their affective lives are on balance positive or negative. These problems matter, but they do not remove the force of the underlying principle. They show that impartial aggregation is difficult, and sometimes indeterminate, not that it is a mistake.

Consequentialist when appropriate

The third element of utilitarianism concerns how far action should be directed towards improving aggregate welfare. This is where I part company with more demanding forms of utilitarianism. Act utilitarianism holds that the right action is always the one that maximises total welfare. I think this is too simple. Even if aggregate welfare is what ultimately matters, it does not follow that each individual should always try directly to maximise it in every choice.

There are three main reasons for this. First, we are rarely in a position to estimate the full effects of our actions on overall welfare with any confidence. Second, good outcomes often depend on intermediate institutions and practices — such as heuristics, rules, conventions, rights, moral norms and laws — which enable coordination and often produce better results than continual case-by-case calculation. Third, individuals are partial in their motivations and primarily concerned with their own interests and relationships.

These are not minor practical obstacles but reflect deep features of human nature. Utilitarian calculations are highly vulnerable to ignorance, bias and wishful thinking. Neither individuals nor governments can simply be trusted to identify and pursue the common good by direct calculation. For a society of self-interested individuals, moral norms and laws promote cooperation, reduce harms and protect expectations. At the level of government, liberal institutions and the rule of law are preferable to allowing a leader to govern by whim in the name of good consequences. And at the international level, law and established norms help self-interested states get along better than unconstrained attempts to pursue national advantage.

Utilitarianism in decision making

If utilitarianism is understood primarily as a theory of value, the next question is what role it should play in actual decisions. My view is that utilitarianism gives important information about what matters, but does not by itself provide a complete decision procedure. It should inform our choices, but its practical force varies by domain.

In one’s own life, utilitarian thinking can help direct attention towards what actually makes life go well. Even a fairly self-interested person may benefit from seeing that what matters is not status, honour or appearance, but the quality of lived experience over time. That can encourage a clearer focus on enjoyable and worthwhile activity, and a better sense of when to accept what cannot be changed and when to act where improvement is possible.

In ordinary social life, utilitarianism enters a field already shaped by rules, relationships and roles. We often have to balance following established rules against trying to produce the best consequences in a particular case. A doctor may normally tell the truth to a patient, yet give a guarded answer to avoid extreme distress. We also constantly balance what is good for ourselves against what is good for others. I may spend money on my own comfort rather than giving it away, or devote time to my family rather than to helping strangers more effectively. Utilitarian considerations are therefore important, but they enter a field already structured by other concerns.

At the level of politics and government, utilitarian considerations can sometimes play a larger role. Public policy affects large numbers of people, and governments can in principle take a broader and more impartial view than private individuals. Cost-benefit analysis, public health measures, safety regulation and infrastructure investment all reflect this kind of thinking. But here too utilitarianism must operate through institutions, within liberal norms and the rule of law.

Utilitarianism may have its clearest role in charity and global priorities. In this domain, the main practical question is often not whether to help, but how to do the most good. Philanthropy is an attempt to do good rather than to pursue private advantage, and it is less tied to the dense network of personal obligations that structures ordinary life. In that domain, the question of how to help others most effectively comes to the fore. This matters because the greatest opportunities to improve welfare may lie far beyond our immediate surroundings: in global poverty, animal welfare, existential risk, or the long-term future.

Happiness science

Bentham had the right basic orientation in focusing attention on pleasures and pains, but recent decades have added much better tools for understanding and promoting wellbeing. Affective neuroscience has helped to clarify the structure of positive and negative experience, including the distinction between ‘liking’ and ‘wanting’. Positive psychology has explored the conditions under which people tend to flourish. And large-scale happiness surveys have made it possible to study self-reported wellbeing across populations with far more sophistication than was previously possible.

At the personal level, happiness research can help us think more clearly about what tends to make lives go well, and about the common mistakes people make when they pursue status, income or short-term desire at the expense of deeper wellbeing. At the level of government, happiness surveys and wellbeing research can help supplement purely economic measures and can support better decisions in areas such as mental health, work, education and social policy.

Why utilitarianism matters

Utilitarianism matters because it captures something deep about value. What matters centrally is the quality of conscious experience, and reason requires us to take this seriously wherever it occurs. The suffering and happiness of others count just as much as our own, including those who are distant from us and those of different species.

At the same time, utilitarianism is not a complete code for everyday conduct. Practical reason has to work partly through rules, conventions and laws, not by act-by-act maximisation. The importance of utilitarianism lies less in supplying a simple decision procedure than in showing us more clearly where value lies.

I see utilitarianism as the central framework for thinking about practical reason. It may not be the whole truth, and its application is often uncertain, especially given our limited understanding of non-human animals. But in a world where we have increasing power to do good across large populations, through public policy, for animals, and over the long-term future, it is hard to think clearly without it.