Utilitarianism: Most Think It's About Putting Pleasure Before Pain
Utilitarianism as a philosophy on which to base business, governmentand society offers a great deal of ambiguity. It allows for almost as manyinterpretations as there are people to think about it. That being thecase, it is, first and foremost, unworkable as a basis for conducting anysort of interaction, from commercial to governmental to social. Some peoplethink utilitarianism means a sort of hedonistic 'good,' while others thinkit is an 'altruistic' good that is being sought. Some define happiness aspresent condition; others define it as the result of a lifetime. And thatonly begins to scratch the surface of the varying degrees of thinking about Utilitarianism, however, as most people very simplistically thinkabout it, is putting pleasure before pain. Some take it a step beyondthat, and consider it putting pleasure before pain for the greatest numberof people. In some ways, of course, that is a very appealing sort ofstatement to members of a democratic society. In the U.S., for example,the belief in the rule of the majority is very prevalent. It is not,therefore, much of a stretch to propose that making pleasure, as opposed topain, possible for the majority is a
On that basis, these days, itmight be safe to predict that the pandas would win. In fact, expedience seems to be whatmodern uninformed people think utilitarianism is. Of course, then, they are not acting on the basisof utilitarianism, but on the basis of malevolence. Butthen, as mentioned early on, the biggest problem with utilitarianism isthat while it is espoused by many to justify all sorts of deeds andmisdeeds, its true definition is known to very few. The part of the utilitarian equation that company president would haveleft out is the part about the relative balance between the 12 paychecksfor wage earners and a few more cents in the dividend statement for theprobably wealthy (or at least probably better off than the elderly wageearners) stockholders. But basing action on such simplistic divisions into good and bad,pleasure-producing or pain-producing, greatest number or fewest number,leaves out a great deal of nuance. It would seem a goodthing, in a utilitarian sense, to kill a few hundred pandas (oops, thereare only a few hundred pandas, but this is imagination anyway) to get theirfat to cook hamburgers for a huge population of hungry Americans. He was an emotionally unstableperson, who had himself felt persecuted and so decided it would beutilitarian to visit that sort of persecution on others. But again, those abusers see theiractions as 'seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. So far, utilitarianism doesn't work because it has so manyinterpretations that it is unworkable. That's an intellectual lapse, at best. Unfortunately,however, that sort of abuse can be cloaked in other clothes in othersettings. For example, let's say a business executive decided, on the basisof the most recent research, that it was good to cook all hamburgers in fatderived from the belly pouches of sleeping pandas.
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