Utilitarianism

Bentham actually created a mathematical formula for measuring pleasure and pain, with seven variables including intensity, duration, certainty, and extent. Imagine trying to quantify whether eating cake brings more utils than helping a stranger—he genuinely believed you could calculate this. Modern economists and policymakers still use cost-benefit analysis derived from this idea, deciding which highway to build or which disease to prioritize funding for based on quantified human welfare.

That famous ethical dilemma where you can pull a lever to kill one person instead of five? It's essentially testing whether you're a utilitarian. Pure utilitarians consistently say pull the lever—five lives outweigh one, mathematically. Yet when the scenario shifts to pushing someone off a bridge to stop the trolley, most people hesitate, revealing how our moral intuitions rebel against utilitarian logic when we're the ones getting our hands dirty.

John Stuart Mill was a fierce abolitionist precisely because of utilitarian reasoning—slavery caused immense suffering that outweighed any economic benefits. Yet here's the twist: earlier utilitarians had argued slavery could be justified if the collective happiness of slaveholders exceeded slaves' suffering. This reveals utilitarianism's moral flexibility problem: the same framework can justify radically opposite conclusions depending on how you count and whose happiness you weigh.

Philosopher Robert Nozick challenged utilitarianism with a devastating question: if scientists could plug you into a machine giving you a lifetime of perfect simulated happiness, would you? Most people say no—they want real achievements, genuine relationships, actual experiences. This suggests that maximizing pleasure isn't actually our highest value, undermining utilitarianism's core claim that happiness is all that matters morally.

Today's Effective Altruism movement applies hardcore utilitarian logic to charity: donate to prevent malaria, not fund opera houses, because you save more lives per dollar. Philosopher Peter Singer calculated that you could save a child's life for roughly the cost of a nice dinner out. This movement has redirected billions in charitable giving and influenced thousands of career choices, making utilitarianism perhaps more practically influential now than ever before in history.

Here's utilitarianism's nightmare scenario: imagine someone who experiences vastly more pleasure from resources than anyone else—a "utility monster." Strict utilitarian logic would demand we funnel all society's resources to this one person because it maximizes total happiness. This absurd conclusion reveals how utilitarianism can justify extreme inequality and sacrifice individual rights for aggregate welfare, which is why even sympathetic philosophers have spent 200 years trying to patch this problem.