An example of act utilitarianism could be when pharmaceutical companies release drugs that have been governmentally approved, but with known minor side effects because the drug is able to help more people than are bothered by the side effects.
Most companies have a formal or informal code of ethics , which is shaped by their corporate culture, values, and regional laws. Today, having a formalized code of business ethics is more important than ever. For a business to grow, it not only needs to increase its bottom line , but it also must create a reputation for being socially responsible. Companies also must endeavor to keep their promises and put ethics at least on par with profits. Consumers are looking for companies that they can trust, and employees work better when there is a solid model of ethics in place.
On an individual level, if you make morally correct decisions at work, then everyone's happiness will increase. However, if you choose to do something morally wrong—even if legal—then your happiness and that of your colleagues, will decrease.
In the workplace, though, utilitarian ethics are difficult to achieve. These ethics also can be challenging to maintain in our business culture, where a capitalistic economy often teaches people to focus on themselves at the expense of others. Similarly, monopolistic competition teaches one business to flourish at the expense of others. So, although utilitarianism is surely a reason-based approach to determining right and wrong, it has obvious limitations.
Utilitarianism puts forward that it is a virtue to improve one's life better by increasing the good things in the world and minimizing the bad things. This means striving for pleasure and happiness while avoiding discomfort or unhappiness. A utilitarian is a person who holds the beliefs of utilitarianism. Today, these people might be described as cold and calculating, practical, and perhaps selfish—since they may seek their own pleasure at the expense of the social good at times.
Rule utilitarians focus on the effects of actions that stem from certain rules or moral guidelines e. If an action conforms to a moral rule then the act is moral. A rule is deemed moral if its existence increases the greater good than any other rule, or the absence of such a rule. If a consumer buys something only for its practical use-value, in a calculative and rational evaluation, then it is of utilitarian value. This precludes any sort of emotional or sentimental valuing, psychological biases, or other considerations.
Because its ideology argues for the greatest good for the greatest number, a business acting in a utilitarian fashion should increase the welfare of others. However, in practice, utilitarianism can lead to greed and dog-eat-dog competition that can undermine the social good. Bentham, J. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , ed.
Mill, J. Utilitarianism Utilitarianism, Liberty, Representative Government , Wealth Management. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Investopedia. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data.
We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. In responding, rule utilitarians may begin, first, with the view that they do not reject concepts like justice, rights, and desert.
Instead, they accept and use these concepts but interpret them from the perspective of maximizing utility. To speak of justice, rights, and desert is to speak of rules of individual treatment that are very important, and what makes them important is their contribution to promoting overall well-being. Critics object to utilitarianism by claiming that the theory justifies treating people unjustly, violating their rights, etc.
This criticism only stands up if it is always wrong and thus never morally justified to treat people in these ways. Utilitarians argue that moral common sense is less absolutist than their critics acknowledge.
In the case of punishment, for example, while we hope that our system of criminal justice gives people fair trials and conscientiously attempts to separate the innocent from the guilty, we know that the system is not perfect.
As a result, people who are innocent are sometimes prosecuted, convicted, and punished for crimes they did not do. This is the problem of wrongful convictions, which poses a difficult challenge to critics of utilitarianism.
Either we can shut down the system and punish no one, or we can maintain the system even though we know that it will result in some innocent people being unjustly punished in ways that they do not deserve.
Most people will support continuing to punish people in spite of the fact that it involves punishing some people unjustly. According to rule utilitarians, this can only be justified if a rule that permits punishments after a fair trial, etc. In the end, utilitarians say, it is justice and rights that give way when rules that approve of violations in some cases yield the greatest amount of utility. The debate between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism highlights many important issues about how we should make moral judgments.
Act utilitarianism stresses the specific context and the many individual features of the situations that pose moral problems, and it presents a single method for dealing with these individual cases. Rule utilitarianism stresses the recurrent features of human life and the ways in which similar needs and problems arise over and over again. From this perspective, we need rules that deal with types or classes of actions: killing, stealing, lying, cheating, taking care of our friends or family, punishing people for crimes, aiding people in need, etc.
Stephen Nathanson Email: s. Act and Rule Utilitarianism Utilitarianism is one of the best known and most influential moral theories. Whose Well-being? Utilitarianism: Overall View Utilitarianism is a philosophical view or theory about how we should evaluate a wide range of things that involve choices that people face.
What is Good? Individual Self-interest See egoism. Actual Consequences or Foreseeable Consequences? How Act Utilitarianism and Rule Utilitarianism Differ Both act utilitarians and rule utilitarians agree that our overall aim in evaluating actions should be to create the best results possible, but they differ about how to do that. Act Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons Act utilitarianism is often seen as the most natural interpretation of the utilitarian ideal.
Arguments for Act Utilitarianism i. Why Act utilitarianism Maximizes Utility If every action that we carry out yields more utility than any other action available to us, then the total utility of all our actions will be the highest possible level of utility that we could bring about.
Why Act Utilitarianism is Better than Traditional, Rule-based Moralities Traditional moral codes often consist of sets of rules regarding types of actions. Why Act Utilitarianism Makes Moral Judgments Objectively True One advantage of act utilitarianism is that it shows how moral questions can have objectively true answers.
Arguments against Act Utilitarianism i. The following cases are among the commonly cited examples: If a judge can prevent riots that will cause many deaths only by convicting an innocent person of a crime and imposing a severe punishment on that person, act utilitarianism implies that the judge should convict and punish the innocent person.
See Rawls and also Punishment. If a person makes a promise but breaking the promise will allow that person to perform an action that creates just slightly more well-being than keeping the promise will, then act utilitarianism implies that the promise should be broken.
See Ross The general form of each of these arguments is the same. Possible Responses to Criticisms of Act Utilitarianism There are two ways in which act utilitarians can defend their view against these criticisms. Rule Utilitarianism: Pros and Cons Unlike act utilitarians, who try to maximize overall utility by applying the utilitarian principle to individual acts, rule utilitarians believe that we can maximize utility only by setting up a moral code that contains rules.
Arguments for Rule Utilitarianism i. Rule Utilitarianism Avoids the Criticisms of Act Utilitarianism As discussed earlier, critics of act utilitarianism raise three strong objections against it. Judges, Doctors, and Promise-makers Critics of act utilitarianism claim that it allows judges to sentence innocent people to severe punishments when doing so will maximize utility, allows doctors to kill healthy patients if by doing so, they can use the organs of one person to save more lives, and allows people to break promises if that will create slightly more benefits than keeping the promise.
Maintaining vs. Undermining Trust Rule utilitarians see the social impact of a rule-based morality as one of the key virtues of their theory. Impartiality and the Problem of Over-Demandingness Rule utilitarians believe that their view is also immune to the criticism that act utilitarianism is too demanding. Arguments against Rule Utilitarianism i. Wrong Answers and Crude Concepts Although rule utilitarians try to avoid the weaknesses attributed to act utilitarianism, critics argue that they cannot avoid these weaknesses because they do not take seriously many of our central moral concepts.
Conclusion The debate between act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism highlights many important issues about how we should make moral judgments. References and Further Reading a.
Classic Works Jeremy Bentham. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation , available in many editions, John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism , available in many editions and online, See especially chapter II, in which Mill tries both to clarify and defend utilitarianism. Passages at the end of chapter suggest that Mill was a rule utilitarian.
In chapter V, Mill tries to show that utilitarianism is compatible with justice. Henry Sidgwick. The Methods of Ethics , Seventh Edition, available in many editions, Sidgwick is known for his careful, extended analysis of utilitarian moral theory and competing views.
Principia Ethica, Oxford: Oxford University Press, Mostly focused on utilitarianism, this book contains a combination of act and rule utilitarian ideas.
More Recent Utilitarians J. Cambridge University Press, Richard Brandt. Ethical Theory. Prentice Hall, Chapter Morality, Utilitarianism, and Rights.
Brandt developed and defended rule utilitarianism in many papers. This book contains several of them as well as works in which he applies rule utilitarian thinking to issues like rights and the ethics of war. Moral Thinking. Oxford University Press, An interesting development of a form of rule utilitarianism by an influential moral theorist.
John C. Reprinted in Amartya Sen and Bernard Williams, eds. Harsanyi, a Nobel Prize economist, defends rule utilitarianism, connecting it to a preference theory of value and a theory of rational action. John Rawls. Before becoming an influential critic of utilitarianism, Rawls wrote this defense of rule utilitarianism. Brad Hooker. In this 21 st century defense of rule utilitarianism, Hooker places it in the context of more recent developments in philosophy.
Peter Singer. Writings on an Ethical Life. HarperCollins, Singer, a prolific, widely read thinker, mostly applies a utilitarian perspective to controversial moral issues for example, euthanasia, the treatment of non-human animals, and global poverty rather than discussing utilitarian moral theory. This volume contains selections from his books and articles.
Reprinted in Peter Singer. Harper Collins, This widely reprinted article, though it does not focus on utilitarianism, uses utilitarian reasoning and has sparked decades of debate about moral demandingness and moral impartiality.
Robert Goodin. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. In a series of essays, Goodin argues that utilitarianism is the best philosophy for public decision-making even if it fails as an ethic for personal aspects of life. Derek Parfit. On What Matters. In a long, complex work, Parfit stresses the importance of Henry Sidgwick as a moral philosopher and argues that rule utilitarianism and Kantian deontology can be understood in a way that makes them compatible with one another.
Overviews Tim Mulgan. Understanding Utilitarianism. Acumen, This is a very clear description of utilitarianism, including explanations of arguments both for and against. Chapter 2 discusses Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick while chapter 6 focuses on act and rule utilitarianism.
This article gives a good historical account of important figures in the development of utilitarianism. This very useful overview is relevant to utilitarianism and other forms of consequentialism. William Shaw. Contemporary Ethics: Taking Account of Utilitarianism. Blackwell, Shaw provides a clear, comprehensive discussion of utilitarianism and its critics as well as defending utilitarianism. John Troyer. The Classical Utilitarians: Bentham and Mill.
Hackett, Ben Eggleston and Dale Miller, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism. This collection contains sixteen essays on utilitarianism, including essays on historical figures as well as discussion of 21 st century issues, including both act and rule utilitarianism. Mill and Utilitarian Moral Theory J. Roger Crisp. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Mill on Utilitarianism. Routledge, West, ed. Henry R. A clear discussion of Mill; Chapter 4 argues that Mill is neither an act nor a rule utilitarian.
Chapter 6 focuses on utilitarianism and justice. Dale Miller. Polity Press, Miller, in Chapter 6, argues that Mill was a rule utilitarian. Stephen Nathanson. The Cambridge Companion to Mill. Cambridge University Press, , — David Lyons. Oxford, Critics of Utilitarianism David Lyons. Forms and Limits of Utilitarianism. Lyons argues that at least some versions of rule utilitarianism collapse into act utilitarianism. Morality, Rules, and Consequences.
Rowman and Littlefield, In a challenging essay, Lyons raises doubts about whether there is any coherent version of utilitarianism. Judith Jarvis Thomson. Reprinted in Judith Jarvis Thomson. Rights, Restitution and Risk. Edited by William Parent. His utilitarian leanings are distinct from his moral sense approach, and his overall sentimentalism. However, this approach highlights the move away from egoistic views of human nature — a trend picked up by Hutcheson and Hume, and later adopted by Mill in criticism of Bentham's version of utilitarianism.
For writers like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson the main contrast was with egoism rather than rationalism. Like Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson was very much interested in virtue evaluation. He also adopted the moral sense approach. However, in his writings we also see an emphasis on action choice and the importance of moral deliberation to action choice.
Hutcheson, in An Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil , fairly explicitly spelled out a utilitarian principle of action choice. Joachim Hruschka notes, however, that it was Leibniz who first spelled out a utilitarian decision procedure.
Scarre notes that some hold the moral sense approach incompatible with this emphasis on the use of reason to determine what we ought to do; there is an opposition between just apprehending what's morally significant and a model in which we need to reason to figure out what morality demands of us.
But Scarre notes these are not actually incompatible:. Scarre then uses the example of telling a lie to illustrate: lying is harmful to the person to whom one lies, and so this is viewed with disfavor, in general.
However, in a specific case, if a lie is necessary to achieve some notable good, consequentialist reasoning will lead us to favor the lying. But this example seems to put all the emphasis on a consideration of consequences in moral approval and disapproval. Stephen Darwall notes , ff. It is the motives rather than the consequences that are the objects of approval and disapproval.
But inasmuch as the morally good person cares about what happens to others, and of course she will, she will rank order acts in terms of their effects on others, and reason is used in calculating effects.
So there is no incompatibility at all. Hutcheson was committed to maximization, it seems. Hume was heavily influenced by Hutcheson, who was one of his teachers. His system also incorporates insights made by Shaftesbury, though he certainly lacks Shaftesbury's confidence that virtue is its own reward.
In terms of his place in the history of utilitarianism we should note two distinct effects his system had. Firstly, his account of the social utility of the artificial virtues influenced Bentham's thought on utility. Secondly, his account of the role sentiment played in moral judgment and commitment to moral norms influenced Mill's thoughts about the internal sanctions of morality.
Bentham, in contrast to Mill, represented the egoistic branch — his theory of human nature reflected Hobbesian psychological egoism. The Classical Utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, were concerned with legal and social reform. If anything could be identified as the fundamental motivation behind the development of Classical Utilitarianism it would be the desire to see useless, corrupt laws and social practices changed.
Accomplishing this goal required a normative ethical theory employed as a critical tool. What is the truth about what makes an action or a policy a morally good one, or morally right?
But developing the theory itself was also influenced by strong views about what was wrong in their society. The conviction that, for example, some laws are bad resulted in analysis of why they were bad. And, for Jeremy Bentham, what made them bad was their lack of utility, their tendency to lead to unhappiness and misery without any compensating happiness. If a law or an action doesn't do any good, then it isn't any good.
Jeremy Bentham — was influenced both by Hobbes' account of human nature and Hume's account of social utility. He famously held that humans were ruled by two sovereign masters — pleasure and pain. Yet he also promulgated the principle of utility as the standard of right action on the part of governments and individuals.
Actions are approved when they are such as to promote happiness, or pleasure, and disapproved of when they have a tendency to cause unhappiness, or pain PML. Combine this criterion of rightness with a view that we should be actively trying to promote overall happiness, and one has a serious incompatibility with psychological egoism. Thus, his apparent endorsement of Hobbesian psychological egoism created problems in understanding his moral theory since psychological egoism rules out acting to promote the overall well-being when that it is incompatible with one's own.
For the psychological egoist, that is not even a possibility. This generates a serious tension in Bentham's thought, one that was drawn to his attention. He sometimes seemed to think that he could reconcile the two commitments empirically, that is, by noting that when people act to promote the good they are helping themselves, too.
But this claim only serves to muddy the waters, since the standard understanding of psychological egoism — and Bentham's own statement of his view — identifies motives of action which are self-interested. Yet this seems, again, in conflict with his own specification of the method for making moral decisions which is not to focus on self-interest — indeed, the addition of extent as a parameter along which to measure pleasure produced distinguishes this approach from ethical egoism.
Aware of the difficulty, in later years he seemed to pull back from a full-fledged commitment to psychological egoism, admitting that people do sometimes act benevolently — with the overall good of humanity in mind.
Bentham also benefited from Hume's work, though in many ways their approaches to moral philosophy were completely different. Hume rejected the egoistic view of human nature. Hume also focused on character evaluation in his system. Actions are significant as evidence of character, but only have this derivative significance.
In moral evaluation the main concern is that of character. Yet Bentham focused on act-evaluation. There was a tendency — remarked on by J. Schneewind , for example — to move away from focus on character evaluation after Hume and towards act-evaluation. Recall that Bentham was enormously interested in social reform. Indeed, reflection on what was morally problematic about laws and policies influenced his thinking on utility as a standard.
When one legislates, however, one is legislating in support of, or against, certain actions. Character — that is, a person's true character — is known, if known at all, only by that person. If one finds the opacity of the will thesis plausible then character, while theoretically very interesting, isn't a practical focus for legislation. Further, as Schneewind notes, there was an increasing sense that focus on character would actually be disruptive, socially, particularly if one's view was that a person who didn't agree with one on a moral issues was defective in terms of his or her character, as opposed to simply making a mistake reflected in action.
But Bentham does take from Hume the view that utility is the measure of virtue — that is, utility more broadly construed than Hume's actual usage of the term. This is because Hume made a distinction between pleasure that the perception of virtue generates in the observer, and social utility, which consisted in a trait's having tangible benefits for society, any instance of which may or may not generate pleasure in the observer.
But Bentham is not simply reformulating a Humean position — he's merely been influenced by Hume's arguments to see pleasure as a measure or standard of moral value. So, why not move from pleasurable responses to traits to pleasure as a kind of consequence which is good, and in relation to which, actions are morally right or wrong?
Bentham, in making this move, avoids a problem for Hume. On Hume's view it seems that the response — corrected, to be sure — determines the trait's quality as a virtue or vice.
But on Bentham's view the action or trait is morally good, right, virtuous in view of the consequences it generates, the pleasure or utility it produces, which could be completely independent of what our responses are to the trait. So, unless Hume endorses a kind of ideal observer test for virtue, it will be harder for him to account for how it is people make mistakes in evaluations of virtue and vice.
Bentham, on the other hand, can say that people may not respond to the actions good qualities — perhaps they don't perceive the good effects. But as long as there are these good effects which are, on balance, better than the effects of any alternative course of action, then the action is the right one.
Rhetorically, anyway, one can see why this is an important move for Bentham to be able to make. He was a social reformer. He felt that people often had responses to certain actions — of pleasure or disgust — that did not reflect anything morally significant at all.
Bentham then notes that people are prone to use their physical antipathy as a pretext to transition to moral antipathy, and the attending desire to punish the persons who offend their taste.
This reduces the antipathy to the act in question. This demonstrates an optimism in Bentham. This is distinct from the view that a pain or pleasure based on a false belief should be discounted. Bentham does not believe the latter. Thus Bentham's hedonism is a very straightforward hedonism. The one intrinsic good is pleasure, the bad is pain. We are to promote pleasure and act to reduce pain.
When called upon to make a moral decision one measures an action's value with respect to pleasure and pain according to the following: intensity how strong the pleasure or pain is , duration how long it lasts , certainty how likely the pleasure or pain is to be the result of the action , proximity how close the sensation will be to performance of the action , fecundity how likely it is to lead to further pleasures or pains , purity how much intermixture there is with the other sensation.
One also considers extent — the number of people affected by the action. Keeping track of all of these parameters can be complicated and time consuming. Bentham does not recommend that they figure into every act of moral deliberation because of the efficiency costs which need to be considered. Experience can guide us. We know that the pleasure of kicking someone is generally outweighed by the pain inflicted on that person, so such calculations when confronted with a temptation to kick someone are unnecessary.
It is reasonable to judge it wrong on the basis of past experience or consensus. Bentham's view was surprising to many at the time at least in part because he viewed the moral quality of an action to be determined instrumentally. It isn't so much that there is a particular kind of action that is intrinsically wrong; actions that are wrong are wrong simply in virtue of their effects, thus, instrumentally wrong.
This cut against the view that there are some actions that by their very nature are just wrong, regardless of their effects. Some may be wrong because they violate liberty, or autonomy. Again, Bentham would view liberty and autonomy as good — but good instrumentally, not intrinsically. Thus, any action deemed wrong due to a violation of autonomy is derivatively wrong on instrumental grounds as well. This is interesting in moral philosophy — as it is far removed from the Kantian approach to moral evaluation as well as from natural law approaches.
It is also interesting in terms of political philosophy and social policy. On Bentham's view the law is not monolithic and immutable. Since effects of a given policy may change, the moral quality of the policy may change as well.
A law that is good at one point in time may be a bad law at some other point in time. Thus, lawmakers have to be sensitive to changing social circumstances. To be fair to Bentham's critics, of course, they are free to agree with him that this is the case in many situations, just not all — and that there is still a subset of laws that reflect the fact that some actions just are intrinsically wrong regardless of consequences.
Bentham is in the much more difficult position of arguing that effects are all there are to moral evaluation of action and policy. This left him open to a variety of criticisms. First, Bentham's Hedonism was too egalitarian. Simple-minded pleasures, sensual pleasures, were just as good, at least intrinsically, than more sophisticated and complex pleasures. The pleasure of drinking a beer in front of the T.
Second, Bentham's view that there were no qualitative differences in pleasures also left him open to the complaint that on his view human pleasures were of no more value than animal pleasures and, third, committed him to the corollary that the moral status of animals, tied to their sentience, was the same as that of humans. While harming a puppy and harming a person are both bad, however, most people had the view that harming the person was worse. Mill sought changes to the theory that could accommodate those sorts of intuitions.
To this end, Mill's hedonism was influenced by perfectionist intuitions. There are some pleasures that are more fitting than others. Intellectual pleasures are of a higher, better, sort than the ones that are merely sensual, and that we share with animals.
To some this seems to mean that Mill really wasn't a hedonistic utilitarian. His view of the good did radically depart from Bentham's view.
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