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Sandra LaFave
West Valley College |
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The notion of an ethics based on utility — usefulness for
human concerns, especially human happiness — was one of the
revolutionary Continental ideas of the Enlightenment period.
Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), for example, in his extremely
influential work On Crimes and Punishments, argues that
punishments should be inflicted only insofar as they are
useful for human purposes; and that governments should not
think themselves free to punish inhumanely in the name of God.
Beccaria is joined by thinkers such as Hobbes, Hume, Diderot,
Helvetius, and Montesquieu.
These notes focus mainly on the version of utilitarianism
defended by John Stuart Mill as expressed in his classic work
Utilitarianism (1861).
[STUDENTS, PLEASE NOTE! His name is "M-I-L-L" (not "Mills").]
But Mill (1806-1873) was not the first English-speaking
utilitarian philosopher; Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a friend
of James Mill, J. S. Mill’s father, is usually considered the
founder of British utilitarianism. The contemporary
philosopher Paul Taylor traces the foundations of British
utilitarianism back even further, to David Hume (1711-1776),
the famous British empiricist, who claims in his Treatise that
people invent rules for conduct because having such rules is
most useful for society as a whole.
However, the differences among the early utilitarians are
slight, so that most of what is said in these notes regarding
Mill is equally applicable to Hume and Bentham.
One important difference between Bentham and Mill arises
regarding the question, “What is the ultimate desideratum?”.
Bentham says pleasure is the highest natural good, and does
not think any pleasures are “objectively” better than any
others: “Pushpin is as good as poetry.” But Bentham does not
mean all pleasures are equally valuable either; pleasures are
better if more intense, long-lasting, certain, nearby, fecund
(capable of producing even more pleasures), pure (not mixed
with pain), and wide-ranged (the more people who enjoy, the
better). According to Bentham, these attributes are part of
the calculus of felicity, which you should use to compute the
overall value of any pleasure. Mill, by contrast, says that
some pleasures are in themselves better than others (whether
or not they are intense, long-lasting, certain, etc.).
Source:
http://instruct.westvalley.edu
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