Utilitarianism As a Public Philosophy

Abstract

Abstract: Utilitarianism, as a subversive theory that once led to legal and social reforms, has come in for the opponents to construct a number of thought experiments to push the theory to the opposite side of people’s moral intuition and sense of justice, which makes the theory gradually lost its dominant position in the theory of political philosophy and legislative practice. Although utilitarians have made a series of self-corrections in the theory on the composition of utility and the object of evaluation, they seem to be unable to retreat from the criticism of the four basic elements of consequentialism, welfarism, impartiality and the equal consideration of interests, and the aggregationism. To deal with such a dilemma, contemporary utilitarian Robert Goodin advocates limiting utilitarianism in its scope of application, arguing that treating utilitarianism as a public philosophy will transform the indignities it suffers in the private sphere into virtues in the public affairs. However, this paper finds that Goodin’s strategy still fails to avoid Rawls’s criticism against aggregationism in utilitarianism and the Dirty Hands Problem’s reproach that utilitarianism raises internal moral tensions in agents in public affairs. To this, the paper responds with reference to Hessani’s average utility maximization and Susan Wolf’s “real-self view”.