Utilitarianism Doesn’t Work. Here’s Why.
The first major utilitarians were Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill (there are hints of the philosophy in David Hume’s ethical writings). Bentham was more of a reformer who wanted to improve workers’ lot in the emerging industrial economy of Great Britain. He realized that couching calls for reform in moral language would carry more emotive and persuasive baggage than cold efficiency. So his moral philosophy was a means to an end, not an end in itself.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the genius son of Bentham’s colleague James Mill, saw ethics as more than a means to an end. His accomplishments ranged across inductive logic, epistemology, and political economy as well as ethics. A systematic thinker, he presented his results as an integrated package, of which two of his most important works On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1863) were just parts.
Utilitarianism has remained one of the most popular secular ethical theories among both academic philosophers and public intellectuals. The most famous and visible of the latter, Peter Singer (b. 1946), calls himself a preference utilitarian.
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, utilitarianism is probably the weakest of the contemporary ethical theories out there.
