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John Stuart Mill: The Case Against Utilitarianism

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The Case Against Utilitarianism In John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, he explains that the amount of pleasure and pain is what dictates the morality of actions. An action is justified if it brings more overall pleasure than pain to people. While it is generally agreed upon that pleasure is good and pain is bad, I believe that these qualities by itself cannot determine morality. Utilitarianism is not the right ethical theory to follow because utility is not inherently measurable and pleasure and pain are not the only determinants of morality. A common criticism of utilitarianism is that attempting to measure utility causes problems. It is evident that different actions produce different levels of pleasure or pain, but is it possible to produce …show more content…
Specifically, the intentions behind actions are not considered in utilitarianism, just the outcomes of pleasure or pain. First, utilitarianism seemingly condones the harming of innocents to generate utility. Consider this scenario: An innocent child is being tortured in private. The parents of the child are the leaders of a terrorist group that is planning to bomb a town full of innocent people for political gains. If the parents find out that their child is being tortured, they will stop with their plan to bomb the town in exchange for the torture to stop. No one except the torturer, the child, and the parents know about this event. There are enough people in the town that the utility conserved by their survival outweigh the pain of the victim and the parents. In this scenario, is the torturing of the child …show more content…
Although the requirement of the child being tortured in the first situation is debatable, most people would agree that the child should not be tortured in the second scenario even if utility is generated overall. This seemingly contradicts the beliefs of utilitarians. Also, if the number of participants from each scenario were to be tuned so that the amount of utility generated comes out to be the same, then would utilitarians regard these scenarios to be the same? If the intentions behind actions do not matter for utilitarianism, how would these situations be

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