Utilitarianism and Its Difficulties

Abstract

Abstract If morality is supposed to make people better off, one might think that what is moral is whatever maximizes being well off in the aggregate. If the morality of an act is determined by whether it generates more goodness than does any possible alternative, and if goodness is a matter of the amount of well-being of one or more people, one might infer that the individual always has a moral obligation to try to maximize happiness for everyone. This is not a sound argument. For one thing, it is not clear that any old happiness can be the objective of moral activity, since some forms of happiness are not obviously good. Is it good to be happy because you believe something false? That hardly seems to count as being better off. More generally, traditional utilitarian theories give no adequate account of what is involved in well-being, or of the good life. Standard economic theory, which has been thought to be the realization of utilitarianism, makes some questionable presuppositions about the good life, in particular about its connection with the fulfilment of desire. This problem about utilitarianism is of particular interest to business ethicists because one of the criticisms of the culture of business is precisely that it socializes people to prefer and be content with a life inferior to what they might otherwise have lived.