Study sheet: Utilitarianism: Bentham and Mill

📋 Course Outline

1. Bentham’s Act Utilitarianism
2. The Hedonic Calculus
3. Mill’s Rule Utilitarianism
4. The Calculation Problem
5. Rights and Rule Utilitarianism

📖 1. Bentham’s Act Utilitarianism

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Principle of utility : Bentham — states that an action is good if it maximises pleasure
• Consequentialism : evaluates an action according to the consequences it produces

📝 Essential Points

• Bentham claimed that human nature finds pleasure good and that human beings are incapable of valuing anything else.

💡 Memory Hook

Pleasure maximisation → morally right action

📖 2. The Hedonic Calculus

📝 Essential Points

• Bentham’s hedonic calculus is a list of 7 criteria, including intensity and duration, used to calculate how much pleasure an action will produce.

• Act utilitarianism requires doing the action that produces the greatest net pleasure after applying the hedonic calculus. — Bentham

💡 Memory Hook

Assess pleasure → calculate net pleasure → act

📖 3. Mill’s Rule Utilitarianism

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Rule utilitarianism : Mill — judges which social rules will maximise happiness if followed and requires people to follow those rules

★ Must-know

📌 Bentham regarded all pleasures as equal, whereas Mill regarded higher pleasures of the mind as superior to lower pleasures.

📌 Mill’s harm principle states that people should be free to do what they want as long as they do not harm others.

Further detail

• Mill argued that higher pleasures of the mind have less risk of addiction and last longer.

💡 Memory Hook

Bentham: equal pleasures; Mill: higher pleasures

📖 4. The Calculation Problem

★ Must-know

📌 The calculation problem is that future consequences cannot be predicted with certainty and subjective pleasure cannot be measured objectively.

• 🔄 Mill’s response involves three stages:
  1. Develop rules that maximise happiness
  2. Debate and improve the rules over time
  3. Follow the rules instead of judging every action separately

Further detail

📌 Bentham responded that past similar actions reveal the tendency of actions to produce certain consequences, making prediction sufficiently reliable for utilitarianism to work.

💡 Memory Hook

Bentham predicts tendencies; Mill follows social rules

📖 5. Rights and Rule Utilitarianism

📝 Essential Points

• Human rights are deontological claims that people possess intrinsic rights, such as a right to life.

• Strong rule utilitarianism says that a rule should not be broken even when breaking it would maximise happiness.

• Weak rule utilitarianism says that a rule should be broken when breaking it maximises happiness, which makes it collapse into act utilitarianism.

• Mill’s rule utilitarianism responds that the harm principle forbids slavery and other forms of harm to minorities, even when an individual harmful act appears to increase happiness.

• Critics argue that consequentialist utilitarianism could justify killing or slavery if harming some people produced greater overall happiness, such as enslaving 10% of the population for the happiness of the other 90%.

💡 Memory Hook

Strong rules never break; weak rules collapse into acts

📊 Synthesis Tables

Bentham and Mill

Dimension	Bentham	Mill
Pleasures	All pleasures are equal	Higher mental pleasures are superior
Method	Calculate each action using the hedonic calculus	Follow happiness-maximising social rules
Response to calculation	Use tendencies from similar past actions	Avoid calculating every individual action
Key principle	Principle of utility	Harm principle