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Utilitarianism was originally started by Jeremy Bentham as a way to improve hedonism; the idea that what brings pleasure is right. Hedonism was very dangerous to follow since you could do anything as long as it brought you pleasure. Bentham recognized this, but he also realized that pleasure was what drove most of us anyway, so he set out to develop a system that would use pleasure as a judgmental basis for morals. This is when he designed Utilitarianism. In order to do this, Bentham decided to come up with a way to calculate which act was better when compared to one or more alternative acts. This led to hedonic calculus. What hedonic calculus does is quantifies possible experiences and then calculates which one would bring you the most pleasure, thus the most moral act. Bentham developed 6 steps to hedonic calculus:
Now, you may have noticed that I said Bentham had 6 steps but 7 are listed. That is because John Stuart Mill came up with the last one to fill in a dangerous gap left in hedonic calculus. After you give the experiences you are trying to decide between a numerical value for each and then compare, you choose which one you are going to do based on the highest numbered one. Now lets put something in like murdering someone. Without extent in there, murder is justified if it brings you pleasure. If you do put it in it makes it a little harder since you would affect the murdered person's family. Now, lets discuss the problems with hedonic calculus. First off, not all experiences are comparable. Think how hard it is to quantify some experiences in your life. Another is that you need to know all the possible variables of an event, which is impossible since knowledge is finite. It also does not take into account the source of the pleasure, which does matter in real life. Hedonic calculus does not justify pleasures that are prior to others. It also does not take into account pain, or at least not to a far enough extent. Pleasures also differ in quality. It also justifies slavery since you are helping your entire family and any one who uses anything produced by your slave, while you are only hurting the slave and his family. One of the big arguments against hedonic calculus is that of murder. Even with extent in there, murder is justified when viewed from the point of saving others. If an army, for example, walked into a room and the enemy was in there with some innocent people, they could just throw a grenade in there and kill everyone since the extent would be greater to kill the enemy than to save the innocent. To combat these points, Bentham came up with sanctions. These are meant to be used at backups to keep people who would misuse hedonic calculus. They are:
Hopefully, if you attempt to use hedonic calculus for wrong, one of these sanctions will stop you. John Stuart Mill, the man who developed the seventh step of hedonic calculus, came up with two of his own sanctions; external and internal. External is just punishment from our fellow man and a god. Internal sanctions, on the other hand, is our "feeling for humanity" that keeps us in our place. Mill hoped that this would plug a huge hole left by Bentham since anyone can get past Bentham's sanctions, leaving only our basic humanity left to stop us. |