The Consequentialist Blank Cheque Part 1 

09-10-2023

In 1789, Jeremy Bentham published An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He introduced a radical concept of utilitarianism: that the morality of actions are only based on the quantity of utility produced. John Stuart Mill later narrowed utility to mean pleasure.

The principle is that given choices A and B, you should calculate the total pleasure of each and select the one that maximises the quantity of pleasure.

Some immediate questions arise to do with pleasure: can all the goods that are valued be reduced to pleasure? Is pleasure not subjective, based on who one asks? Can all sources and forms of pleasue always be compared? Is the enjoyment of the pain of others not pleasure too?

Let us pretend for a while that pleasure is the correct thing to maximise. What about the assertion that one can calculate the value of pleasure? The requirement is that there is a mathematical function which takes every action and returns a value, a utility function.

No example of well-defined, consistent utility function has ever been presented. Even the existence of such a function has not been proven. Instead, utilitarianism leaves us with a blank cheque where we can assign any value to any action, justifying whatever ill deed we desire by draping over a thin veil of false mathematical legitimacy.

#ethics