What Is Utilitarianism?

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Jeremy Bentham argued the case of Utilitarianism: the doctrine of providing happiness for the most amount of people. It is the ethical quest for the greater good, of man and mankind. The underlying factors for striving to seek and provide the greater good is the pursuit of pleasure with the calculated avoidance of pain. Pleasure may or may not come with an equal or opposite consequence of pain; the calculated procedure of the matter is the basis of utilitarianism. I will examine confounding factors that affect the nature of utilitarianism with the philosophies of some of the great thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Aristotle, and Thomas Moore. I argue that utilitarianism and the …show more content…
The first being, the two absolute governing factors for human beings are pain and pleasure, specifically the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This calculated effort bears the roadmap for happiness. Happiness is characterized by the preeminence of pleasure over the presence and magnitude of pain. The construct of happiness is applied to both a group collective and the individual. Jeremy Bentham’s student John Stuart Mill further develops Bentham’s initial presentation of happiness as the outcome of the two confounding factors pleasure and pain, with respect to a group or collective in his work On Liberty and Other Writings. Mill brings forth the idea that utility, “property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness” (Bentham 9), should serve the greatest good of society as a whole. In regards to the individual, Sigmund Freud extends the theory of pleasure and pain as sovereign masters as a principle that guides human …show more content…
This thought was in alignment with Karl Marx’s notion of property as a material condition for human well being leading to inequality. Rousseau believed that the only inequality was physical inequality, which is purely natural. Physical inequality referring to a man’s physique, which was originally unaltered by social constructs. With social inequality and class wars, the abuse of power by the rulers or bourgeoisie could result in a reaction by the poor. The poor, acting in the interest of self-preservation, are trying to feed the appetites of their passions, as are the rulers and bourgeoisie. This exemplifies the pursuit of pleasure by the virtue of passions. However, the abuse of power by the rulers and bourgeoisie come with silencing the basic human nature of compassion and the need to attain only what is required for self-preservation for themselves and only themselves, instead of what can be consumed by two people or more. For Aristotle, pride was of basic human nature, but for Rousseau pride was merely a social construct as a byproduct of the pursuit of perfectibility, or pleasure. Property, commerce, laws, language, and sociability have been developments of passions, which has attributed to the philosophies of other thinkers as society having a natural state of war, when the only true natural attribute of man is self-preservation. Similar to Bentham’s dismemberment from popular
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