Ulitarianism

“Utilitarianism is the ethical doctrine that the moral worth of an action is solely determined by its contribution to overall utility in maximizing happiness or pleasure as summed among all persons.”- Wikipedia. This means that a person should do everything in his power to achieve ultimate bliss. Good is what brings happiness to most people in the world. This principle is based on decisions that human kind makes. These decisions are based of benefit, with complete disregard to the consequences. Mill states that people, instead of choosing based on personal gain, will decide for the betterment of everyone. Mill considers human beings to posses the gift of conscious thought, therefore given the ability to choose correctly

There were some moral problems that Mill ran into with his principle. One of the first problems was that actions are right to promote happiness, but wrong as they sometimes tend to produce unhappiness. By moving a victim from a mangled car would be the noble thing to do but what if pulling him from the wreck meant killing him. He intended to produce a happy outcome, but in the end he created an unhappy situation. Utilitarianism declares that men can live just as well without happiness. Mill says yes, but men do not conduct their lives, always seeking happiness. Happiness does not always mean total bliss.

Another problem is that some pleasures are more alluring than others. Pleasure does not deal with just quantity, quality is also important. The old saying, “You can’t have too much of a good thing” is a statement many people live by but if Mill were to battle these words he would say too much happiness would lead to undesired happiness. It is natural for a person to focus their goals on what will provide happiness. People do not focus on being poor for instance but it does not mean that being rich provides complete happiness.

Mill says that ethical decisions should be based on pleasure. Therefore when he states that pleasure is the sole requirement for happiness, it is questionable because pain indirectly affects happiness. Pain is an indirect factor because it is not the object of one’s happiness but it is an obstacle, which you have to overcome. If you were to avoid all pain, then how would you truly ever know what pleasure feels like? Real pleasure comes only after experiencing pain. If a person always wins the tic tac toe game then the pleasure they feel turns into an expectation. Thus it is not true pleasure. If the loser of the tic tac toe game after 20 years finally wins he can feel the desired pleasure that he was seeking.

Another problem is one that deals with the justification of happiness. What is happiness for one person is not necessarily happiness for the other. If there were a basket of oranges given to a starving group of people, one person might be happy to have the orange because it is his favorite fruit and won’t be starving now, but one person might be deathly allergic to oranges and so he will be left starving. The intentions of one person might be to pull the victim form a burning building only to shoot them outside. This proves that it is morally right even if the intentions were wrong. Intentions play a very important role when it concerns morality. There is no way to really know if the intentions of the person are moral. Another side to the problem has to deal with impure thoughts. An impure thought does not become a sin until someone else knows about it. No matter if the secret is told or kept to yourself it is still a sin. If all the people in the world thought you were right, still there is no way for you to be morally correct. Mill did not really justify the criteria for the rules of happiness.

Bentham critics Mill by saying that his philosophy for utilitarianism was,” fit only for the swine.” This simply means that his views are fit for the perfect person. Pleasure for one person is completely different for the next person and there is no set standard to live by for the contents of pleasure. Several critics do not agree with Mill. Critics have condemned pleasure as the promotion of interest of a person with no regard to the happiness of others.

Man has the intellectual capacity for reason and he should aspire for something more. So pleasure keeps multiplying. You get a million