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57 lines
4.7 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Consequentialism
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section-id: ethics
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sort: 110
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author: Prof. James Okafor
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created: 2026-02-19 09:00
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modified: 2026-03-27 10:30
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language: en
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description: Utilitarianism and its variants, objections, and defences.
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---
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# Consequentialism
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Consequentialism is the family of ethical theories holding that the moral status of an action is determined solely by its consequences. The right action in a given situation is the one that produces the best overall outcomes. The most influential version is utilitarianism.
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## Classical Utilitarianism
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Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill developed utilitarianism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Classical utilitarianism holds:
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1. The only thing with intrinsic value is **pleasure** (or happiness); the only thing with intrinsic disvalue is **pain** (or suffering)
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2. The right action is the one that maximises net pleasure (pleasure minus pain) summed across all affected beings
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3. Everyone’s pleasure and pain counts equally: one person counts for one, no more
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Bentham proposed a **felicific calculus**: pleasures and pains can be measured by intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity (nearness), fecundity (tendency to produce more pleasure), and purity (tendency not to produce pain).
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Mill complicated Bentham’s picture by distinguishing **higher and lower pleasures**. The pleasures of the intellect and moral sentiment are qualitatively superior to physical pleasures. ‘It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.’ This move was intended to make utilitarianism less vulnerable to the charge that it is a doctrine for swine, but it introduces a non-hedonist element: if the quality of pleasures matters independently of their intensity, something other than pleasure is being valued.
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## Objections to Classical Utilitarianism
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### The Transplant Case
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A surgeon can save five patients by killing one healthy patient and harvesting their organs. Maximising welfare seems to require it, but the intuition that this is monstrous is very strong. Utilitarianism seems to permit, or even require, actions that violate the rights of individuals for the aggregate benefit.
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### Demandingness
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Utilitarianism seems to require that we sacrifice nearly everything—personal projects, relationships, luxuries—until the marginal utility of our next expenditure equals the marginal utility of giving it to someone in greater need. This seems excessively demanding; it appears to erase the distinction between what morality requires and what is merely supererogatory (beyond the call of duty).
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### Integrity
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Bernard Williams argued that utilitarianism alienates agents from their own projects and commitments. If I must always do whatever produces the best consequences, I cannot maintain the personal commitments that give life meaning. Morality, on the utilitarian picture, does not just constrain action from the outside; it colonises the entire self.
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## Rule Utilitarianism
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To meet the transplant and similar objections, **rule utilitarians** hold that the right action is the one prescribed by the set of rules whose general acceptance would maximise welfare. Even if harvesting organs would maximise utility in this case, a rule permitting doctors to harvest organs would have terrible effects if generally accepted (no one would go to hospital).
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Critics argue that rule utilitarianism, if consistently developed, collapses back into act utilitarianism: if the rules are perfectly optimised, following them will produce the same results as act utilitarianism in every case. Or rule utilitarianism will retain rules that require suboptimal acts in particular cases, and then the question is why we should follow the rule rather than the act that produces the best outcome.
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## Preference Utilitarianism and Welfare
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Contemporary utilitarians often replace hedonism with a broader conception of welfare. **Preference utilitarianism** (Peter Singer) holds that the right action maximises the satisfaction of preferences. **Objective list theories** hold that welfare consists in obtaining certain goods (knowledge, friendship, achievement) regardless of whether they are wanted.
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Each approach has different implications. Preference utilitarianism must deal with uninformed, mistaken, or adaptive preferences. Objective list theories must explain why items on the list are objectively good.
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## Summary
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- Classical utilitarianism: right action maximises pleasure summed across all affected beings
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- Mill adds qualitative distinctions between higher and lower pleasures
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- Objections: the transplant case, demandingness, the integrity objection
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- Rule utilitarianism proposes rules whose general acceptance maximises welfare; risks collapsing into act utilitarianism
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- Modern versions use preference satisfaction or objective lists instead of pleasure
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