How does preference utilitarianism work

Suppose an agent has the mistaken belief that the glass of clear poison in front of them is a glass of water, and forms the preference to drink the liquid in the glass. Actual preference utilitarianism would counsel that, all else equal, the world would be better off if the agent satisfied their preference to drink the liquid — the agent should drink the liquid.

But clearly this is false, because if the agent satisfied their preference they would experience severe pain and die. The preference utilitarian should instead adopt ideal preference utilitarianism. Ideal preference utilitarianism is the view that utility is sum total ideal preference satisfaction.

The nature of ideal preferences is contentious, but a workable definition is that they are preferences agents would have if they were rational and had deliberated about all the relevant facts.

The goal is to avoid endorsing cases like drinking poison on the basis of mistaken beliefs. It is at this juncture that hedonic and preference utilitarianism seem to blend together. Because the hedonist thinks pleasure just is intrinsically good and suffering just is intrinsically bad , the hedonist will argue that an agent with ideal preferences i. Agents will do this, the hedonist claims, because experiences of pleasure just are the basis for goodness and experiences of suffering just are the basis for badness, so it is no surprise that an ideal agent will prefer to maximize net pleasure experiences.

For the hedonist, there is no other ultimate basis for making a rational decision based on all the facts. At this juncture the preference utilitarian has three options:. Option 1 can be further broken down depending on whether the proposed alternative basis for preference-formation involves experiential qualities. The preference utilitarian might disagree with the hedonist because they think there are other experiential qualities which are intrinsically good and bad apart from pleasure and suffering, and that ideal agents should form preferences on the basis of the intrinsic normative qualities of those experiences.

Call this 1a. I think the hedonic utilitarian will be quite satisfied if the preference utilitarian takes option 1a. The disagreement between the hedonic utilitarian and the 1a preference utilitarian, if there even is a disagreement, is whether there are experiential states with intrinsic value apart from states of pleasure and pain. Really, this is no longer a disagreement between a preference and hedonic utilitarian — it is an internecine dispute between two hedonic utilitarians who disagree on which experiential states are intrinsically valuable.

The other variant for Option 1 — call it 1b — is that the alternative basis for preference-formation does not involve experiential qualities. This is a real dispute, because a hedonist must think that normative value ultimately derives from experiential qualities. In this sense 1b agrees with 2 that intrinsic good does not derive from any experiential quality. The new taxonomy is in terms of experiential versus non-experiential bases for intrinsic value or ideal preference formation.

Hedonic utilitarians 1a and 3 above argue only experiential states are intrinsically valuable, and that ideal preferences are formed on the basis of those experiential states. Non-hedonic utilitarians 1b and 2 above argue experiential states are not intrinsically valuable, and ideal preferences are formed on the basis of something else or, alternatively, the satisfaction of ideal preference is good even if that satisfaction is not accompanied by any positive experiential states whatsoever.

Here the hedonist, I think, has the decisive argument. Consider first the case of P-zombies, which are entities identical in all respects to humans except lacking any experiences. The argument I have in mind asks us to consider whether there is any value in P-zombies satisfying their preferences and the conclusion I will suggest is no, there is not. Getting to this argument first requires some conceptual machinery.

The reason p-zombies can have preferences is because preference is, at least in part, a psychological rather than a phenomenal state. David Chalmers usefully distinguishes between psychological and phenomenal states of mind. A state of mind is psychological insofar as it plays the right causal role in explaining behavior. A state of mind is phenomenal insofar as there is a certain way it feels. A paradigm phenomenal state is seeing red or smelling a rose. The case of pain and nociception can be useful in disambiguating these two different concepts of mentality.

Strictly speaking, pain is a phenomenal state: it is the unpleasant experience often accompanying tissue damage. Nociception is a psychological state: it is the neural process of encoding and processing noxious stimuli like tissue damage. The reason pain is bad, argues the hedonist, is because it feels bad. Pain is only bad insofar as it is phenomenal pain. Actually, pain is quite good instrumentally insofar as it is a psychological state: it causes and trains our body to avoid harmful stimuli.

A world where people were only ever in the psychological state of pain, and never had any experience of phenomenal pain, would be better than our world where the two are mostly coupled: people would avoid harmful stimuli just as well as they do now, except their avoidance would not be accompanied by any bad feelings.

What is so good about satisfying preferences? The hedonist will argue that, if anything is good about satisfying preferences, it is the positive experience — pleasure — which accompanies preference-satisfaction and the avoidance of the negative experience — suffering — which accompanies preference-frustration.

The preference utilitarian, unless they are happy to accept 3 above and become hedonic utilitarians, must deny that the goodness of preference satisfaction stems from any experiential quality of preference satisfaction. The distinction between phenomenal and psychological mental states introduced in the previous section is helpful in understanding this dispute between the hedonic and preference utilitarian. Utilitarianism: For and Against. London: Cambridge University Press.

Since Jim is an honoured guest, the captain of the guard offers him a guest's privilege of killing one of the Indians himself. If Jim accepts this privilege, then the other Indians would be let off but if he does not, then all the Indians would be killed.

In addition, Jim cannot conceivably rescue all the Indians at that moment without himself and all the Indians being killed by the soldiers. In such a situation, act utilitarianism would prescribe the killing of the innocent Indian as the right action. This is not to say that the rules of conventional morality such as "never lie", "never break promises", "never kill the innocent", etc. Act utilitarianism treats rules as useful rules of thumbs which, when applied in most cases would maximize happiness or produce more good than bad consequences.

Rule following is also useful in emergency situations like whether to save a drowning person or not when there is no time to think about consequences 14 14 Ibid. But in situations in which we do have time to reflect or when we are not sure of rightness of a course of action, we should deliberate in an act utilitarian manner. Rules are not seen as absolute by the act utilitarians because complying with a rule may endanger public interest on some occasions as noted by Hume 15 15 HUME, D.

A Treatrise of Human Nature. Selby-Bigge ed. London: Oxford. Clarendon Press, p. It holds that the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined not by the consequences of the action on a particular occasion but by the possibility of its being subsumed under a morally acceptable rule. Whether the rule is acceptable as a moral rule depends, in turn, on the kind of consequences resulting from everybody's adoption of the rule. Thus rule utilitarianism employs the notion of "universalisation".

In determining whether an act is right or wrong, one should not look at the likely consequences of an act on a particular occasion but rather at the likely consequences from the performance of the same act by everyone under the same consequences.

If everyone adopts and applies the rule "I will make a promise without the intention of keeping it whenever I am hard pressed to do so", then if everyone adopts the rule, it would make nonsense of the institution of "promise-keeping"; for no one would believe anyone else. Since there are many obvious utilitarian reasons for having institution of "promise-keeping", the rule that I act on cannot be a moral one and the act based on the rule is consequently not the right act.

Thus actions are to be tested by the rules which govern them which in turn are to be tested by the consequences of adopting these rules 17 17 Some other rule utilitarianism theories claim that the right action is that which is based on certain actual recognized or ideal moral code or system of rules of a given society and it is utility that justifies decision as to whether a moral code is seen to have utility above other moral code. Dimensions of Ethical Thoughts. USA: New York. Peter Lang Publishing Inc.

This is what makes the theory attractive - it resolves the dispute between intuitionists and utilitarians very neatly. The only exception where we must determine the morality of an action directly by its consequences arise when the action comes under the jurisdiction of two different rules, one prescribing and the other forbidding it as in the case of lying to save a life or when there is no existing rule that governs the given case 18 18 SMART, J.

From a comparison of the various forms of utilitarianism, it becomes obvious that Hare's preference utilitarianism is superior to, and more sophisticated than, the rest. This is so because Hare's theory is a more recent development and modification of the other forms of utilitarianism, being formulated with the aim of overcoming many of the traditional criticism against the other cruder forms of utilitarianism. First, it overcomes the problems faced by hedonistic and ideal utilitarianism.

It is very difficult to resolve the dispute between hedonism and idealism in the above-mentioned context of utilitarianism because what one considers as good happiness, knowledge, etc. Thus if one cannot agree on what is good, how can one try to promote good?

This problem can be avoided by using the preference approach. Secondly, by using the preference approach, Hare's theory avoids the traditional problem regarding the quantification of utility. If we take into consideration people's preferences to decides if an action is right or wrong, then we would not need to determine the quality of pleasure or distinguish between higher and lower pleasures 19 19 HARE, R.

Hare's preference utilitarianism allows us to measure preference utility more objectively by devising a utility scale to measure the relative strength and intensity of individual and the group preferences. This procedure is being used in voting and survey practices in which polls are taken to ascertain the preferred candidate for public office. Though he admits that exact calculations of utilities are impossible 20 20 G.

MOORE also pointed out that a person would never have sufficient information in a concrete situation of moral choice to know that in a particular situation, breaking the rule would produce the best consequences.

In shall not, from now on, elaborate on the quantification problems in Hare's preference utilitarianism, or utilitarianism in general, for I do agree with Hare and Smart that it is indeed possible to, at least, roughly estimate the utility of an action or the preferences of the people.

After all, that is what we do in our daily lives and our factual and moral reasoning. We weight the pros and cons of an action and act on it. It is what economists, politicians and entrepreneurs do and it is at least possible, to a limited extend, to know what makes others happy, what is good, what benefits others or what others would prefer by putting ourselves in their place.

Thirdly, Hare's two levels of moral thinking "apparently" allows us to overcome many of the common intuitionist objections against utilitarianism such as the charge of rule worship, immorality, neglect of special responsibilities, duties and obligations, distributive injustice and the infringement of natural and moral rights. Hare has made an important and illuminating distinction between two levels of moral thinking; for we indeed do our moral thinking in this way.

We are conditioned, socialized or educated sometimes consciously but most of the time unconsciously through following the way things are done around us into believing that various acts or classes of acts are right, or wrong, just or unjust. We intuitively hold these moral judgements or principles without much reflection and are perfectly and honestly convinced that it is the right thing to do.

Thus, our intuitions are derived through education and have been tested sufficiently in the past which shows that there are good utilitarian reasons for obeying them. Moral Tradition and Individuality. New Jersey: Princeton. Princeton University Press, , p. Simple moral situations are situations involving the murder, torture and mutilation of the innocent. They are situations which involve a deep moral prohibition against the above acts of simple evil because such acts are detrimental to the attainment of the good life by the moral agent because such acts undermine the minimum requirement of conditions necessary for the moral agent's attainment of the good life and such acts are what harm human beings always, everywhere, under all circumstances and are thus always evil.

Hare's practical syllogism allows us to recognize which moral situations are simple ones or what Hare calls "usual cases" by stipulating that all acts or situations possessing the morally relevant feature mentioned in the moral situations which prescribe an action or a prohibition. For example,. Thus is easy in simple moral situations or usual cases to recognize if an act is morally wrong or not. However, in more complex moral situations like pre-marital or extra-marital sex, homosexuality, abortion, etc.

Firstly, there may be no existing moral rules telling us what to do and, secondly, our moral intuitions or judgments may conflict. In such cases, we do think critically and decide explicitly on a course of action and implicitly on a moral principle by weighing the pros and cons of each alternative and thinking critically.

My agreement with Hare only goes as far as what I have mentioned. That is, utilitarianism led the early utilitarians to many conclusions which struck people as counterintuitive at the time but which most of us now understand as right.

This provides us with some reason to accept utilitarian conclusions, even where they conflict with commonsense moral intuitions today. Imagine you had to decide how to structure society from behind a veil of ignorance.

However, what you do not know is which of these people you are. You only know that you have an equal chance of being any of these people. Imagine, now, that you are trying to act in a rational and self-interested way—you are just trying to do whatever is best for yourself.

How would you structure society? See also: Existential risk reduction. The average view of population ethics regards one outcome as better than another if and only if it contains greater average wellbeing.

Since the average view aims only to improve the average wellbeing level, it disregards—in contrast to the total view —the number of individuals that exist. The average view avoids the repugnant conclusion , because it states that reductions in the average wellbeing level can never be compensated for by adding more people to the population.

However, the average view has very little support among moral philosophers, because it leads to counterintuitive implications which are said to be at least as serious as the repugnant conclusion. The main alternatives to the average view of population ethics are the total view and person-affecting views.

According to the total view, one outcome is better than another if and only if it contains a greater sum total of wellbeing, even if that is in virtue of simply having more people. Person-affecting views are a family of views that share the intuition that an act can only be good or bad if it is good or bad for someone.

Standard person-affecting views stand in opposition to the total view, since they entail that there is no moral good in bringing new people into existence because nonexistence means there is no one for whom it could be good to be created. Most of us will spend around 80, hours during our lives on our professional careers, and some careers achieve much more good than others.

Your choice of career is, therefore, one of the most important moral choices of your life. By using this time to address the most pressing global problems, we can do an enormous amount of good. Yet, it is far from obvious which careers will allow you to do the most good from a utilitarian perspective. Fortunately, there is research available to help us make more informed choices.

To do this, they research how individuals can maximize the social impact of their careers, create online advice, and support readers who might enter priority areas. Which causes will allow us to do the greatest amount of good by promoting wellbeing? Finding the answer to that question is called cause prioritization. We know that some ways of benefiting individuals do much more good than others.

For example, within the cause of global health and development , some interventions are over times as effective as others. If so, focusing on the very best causes is vastly more impactful than focusing on average ones.

Giving more simply means increasing the proportion of your income you give to charity. Giving better means finding and donating to the organizations that make the best use of your donation. By making small sacrifices, those in the affluent world have the power to dramatically improve the lives of others.

Due to the extreme inequalities in wealth and income, one can do a lot more good by giving money to those most in need than by spending it on oneself. To give better, one can follow the recommendations from organizations such as GiveWell , which conducts exceptionally in-depth charity evaluations.

Classical utilitarianism is the ethical theory on which the rightness of actions or rules, policies, etc. Classical utilitarianism can be distinguished from the wider utilitarian family of views because it accepts hedonism as a theory of welfare and the total view of population ethics. Consequentialism is the view that the moral rightness of actions or rules, policies, etc. Thus, to evaluate whether an action is right or wrong, we should look at all its consequences rather than any of its other features.

For instance, when breaking a promise has bad consequences—as it usually does—consequentialists consider it wrong to do so. However, breaking a promise is not considered wrong in and of itself. In exceptional cases breaking a promise would be morally permissible or even required, such as when doing so is necessary to save a life. Consequentialism is one of the four elements of utilitarian ethical theories. External links: Consequentialism , Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Moral cosmopolitanism is the view that if you have the means to save a life in a faraway country, doing so matters just as much as saving a life close by in your own country; all lives deserve equal moral consideration, wherever they are. Utilitarianism accepts moral cosmopolitanism and consequently regards geographical distance and national membership as not intrinsically morally relevant.

This means that, by the lights of utilitarianism, we have no grounds for discriminating against someone because of where they live, where they come from, or what nationality they have. An implication of accepting moral cosmopolitanism is to take improving global health and development very seriously as moral priorities. Utilitarianism is a very demanding ethical theory: it maintains that any time you can do more to help other people than you can to help yourself, you should do so.

For example, if you could sacrifice your life to save the lives of several other people then, other things being equal, according to utilitarianism, you ought to do so. Though occasions where sacrificing your own life is the best thing to do are rare, utilitarianism is still very demanding in the world today. Indeed, you are likely obligated to donate the majority of your lifetime income.

As well as requiring very significant donations, utilitarianism claims that you ought to choose whatever career will most benefit others , too. This might involve non-profit work, conducting important research, or going into politics or advocacy. See also: Demandingness Objection to Utilitarianism. Many critics argue that utilitarianism is too demanding, because it requires us to always act such as to bring about the best outcome. The theory leaves no room for actions that are permissible yet do not bring about the best consequences; this is why some critics claim that utilitarianism is a morality only for saints.

Consider that the money a person spends on dining out could pay for several bednets, each protecting two children in a low-income country from malaria for about two years. See the article The Demandingness Objection on how proponents of utilitarianism might respond to this objection. The main alternatives to deontology are consequentialism , the view that the moral rightness of actions or rules, policies, etc. The most well known desire theory is preference utilitarianism, the ethical theory on which the rightness of actions or rules, policies, etc.

According to direct consequentialism, the rightness of an action or rule, policy, etc. On this view, to determine the right action in some set of feasible actions, we should directly evaluate the consequences of the actions to see which has the best consequences.

The most well known direct consequentialist view is act utilitarianism, which assesses the moral rightness of actions, and only of actions, according to the sum total of wellbeing they produce. The alternative to direct consequentialism is indirect consequentialism, according to which we should evaluate the moral status of an action or rule, policy, etc.

Many non-consequentialists believe there is a morally relevant difference between doing harm and allowing harm , even if the consequences of an action or inaction are the same. However, while consequentialists—including utilitarians—accept that doing harm is typically instrumentally worse than allowing harm, they deny that doing harm is intrinsically worse than allowing harm.

Thus, they reject the Doctrine of Doing and Allowing. Those in the effective altruism movement try to figure out, of all the different uses of our resources, which ones will do the most good, impartially considered, and act on that basis. So defined, effective altruism is both a research project—to figure out how to do the most good—and a practical project to implement the best guesses we have about how to do the most good.

Egalitarianism is a theory of how to aggregate the wellbeing of individuals. Egalitarianism is the view that the goodness of an outcome depends not only on the sum total of wellbeing, but also on how equally this wellbeing is distributed across all people.

External links: Egalitarianism , Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Some argue that utilitarianism conflicts with the ideal of equality. Suppose, for example, that you could choose between two possible distributions of wellbeing, Equality and Inequality : Equality has 1, people at wellbeing level 45, while Inequality has people at 80 wellbeing and another people at 20 wellbeing.

By the lights of utilitarianism, only the sum total of wellbeing determines the goodness of an outcome: it does not matter how that wellbeing is distributed across people. Some philosophers object to the utilitarian view regarding this choice, claiming that the equal distribution of wellbeing in Equality provides a reason to choose this outcome. On this view, total wellbeing is not all that matters; equality of distribution also matters.

Equality, it is claimed, is an important moral consideration that the utilitarian overlooks. See the article The Equality Objection on how proponents of utilitarianism might respond to this objection. Besides the deaths of all 7. Since the stakes involved with existential risks are so large, their mitigation may, therefore, be one of the most important moral issues we face. We now recognize that characteristics like race, gender, and sexual orientation do not justify discriminating against individuals or disregarding their suffering.

Over time, our society has gradually expanded our moral concern to ever more groups, a trend of moral progress often called the expanding moral circle.

Utilitarianism provides a clear response to this question: We should extend our moral concern to all sentient beings , meaning every individual capable of experiencing positive or negative conscious states. This includes humans and probably many non-human animals, but not plants or other entities that are non-sentient. This view is sometimes called sentiocentrism as it regards sentience as the characteristic that entitles individuals to moral concern. A priority for utilitarians may be to help society to continue to widen its moral circle of concern.

For instance, we may want to persuade people that they should help not just those in their own country, but also those on the other side of the world; not just those of their own species but all sentient creatures; and not just people currently alive but any people whose lives they can affect, including those in generations to come.

Expectational utilitarianism is the view we should promote expected wellbeing, as opposed to the wellbeing an action will in fact produce. Expectational utilitarianism states we should choose the actions with the highest expected value.

The main alternative to expectational utilitarianism is objective utilitarianism , on which the rightness of an action depends on the wellbeing it will in fact produce. Improving the welfare of farmed animals should be a high moral priority for utilitarians.

The argument for this conclusion is simple: First, animals matter morally ; second, humans cause a huge amount of unnecessary suffering to animals in factory farms; third, there are easy ways to reduce the number of farmed animals and the severity of their suffering.

Efforts in global health and development have a great track record of improving lives, making this cause appear especially tractable. Indeed, the best interventions in global health and development are incredibly cost-effective: GiveWell , a leading organization that conducts in-depth charity evaluations, estimates that top-rated charities can prevent the death of a child from malaria for just a few thousand dollars by providing preventive drugs.

Global utilitarianism is the view that the utilitarian standards of right and wrong can evaluate anything of interest, including actions, motives, rules, virtues, policies, social institutions, etc. Global utilitarianism assesses the moral nature of, for example, a particular character trait, such as kindness or loyalty, based on the consequences that trait has for the wellbeing of others—just as act utilitarianism evaluates the rightness of actions.

Global utilitarianism is simpler and more general than act utilitarianism and has the potential to explain certain non-consequentialist intuitions. Philosophers commonly use happiness and suffering as shorthand for the terms positive conscious experience and negative conscious experience, respectively.

According to ethical hedonists, happiness is the only thing good in and of itself and suffering is the only thing bad in and of itself. The hedonistic conception of happiness is broad: It covers not only paradigmatic instances of sensual pleasure—such as the experiences of eating delicious food or having sex—but also other positively valenced experiences, such as the experiences of solving a problem, reading a novel, or helping a friend.

A close friend and later wife of John Stuart Mill, she had a profound impact on his thinking and worked in close collaboration with him. Despite her many contributions in books and magazines, most of her writing was only published under her own name after her death. Applying the hedonic calculus to similarly assess all the alternative actions, would show which one has the best overall consequences, and should therefore be chosen.

Hedonism is the view that wellbeing consists in, and only in, positive and negative conscious experiences. For hedonism the only things good in and of themselves are the experiences of positive conscious states, such as enjoyment and pleasure; and the only things bad in and of themselves are the experiences of negative conscious states, such as misery and pain. Hedonists claim that all these experiences are intrinsically valuable, which means they are valuable in and of themselves.

Other goods, such as wealth, health, justice, fairness and equality are also valued by classical utilitarianism, but they are valued instrumentally. This means they are valued to the extent that they affect the conscious experience of individuals, rather than being valued in and of themselves.

This list can include conscious experiences or satisfied preferences, but it rarely stops there; ethicists commonly argue that the objective list includes art, knowledge, love, friendship, and more. Henry Sidgwick - was a British philosopher and economist. Impartiality is the view that the identity of individuals is irrelevant to the value of an outcome.

Accepting impartiality means treating wellbeing as equally valuable regardless of when, where, or to whom it occurs. As a consequence, utilitarianism values the wellbeing of all individuals equally, regardless of their nationality, gender, where or when they live , or even their species.

Impartiality is one of the four elements of utilitarian ethical theories. According to indirect consequentialism we should evaluate the moral status of an action or rule, policy, etc.