This paper critically examines utilitarianism as a political philosophy, tracing its roots from Epicurus through Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick. While acknowledging that utilitarian thinking may have limited applications in large-scale political decisions, the paper argues that utilitarianism fails as a workable philosophy because it cannot adequately account for individual human differences. By reducing the full spectrum of human emotion to a simple binary of pleasure and pain, utilitarianism homogenizes the human experience and ignores the complex, varied, and often contradictory ways in which real individuals respond to political decisions.
Utilitarianism is an old political theory that has been put forth in one form or another by many political philosophers over the years as the basis for a good political system. Epicurus was one of the early proponents of utilitarian thinking, though he did not call it by that name. He did, however, promote the idea that happiness or pleasure was a good indicator of moral decisions. Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick — all well-known political philosophers — also put forth utilitarian ideas in their political philosophies.
While a utilitarian political philosophy may have some uses in making decisions that affect a large number of people, such as the decision to go to war or the decision to raise taxes to pay for health care, utilitarianism does not take into consideration the distinctions between people. There is no room for individual thought or action in utilitarianism, as each person's actions must be evaluated in terms of the amount of pleasure or pain those actions will bring to others. This paper argues that utilitarianism is not useful as an individual philosophy, as it does not take the differences between individuals into consideration.
The political philosophy of utilitarianism is highly impersonal in nature. It focuses on what is good for humans as a whole, rather than what is good for any one human. Because people differ from each other by nature — each with different interests, likes, dislikes, and beliefs — the philosophy of utilitarianism cannot be effectively applied where individuals are concerned.
A government operating under a utilitarian philosophy would be required to take into consideration the relative pain or pleasure that each decision would bring to every single person in the country. Not only that, but every possible effect any decision could have on every single person would also have to be considered before a choice could be made. Even if it were somehow possible for a government to determine whether its decisions would bring pleasure or pain to each and every citizen, it would still be practically impossible to anticipate every possible downstream effect on every individual. The very nature of utilitarianism — its focus on the whole rather than on the individual — makes it impractical as a political philosophy.
It may seem at first that utilitarianism does take individual differences into consideration, since it examines how each person will be affected by a potential decision. However, a closer look reveals that this is not the case. Almost all political philosophers who have championed utilitarianism have advanced the idea that whatever brings pleasure to the greatest number of people is the best moral course of action. The reality, however, is that any decision could have a wide variety of effects on a person, ranging from pleasure to pain to indifference. A person may even feel both pleasure and pain about the same decision — for instance, if that decision caused harm to someone they were personally close to.
Any potential government decision has the capacity to produce many varied and subtle effects on every person it touches. By simply grouping the effects of a decision into either "pleasure" or "pain," proponents of utilitarianism shortchange the far-ranging spectrum of human emotion that varies so greatly from individual to individual. A political philosophy that operates this way does not take seriously the differences between people. Instead, it homogenizes and sanitizes the human experience into a simple binary of black or white. There is no room for individuality, and many people will necessarily be left behind by such a philosophy.
"Defenders claim emotions reduce to pain or pleasure"
"Human complexity makes utilitarian defense untenable"
Utilitarianism is a simple philosophy of black and white. In utilitarianism, either something is good or it is not good, all based on the feelings it brings to people. However, this framework does not account for the wide variation in human nature and emotion, and how profoundly those differ from person to person. Because of this, no decision ever made under a utilitarian philosophy can fully serve human society. Human beings are not simply black and white in their feelings, and our political philosophies, therefore, can never be simply black and white either.
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