Utilitarianism & Consequentialism
Consequentialism
is the view that what makes moral standards valid is the fact that acting
on them tends to produce good effects. The most familiar form of
consequentialism is utilitarianism, formulated with different
emphases by the nineteenth-century philosophers, Jeremy Bentham and John
Stuart Mill. The basic idea is that the good is happiness,
understood as either the feeling of satisfaction, or as the fact of having
one’s desires satisfied. Since morality is not just each
individual’s pursuit of his private happiness, utilitarianism holds that
the moral good is found in the maximization of happiness for all people or
for all creatures capable of experiencing pleasure or pain. The
latter version would include sentient animals within the reach of morality
(see below).
The utilitarian supposes that we can, at least roughly, estimate how
much net satisfaction (satisfaction minus dissatisfaction) any of our
actions will produce in each person affected, and then that we can add
this up to arrive at a total sum of satisfaction that will be
produced by our actions. The
utilitarian would have us calculate these possible outcomes for all of the
actions available to us (including the action of doing nothing). Our
duty is do that action that, among all the actions possible for us,
produces the highest aggregate sum of net satisfaction.
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Utilitarian.org
and Utilitarianism.net
provide a wide range of information, including Frequently Asked Questions,
explanation of terms, lists of standard philosophical texts (many of which
are available on the internet), and short papers concerning
utilitarianism.
Ethics
Updates material on Utilitarianism includes a Powerpoint
presentation and 45 minute lecture in RealMedia format
The Utilitarianism
Glossary gives in-depth definitions in “plain English”.
The
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy's section on Consequentialism
includes a definition and description of the major
subdivisions.
Buy
CJ Ethics
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