Hi everyone.

I am currently a master student of a completely different background and I am evaluating Bentham´s concept of utilitarianism. With this, I wanted to point out some strengths and weaknesses of it, and unfortunately, I came to the conclusion that it is not a good theory to use when thinking morally correct. I would therefore like to discuss a few things I came up with, please do not be too harsh if there are mistakes in it or if I used the concept of Bentham in a wrong way. I did not study ethics and am not that familiar with everything yet, although I am highly interested. Thus, I seek your help and I look forward to hear your opinions!

I pointed out 5 major insights I gained from the moral theory and wanted to discuss with you. I would be super happy if you could read through a few of those insights, you definitely don't have to discuss all of them with me. Anyways, thanks for reading and all the best.



1. Bentham´s concept relies on the consequences of an act. Predicting the consequences relies heavily on experiences and subjective thinking and can only be a guess of how actions are going to turn out. Imagine a plane is captured by terrorists over the ocean and they threaten to fly it into a big city. The government sends out two fighter jets to shoot down the plane before thousands of people are killed when the plane crashes into a crowded area. In this situation, a utilitarian would suggest that it is a morally right act based on the result that only one hundred people in the plane die compared to more than 100 in the city center. However, it could turn out that passengers regain control of the plane or that the terrorists change their mind and land the plane safely on the closest airport.

--> What would you do here? Can you really take these difficult decisions when you are not completely certain of how the events are going to unfold?

2. When we constantly think of taking the best decisions for everyone who is affected by that decision , is that not too much we can be asked for, and is it not also completely subjective in the argumentative chain to say you did the best for the greatest good? Think of the situation when buying a new handbag. The money which is spend could have been donated for a greater good as well, but the buyer can simply justify the decision by pointing out that the people who have built the handbag will be able to earn some money for their families, the company receives money and can further pay its employees and that he or she will be content with the product which was bought.

--> Is it false to expect humans to always act morally right and neglect their own interest in favor of the greater good? I think that Bentham doesn't really think of the nature of human beings as being able to twist things so that they turn out to be the most valuable only for themselves.

3. Maybe the biggest weakness I see for Bentham´s utilitarianistic view is that it does not consider personal affection and emotions. Imagine a mother sits in a car with two other persons, her own 3-year-old child, and a scientist who has found the cure for a disease which will benefit thousands of people all around the world. Suddenly a deer jumps in front of the car and while the mother tries to avoid it, she crashes the car into a lake. As the car is drowning very quickly, the mother is the only one of the three passenger who is still conscious and can leave the car on her own. In the remaining time, she only has the time to save one of the two remaining passengers. If you ask Bentham what would be the morally right act, he would say that it is to save the scientist as his invention will amount in a large amount of pleasure all around the world. Yet, would it be really a morally right decision to let one´s own child drown in favor for a stranger? If argued in favor of it, it would at least be very unrealistic, and especially when thinking of our own nature, the main duty of a mother is to take care of her offspring, so in this moment she would neglect her own self in order to act morally right which is a contradiction.

4. A last aspect will cover the difficulties in measuring pleasures and pains. An individual human being is perceived as the source of values, which makes the concept prone for anomalies, who value happiness different than others do. The quantitative approach cannot work flawlessly, as it is impossible to describe human behavior in numbers and assign basic numbers towards a state of pleasure of pain. Let us say you cut your finger while preparing a dish for your friends and it hurts you a lot. In this moment, you think that it is a very bad pain and you would assign a high mark towards it. In the next week, it happens that you cut off two fingers and the pain is much higher, what number are you going to assign to this pain then? In our world, there is always more and less of something, more pain and more pleasure and luckily, at least when it comes to pains, we will never experience all pains which can somehow occur. By this, human beings are not able to calculate pains and pleasures in an effective and correct way.

5. Most human beings are nowadays only concerned when they are physically affected by something. Consider the example with environment, when we cannot see or feel something we are indifferent towards it. It is proven that climate change will have an enormous effect on the earth and future generations, the pollution of the sea is a major issue and still, people continue to exploit the earth how they want to as it can minimize their own pleasure. Volkswagen recently had the so-called diesel gate, and although the company and those that were involved have got into major trouble, many citizens continue buying the companies cars and call for no regulations on the polluting engines as this could have a negative impact on their life.

--> do you agree with this or is there another, more logical reason why people behave in this way?