Utilitarianism Explained: Principles, History, and Catholic Insights
This is the third article in the series “The -Isms Encyclopedia: Historical and Philosophical Ideas Explained” by Mr. Phillip Campbell.
I know utilitarianism is a big word, but it has been a very potent force in the history of Western thought over the last two centuries. While utilitarians never waged wars nor subjugated nations like some of the other –isms of modernity, it could be argued that their philosophy has been more consequential in modern society than any other. Today, we will do a deep dive into utilitarianism and see why this school of thought has been so influential.
Coming out of 18th and 19th-century Britain, utilitarianism was a system of ethics that emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, attempting to establish new grounds for human behavior that did not depend on either the old virtue ethics of Aristotle nor the theology of the Church. It thus can be viewed as an attempt to replace the foundations of human morality without appeal to value judgments or religious faith.
Principles of Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism comes from the word “utility,” which means “usefulness.” Something has utility if it is indeed useful. For example, many homes have a utility room, which is full of things useful for daily life, like a washer and dryer, furnace, or wash tub. As we might guess, then, utilitarianism is a philosophy that attempts to assess what is the most useful way for humans to act in terms of resources, intentions, and decision-making. Because utilitarianism addresses questions of human behavior and morality, we may consider it a system of ethics.
Utilitarianism is organized around three basic principles:
The Pleasure Principle
How should human society be organized in a way that is most conducive to our happiness? The answer to this depends upon understanding what our happiness lies in. Traditional Catholic ethics (following Aristotle) argued that man’s happiness is found in virtue—that is, in cultivating a noble character. The utilitarians, however, argued that man’s happiness is found in pleasure. They said people act from a desire to experience pleasure and avoid pain. Pleasure, therefore, is the natural end of human actions. It is what we all crave, whether or not we are willing to admit it.
It is important to note that the utilitarians did not necessarily believe this pleasure was merely sensual. In other words, intangible pleasures such as love, contentment, or pride in one’s work are all sources of pleasure. Nevertheless, because happiness is equated with pleasure, utilitarianism is rightly considered a type of hedonism.
The Greatest Happiness
If pleasure is our happiness, the next question is, how do we maximize human pleasure? The utilitarians are famous for a principle that is sometimes known as the Utilitarian Calculus (or, more amusingly, the Felicific Calculus). The Utilitarian Calculus is an ethical method for determining the moral worth of an action by the amount of happiness it generates. In general, the maxim the utilitarians employ is that we should do those things that result in the greatest amount of happiness for the most significant number of people. In other words, act in a way that maximizes the well-being of other people (where “well-being” is understood as pleasure). That which is ethical is that which maximizes happiness.
If you are wondering how something like pleasure could ever be adequately calculated, so did the utilitarians. That’s why the Utilitarian Calculus was devised: to provide some sort of rational method for assessing if something is sufficiently pleasurable to be morally good. The calculus uses seven criteria:
DURATION: How long does the pleasure last?
INTENSITY: How intense is it?
PROPINQUITY: How near or remote is it?
EXTENT: How widely does it cover?
CERTAINTY: How probable is it?
PURITY: How free from pain is it?
FECUNDITY: Does it lead to further pleasure?
The utilitarians understood that the raw pursuit of pleasure could lead to negative consequences. For example, stealing an item you want might bring pleasure in the moment. However, this could cause legal problems if caught, the aftermath of which could lead to miseries that far outweigh any momentary pleasure. If we look at the question through the utilitarian calculus, an act of theft has a very low duration, a low extent (i.e., only one person gets pleasure from stealing, namely, the thief), and it is not free from pain (i.e., there’s considerable mental stress in pulling off the act of theft and then the pain of worrying about being caught or actually getting caught). Therefore, stealing is unethical from a utilitarian perspective because it does not pass the Utilitarian Calculus.
Utilitarians debate whether an act must score well on every one of the criteria to be permissible and what exactly constitutes a “passing” score. Nonetheless, they generally agree that an act is more moral to the degree that it meets these criteria.
Consequentialism
Because utilitarians focus on the outcome of a moral action, they are considered consequentialists. Consequentialism is the belief that a moral act should be judged primarily by its consequences—in other words, the end justifies the means. From a utilitarian perspective, how we do something is not so important as what we accomplish in doing it. If what we accomplish is moral, the details of how we arrived at that end are negligible.
Who’s Who of Utilitarianism
Though various pre-Christian philosophers argued positions that bear some resemblance ot utilitarianism, it is only in 18th century Britian that utilitarianism emerged as a distinct philosophy. The emergence of utilitarianism in this time and place was a response to the changing economic and social conditions brought about by the emergence of industrial capitalism during the same time, as philosophers attempted to fornulate ethical systems that could be harmonized with the new system.
The first kernels of utilitarianism can be found in the works of Francis Hutcheson (d. 1746) and John Gay (d. 1745), who both identified “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” as a principle for moral action. David Hume (d. 1776) would argue for a strong connection between morality and utility, while the clergyman William Paley (d. 1805) would attempt to systematize these ideas within a Christian framework, creating a hybridized Christian utilitarianism palatable to the tastes of Georgian era Anglicans.
Jeremy Bentham
It was the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1747-1832) who is regarded as the father of utilitarianism proper, as it was Bentham who gave utilitarianism its most systematic and enduring form. Like many thinkers of his age, Bentham was was troubled by the social changes that followed the industrial revolution and pondered what sort of societal reforms could remedy the situation. His 1780 An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation argued for political reform along utilitarian principles. It was Bentham who first proposed the Utilitarian Calculus as a means of assessing to what degree an action was or was not moral based on quantifying the happiness resulting from it.
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was an English philosopher and economist who was a student of Bentham. Mill stridently promoted Bentham’s ideas while also developing them considerably. His 1863 book Utilitarianism (which is generally considered to have coined the name for the ideology) argued for a more refined utilitarian ethos. Mill, for example, rejected the purely quantitative approach to happiness promoted by his master. Understanding that something as abstract as happiness could not be measured like a substance, he made a distinction between higher and lower pleasures, i.e., intellectual pleasures and bodily pleasures. Mill was concerned that utilitarianism would be mistaken for Epicurean hedonism and attempted to demonstrate that the sophisticated morality of Victorian society could be deduced from utilitarian principles. He also made an eloquent (although logically fallacious) apologetic for the pleasure principle.
Henry Sidgwick
The work of Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) is considered the peak of classical utilitarianism. Sidgwick attempted to demonstrate that the principles of utilitariansm were consistent with common sense (as opponents utilitariansm had argued that a strict application of its principles ran counter to common sense and basic human decency). Sidgwick’s work descended into a very detailed analysis of human motivation, attempting to answer the question of why we “can just tell” that some things are moral and others not, from whence this certainty comes, and how it can be used in the service of utilitarianism. Though Sidgwick’s work is much more analytical than that of Mill or Bentham, its sheer complexity made him less accessible to the public.
Utilitarianism in Practice
The 20th century saw an entirely new crop of utilitarian philosophers who sought to continually refine the ideas of their predecessors into a system that was logically coherent but also practicable, i.e., that could be implemented on a societal level with sound results. To date, no such system has ever been tried, although many principles of utilitarian ethics have been adopted by modern society, implicitly if not explicitly. For example, that calculating approach to happiness that sees human flourishing as something that can be quantified, the belief that pleasure is the highest good and pain the highest evil, and the idea that it’s okay to compromise our morals sometimes in pursuit of a good cause are all widely accepted in modern society.
While most Western societies do not embrace full-blown consequentialism, things seem to move more in this direction with each passing year. For example, the entire euthanasia movement is based on the utilitarian assumption that life loses its value if one cannot experience requisite amounts of pleasure.
From a Catholic Perspective
While some decisions in life can benefit from a utilitarian calculus (for example, parents deciding how to allocate money in a family to bring the maximum amount of good to the greatest number of their children), it is entirely inadequate as a way to order society, much less serve as the foundation of our entire moral system.
Utilitarianism is incompatible with many foundational principles of Catholicism. For example, Catholic tradition strongly objects to identifying happiness with pleasure, regardless of whether it is intellectual or physical. For the Catholic, natural happiness is found in the life of virtue and supernatural happiness in the life of grace—and, ultimately, in union with God. Catholicism thus has a fundamentally different definition of happiness than that proposed by Bentham, Mill, and their followers.
Furthermore, Catholic moral theology recognizes three components to a moral act: the objective act, the intention, and the circumstances. All three of these components must be good for an act to be moral. The Church thus entirely rejects the consequentialism of the utilitarians, whereby an act is judged primarily by its outcome. This principle runs contrary to the Scriptures themselves, which teach that we ought not to to evil so that good may come of it (cf. Rom. 3:8). A Catholic cannot merely judge an act by its outcome alone.
Finally, the utilitarian idea that happiness can be quantified is a materialist and reductive manner of assessing human happiness. Human fulfillment is too abstract, too intangible, too complex, too subtle to be analyzed in such a way. And if this holds true on an individual level, how much more when we begin to consider the cumulative happiness of groups or entire societies?
Finding Happiness and Fulfillment
Creating a society where people are happy and fulfilled is one of the perennial challenges faced by humanity, one whose solution proves as elusive today as ever. While claiming to offer straightforward answers to the problem of human misery with its emphasis on pleasure and data-driven approach to ethics, utilitarianism is ultimately just hedonism under a more refined appearance. This is likely why its principles are so popular today.
As Catholics, we know that true happiness and fulfillment are found not in the pursuit of pleasure or the calculation of outcomes but in embracing the teachings of Jesus Christ. His message of selfless love, virtue, and grace offers a pathway to lasting joy that transcends the fleeting satisfaction of worldly pleasures. By exploring topics like utilitarianism in our Catholic homeschools, especially with high school teens, we equip them to critically evaluate the cultural philosophies that surround them. This understanding helps them recognize the profound contrast between worldly ideologies and the eternal truths of our faith, empowering them to live lives rooted in Christ’s love and truth.
In the Homeschool Connections Catalog
The following upper high school course discusses utilitarianism: Philosophy of the Human Person taught by Dr. Sam Nicholson.
Dr. Nicholson also teaches this high school course, which touches on topics related to utilitarianism: Virtue and Vice: Ancient Philosophy for Modern Catholics,
What are your thoughts on utilitarianism? Join me and other Catholic homeschool parents at our Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group to continue the discussion. And stay tuned for future articles on other “isms!”
