I think I have a decent understanding but love learning more and new perspectives help. Also what are the opposing viewpoints/philosophies?
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There are a few differing versions, but they all say some form of: the morally right thing to do is the one that brings about the most overall good. “Good” is usually defined as some form of human happiness. For example, tripping a kid about to run into a busy street might be considered morally correct. Tripping in general isn’t nice, but it’s nicer than getting hit by a car.
Some common complaints about it are: It gets you nowhere without a solid definition of “good.” It can involve a lot of on the spot moral calculations that aren’t always easy to make as opposed to steadfast rules like “tripping someone is bad.” You can get different answers to the same question depending on how big you draw your circle so to speak. For instance, lying is bad, but saying you liked the sandwich your kid just made is good, but always lying in those situations leads your kid to mistrust you, so it’s bad again.
The first one can be dealt with, but is its own discussion. You can minimize the last two by drawing your circles really big. That gets you generalized rules that are more broadly applicable but less precise, like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
I think John Stuart Mill’s essay on utilitarianism does a pretty good job summarizing and defending it. The most interesting perspective I’ve seen for it is that if everyone in a given society does something and society is made better by it (I.e. greatest happiness for greatest number of people), then that action is considered good. For example, not littering is good because society is generally made better if everyone disposed of their trash properly. Mill concludes his essay by essentially saying that you should do good things for the sake of doing good things because society is made better if everyone did that. For other reading, I would also recommend Mountains Beyond Mountains and Doing Good Better because I feel like they exemplify the philosophy on a micro and macro scale, respectively.
Look other people have tried this one but they don’t feel like actual explanations you’d try to give to a 5 year old.
So, utilitarianism is like that time your teacher had a pizza party for your class. Yeah, that one, the one where you only got half a slice of pizza and half a little cup of orange soda.
The reason why Mr Green only gave you half a slice and half a cup of soda is because he was only able to get 2 pizzas and 2 bottles of soda for the whole class. Now, because each pizza is usually sliced into 8 pieces per pizza, and because each soda bottle can only completely fill 8 little cups before it runs out, if Mr Green gave out a full slice and a full cup, he’d only be able to give 16 kids a slice of pizza and a cup of soda, instead of giving 32 kids half a slice and half a cup.
Urgh, yes, as I’ve told you before, that is why Mr Green had a full slice and a full cup to himself, because there were 30 of you in his class and there were 32 portions, meaning that in order to be fair to all the kids, instead of giving 2 other kids a full slice and a full cup, he ate a full slice and a full cup himself, I mean who do you think bought the pizza and the soda? The Pizza party fairy? No, Mr Green did that with his own money.
Utilitarianism is all about making choices that make the most people happy with the least amount of people being sad. If you imagine every pizza and every bottle of soda was able to give out, say, 16 happy points, that means that two pizzas and two sodas can give out a total of… (wait for the kid to try and work it out on their fingers and fail)
64! 64 happy points! So, if you have 30 kids in a class, what would be the best way to hand out those 64 happy points? (Kid tries to perform short division and again fails)
Alright I’ll tell you, the answer is you give each kid 2 happy points each, which means that each of the 30 kids gets two happy points each, and the remaining 4 happy points go to the teacher, to make him happy for paying for all of it.
Now yes, technically if we gave 15 kids and the teacher a full slice and a full cup, the whole class would be, on average, roughly 2 happy points per kid, but again, would you be happy if a kid that wasn’t you got 4 happy points and you got none? Utilitarianism says that this answer wouldn’t do, because although you may be super happy if you got a full slice and cup and got 4 happy points, that would come at the cost of another kid, who would have received 0 pizza, soda or happy points.
So essentially, utilitarianism says that the best way to make the most people happy is to take the thing that would make them happy and give as many people as possible the same amount of happiness, instead of making some people very happy and others not happy at all.
You are asking about ethics! A very important subject.
Utilitarianism is a theory of right and wrong. The right thing to do is whatever promotes the “greater good” – whatever maximizes happiness or well-being for the population as a whole.
Utilitarianism is a powerful theory, because it explains a vast array of moral rules with one underlying principle. The rules against murder, rape, assault, lying, and theft are all results of this principle. It also accounts for exceptions to those rules – for example, that it is right to steal bread to feed your family.
But Utilitarianism also has a dark side: “the ends justify the means.” Which means you can (and should) break normal moral rules in certain circumstances – such as if murdering 1 person would save multiple others. As positive as the basic principle is, Utilitarianism is also cold and calculating about moral decisions. And some movie villains were really Utilitarians – like Ozymandius in Watchmen.
Alternatives include Kantian Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Religious / Divine Command Ethics, and Particularism. All have different fundamental principles, and all have different strong points.
The basic idea is that something is ‘right’ when it results in the greatest overall ‘good’.
Put like this, it sounds very reasonable and sensible, and arguably sounds very ‘right’. Who wouldn’t want to achieve the greatest overall good in the world?
However this raises a number of significant ethical questions and dilemmas:
1) What is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’? e.g. most people agree lying is ‘bad’….but is it ‘bad’ to lie when the truth would also cause pain and hurt? Or is it ‘good’ to tell hurtful truth to prevent people living in a fool’s paradise? It can be very hard to determine what is the ‘right’ thing to do when we can’t even agree on what is ‘good’.
2) How do you define ‘greatest good’? Just because a majority would benefit from something doesn’t mean it’s necessarily ‘good’. White supremacy would favour a majority white society…does that mean it’s the ‘greatest good’ outcome?
3) It can get twisted heavily into a sort of ‘Might Is Right’ or ‘The End Justifies The Means’ judgement, where anything is justified or ‘right’ if it ultimately benefits the greatest number. Things like warfare or eugenics could be supported by these sorts of arguments.
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