1973. In Baker's Dictionary of Christian Ethics. Carl F.H. Henry, ed. Washington D.C.: Canon Press. [Reprinted in 1988 by Baker Book House.] Utilitarianism
UTILITARIANISM. Utilitarianism, dimly foreshadowed by
Helvetius, Beccaria, and Hume, was perfected by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1842). The
immediate stimulus was the imperfection of the British legal system.
Utilitarianism was a theory to support reform.
The philosophical basis is psychological hedonism: “Nature
has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain
and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as
well as to determine what we shall do.”
If pleasure is the only human motive, it is plausible that
we should aim for the greatest amount. To calculate the amount we must measure the
intensity, the duration, the certainty, the propinquity, the fecundity, and the
purity of the pleasure.
Then Bentham adds a seventh dimension: “the extent; that is,
the number of persons to whom it extends.”
Now, psychological hedonism surely means that a man is
motivated by his own pleasure. The pleasure of others are not pleasures and
therefore not motives to him. Thus Bentham seems to have made a fallacious
inference from psychological hedonism to utilitarianism – the theory that the
good life is the one that produces the greatest good for the greatest number.
Yet if the greatest good of the greatest number prevents a man from getting the
greatest good for himself, what reason can be given to convince him to
sacrifice his own good? Surely not psychological hedonism.
Bentham tries to minimize this conflict by a theory of four
sanctions. The physical sanction is merely the natural consequence of one’s action.
This has little to do with inducing us to seek the pleasure of others. The
political sanction is the power of the state. Such a sanction by imposing
penalties can make one’s personal pleasures result in pain and so produce a
certain amount of harmony in the state. The social sanction still further makes
it painful to seek personal pleasure at the expense of the greatest number. The
religious sanction, i.e., God’s inflicting pain in order to harmonize private
and universal pleasure, would guarantee the result, if only these punishments
could continue into the world to come. But Bentham rejects this solution: God
is supposed to operate only in this life and only through the powers of nature.
Since these four sanctions do not produce a perfect harmony, utilitarianism is
left without a justification of its principle of universalism.
The principle of the greatest good for the greatest number
envisages at least some people, the smaller number, who must suffer. Thus utilitarianism
justifies massacre. To be sure, Henry Sidgwick in the late nineteenth century
tried to avoid justifying massacre by replacing the notion of the greatest good
of the greatest number with the assumption that the greatest sum of pleasures
for any one individual actually contributes to the greatest such for every
other individual. Thus a murder could never be beneficial to anyone. But there
is no empirical evidence to support this assumption.
Bentham’s original principle of the greatest good “on the
whole” is quite consistent with Stalin’s murder of millions of Ukrainians, his
slaughter of the captured Polish officers, and his suppression of the
Hungarians. These actions caused considerable pain to many people; but they
will all be overbalanced by the pleasures of the greatest number of happy
communists in the centuries to come.
This is true, of course, provided that the calculation is
correct – provided, of course, that the calculation is possible. The possibility
of measurement depends on the identity of a unit. In order to measure heat, a
degree of temperature had to be invented. No one has yet invented a unit of
pleasure; therefore there can be no sum. There must also be a unit of pain, and
this unit must be commensurable with the unit of pleasure. One cannot add an
inch to a degree to an ounce and get a total. It is doubtful that pains and
pleasures are commensurable, and at any rate there is no unit. Therefore the
required calculation is impossible.
If it were possible, the question would still remain whether
the calculation could be complete and correct. To count the pleasures, not only
of all people living today, but also of all future generations all over the
world, is a superhuman task. For example, how much pleasure or pain will my
action today produce for a Chinese peasant a few hundred years from now? Must
morality depend on my knowing this amount before I decide between two proposed
decisions?
God and immortality, though in one way or another they may
avoid the difficulty of conflicting goods, cannot help one to calculate.
Practicability as well as consistency is needed. This requires a verbal
revelation, such as the Ten Commandments. Only these can inform us which
decisions are right and wrong.
Gordon H. Clark
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