Discussion of Utilitarian Scenarios

Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1332) left no doubt where he stood on this question. He heaped scorn on the idea of natural rights, calling them nonsense upon stilts.” The philosophy he launched has had an influential career. In fact, it exerts a powerful hold on the thinking of policy-makers, economists, business executives, and ordinary citizens to this day.

Bentham, an English moral philosopher and legal reformer, founded the doctrine of utilitarianism. Its main idea is simply stated and intuitively appealing: The highest principle of morality is to maximize happiness, the overall balance of pleasure over pain. According to Bentham, the right thing to do is whatever will maximize utility. By, “utility," he means whatever produces pleasure or happiness, and whatever prevents pain or suffering.

Bentham arrives at his principle by the following line of reasoning: We are all governed by the feelings of pain and pleasure. They are our "sovereign masters." They govern us in everything we do and also determine what we ought to do. The standard of right and wrong is "fastened to their throne." 

We all like pleasure and dislike pain. The utilitarian philosophy recognizes this fact, and makes it the basis of moral and political life. Maximizing utility is a principle not only for individuals but also for legislators. In deciding what laws or policies to enact, a government should do whatever will maximize the happiness of the community as a whole. What, after all, is a community? According to Bentham, it is "a fictitious body," composed of the sum of the individuals who comprise it. Citizens and legislators should therefore ask themselves this question: If we add up all of the benefits of this policy, and subtract all the costs, will it produce more happiness than the alternative? 

Bentham’s argument for the principle that we should maximize utility takes the form of a bold assertion: There are no possible grounds for rejecting it. Every moral argument, he claims, must implicitly draw on the idea of maximizing happiness. People may say they believe in certain absolute, categorical duties or rights. But they would have no basis for defending these duties or rights unless they believed that respecting them would maximize human happiness, at least in the long run. 

"When a man attempts to combat the principle of utility," Bentham writes, "it is with reasons drawn, without his being aware of it, from that very principle itself." All moral quarrels, properly understood, are disagreements about how to apply the utilitarian principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, not about the principle itself. "Is it possible for a man to move the earth?" Bentham asks. "Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon." And the only earth, the only premise, the only starting point for moral argument, according to Bentham, is the principle of utility. 

Bentham thought his utility principle offered a science of morality that could serve as the basis of political reform. He proposed a number of projects designed to make penal policy more efficient and humane. One was the Panopticon, a prison with a central inspection tower that would enable the supervisor to observe the inmates without their seeing him. He suggested that the Panopticon be run by a private contractor (ideally himself), who would manage the prison in exchange for the profits to be made from the labor of the convicts, who would work sixteen hours per day. Although Bentham’s plan was ultimately rejected, it was arguably ahead of its time. Recent years have seen a revival, in the United States and Britain, of the idea of outsourcing prisons to private companies.

Rounding up beggars

Another of Bentham’s schemes was a plan to improve "pauper management" by establishing a self-financing workhouse for the poor. The plan, which sought to reduce the presence of beggars on the streets, offers a vivid illustration of the utilitarian logic. Bentham observed, first of all, that encountering beggars on the streets reduces the happiness of passersby, in two ways. For tenderhearted souls, the sight of a beggar produces the pain of sympathy; for hardhearted folk, it generates the pain of disgust. Either way, encountering beggars reduces the utility of the general public. So Bentham proposed removing beggars from the streets and confining them in a workhouse.*

Some may think this unfair to the beggars. But Bentham does not neglect their utility. He acknowledges that some beggars would be happier begging than working in a poorhouse. But he notes that for every happy and prosperous beggar, there are many miserable ones. He concludes that the sum of the pains suffered by the public is greater than whatever unhappiness is felt by beggars hauled off to the workhouse. Some might worry that building and running the workhouse would impose an expense on taxpayers, reducing their happiness and thus their utility. But Bentham proposed a way to make his pauper management plan entirely self-financing. Any citizen who encountered a beggar would be empowered to apprehend him and take him to the nearest workhouse. Once confined there, each beggar would have to work to pay off the cost of his or her maintenance, which would be tallied in a "self-liberation account." The account would include food, clothing, bedding, medical care, and a life insurance policy, in case the beggar died before the account was paid up. To give citizens an incentive to take the trouble to apprehend beggars and deliver them to the workhouse, Bentham proposed a reward of twenty shillings per apprehension to be added, of course, to the beggar’s tab.

Bentham also applied utilitarian logic to rooming assignments within the facility, to minimize the discomfort inmates suffered from their neighbors: "Next to every class, from which any inconvenience is to be apprehended, station a class unsusceptible of that inconvenience." So, for example, "next to raving lunatics, or persons of profligate conversation, place the deaf and dumb . .. Next to prostitutes and loose women, place the aged women." As for "the shockingly deformed," Bentham proposed housing them alongside inmates who were blind.

Harsh though his proposal may seem, Bentham’s aim was not punitive. It was meant simply to promote the general welfare by solving a problem that diminished social utility. His scheme for pauper management was never adopted. But the utilitarian spirit that informed it is alive and well today. Before considering some present-day instances of utilitarian thinking, it is worth asking whether Bentham’s philosophy is objectionable, and if so, on what grounds.

Objection 1: Individual Rights

The most glaring weakness of utilitarianism, many argue, is that it fails to respect individual rights. By caring only about the sum of satisfactions, it can run roughshod over individual people. For the utilitarian, individuals matter, but only in the sense that each person’s preferences should be counted along with everyone else’s. But this means that the utilitarian logic, if consistently applied, could sanction ways of treating persons that violate what we think of as fundamental norms of decency and respect, as the following cases illustrate:

Throwing Christians to lions

In ancient Rome, they threw Christians to the lions in the Coliseum for the amusement of the crowd. Imagine how the utilitarian calculus would go: Yes, the Christian suffers excruciating pain as the lion mauls and devours him. But think of the collective ecstasy of the cheering spectators packing the Coliseum. If enough Romans derive enough pleasure from the violent spectacle, are there any grounds on which a utilitarian can condemn it?

The utilitarian may worry that such games will coarsen habits and breed more violence in the streets of Rome; or lead to fear and trembling among prospective victims that they, too, might one day be tossed to the lions. If these effects are bad enough, they could conceivably outweigh the pleasure the games provide, and give the utilitarian a reason to ban them. But if these calculations are the only reasons to desist from subjecting Christians to violent death for the sake of entertainment, isn’t something of moral importance missing?

Is torture ever justified?

A similar question arises in contemporary debates about whether torture is ever justified in the interrogation of suspected terrorists. Consider the ticking time bomb scenario: Imagine that you are the head of the local CIA branch. You capture a terrorist suspect who you believe has information about a nuclear device set to go off in Manhattan later the same day. In fact, you have reason to suspect that he planted the bomb himself. As the clock ticks down, he refuses to admit to being a terrorist or to divulge the bomb’s location. Would it be right to torture him until he tells you where the bomb is and how to disarm it? The argument for doing so begins with a utilitarian calculation. Torture inflicts pain on the suspect, greatly reducing his happiness or utility. But thousands of innocent lives will be lost if the bomb explodes. So you might argue, on utilitarian grounds, that it’s morally justified to inflict intense pain on one person if doing so will prevent death and suffering on a massive scale. Former Vice President Richard Cheney’s argument that the use of harsh interrogation techniques against suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists helped avert another terrorist attack on the United States rests on this utilitarian logic.

This is not to say that utilitarians necessarily favor torture. Some utilitarians oppose torture on practical grounds. They argue that it seldom works, since information extracted under duress is often unreliable. So pain is inflicted, but the community is not made any safer: there is no increase in the collective utility. Or they worry that if our country engages in torture, our soldiers will face harsher treatment if taken prisoner. This result could actually reduce the overall utility associated with our use of torture, all things considered.

These practical considerations may or may not be true. As reasons to oppose torture, however, they are entirely compatible with utilitarian thinking. They do not assert that torturing a human being is intrinsically wrong, only that practicing torture will have bad effects that, taken as a whole, will do more harm than good.

Some people reject torture on principle. They believe that it violates human rights and fails to respect the intrinsic dignity of human beings. Their case against torture does not depend on utilitarian considerations. They argue that human rights and human dignity have a moral basis that lies beyond utility. If they are right, then Bentham’s philosophy is wrong.

On the face of it, the ticking time bomb scenario seems to support Bentham’s side of the argument. Numbers do seem to make a moral difference. It is one thing to accept the possible death of three men in a lifeboat to avoid killing one innocent cabin boy in cold blood. But what if thousands of innocent lives are at stake, as in the ticking time bomb scenario? What if hundreds of thousands of lives were at risk? The utilitarian would argue that, at a certain point, even the most ardent advocate of human rights would have a hard time insisting it is morally preferable to let vast numbers of innocent people die than to torture a single terrorist suspect who may know where the bomb is hidden.

The city of happiness

The second version of the torture case (the one involving the innocent daughter) brings to mind a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin. The story ("The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas") tells of a city called Omelas a city of happiness and civic celebration, a place without kings or slaves, without advertisements or a stock exchange, a place without the atomic bomb. Lest we find this place too unrealistic to imagine, the author tells us one more thing about it: "In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window." And in this room sits a child. The child is feeble-minded, malnourished, and neglected. It lives out its days in wretched misery.

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas They all know that it has to be there.. [T]hey all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, … even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery. . . . If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of the vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms.

Are those terms morally acceptable?