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Essay on Consequentialism & Utilitarianism
This paper is concerned both with the utilitarianism and consequentialism as an ethical theory and with the lively contemporary debate over its forms, problems and prospects. It will become clear, but it is only fair to declare at the outset, that my own sympathies run broadly in favor of the utilitarian point of view, though I am not convinced that a wholly satisfactory form of the theory is yet available. Perhaps the best that can currently be said about utilitarianism is that it is a very bad form of moral philosophy, but that all the others are so much worse.
At any rate, I am far from believing, as some philosophers profess to do, that the days of utilitarianism are numbered. Reports of the death, or imminent demise, of utilitarianism have been greatly exaggerated. ‘Utilitarianism is destroyed,’ claimed John Plamenatz in 1949, ‘and no part of it left standing’. Yet there was still enough life left in the corpse a quarter of a century later for Bernard Williams to hope that ‘The day cannot be too far off in which we hear no more of it’. Twenty years further on we hear as much about utilitarianism as we ever did, and the flow of new writings on the subject is unceasing. For a viewpoint often accused of simple-mindedness, utilitarianism has demonstrated a striking ability to go on stimulating forceful and subtle argument on both sides of the case. If the utilitarian theory is wrong, proving it to be so is taking a remarkable amount of intellectual effort.
John Stuart Mill believed that the appeal of utilitarianism, to a certain cast of mind, was perennial. In every age of philosophy, he thought, one of its schools had been utilitarian. But in every era too, the doctrine had provoked virulent opposition: from a very early period.................
