Utilitarianism In Nicola Machiavelli's The Prince

The Prince by Nicola Machiavelli is one of the most influential books. There are a lot of ideas in this book that change one’s perception about prosperity and success specially in the political arena. Many see this book as being a guide on ‘how to rule’ but Machiavelli can also be explained as being a moral utilitarian which means that he claimed that one can be good or bad interchangeably to reach their goal.
One of the passages from the book, I thought was interesting was the one in which he talks about certain cities that get conquered and the circumstances about how they get conquered, what type of city they are and one of the cities he talked about was a ‘free city’ and what happens to the people in the free city when it is conquered. He said:
“And he who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it has always the watch-word of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will …show more content…
So here we see that he puts a limit to his moral utilitarianism, he sets the limit that if you’re going to kill somebody, you better have a justification for it. He says “The only good war is a just war”. After reading this I felt that Machiavelli’s image portrayed as being cut-throat guide for rulers and being morally ambiguous is kind of an exaggeration. His explicit encouragement of ruthless leadership was in response to the writings of other political authors of the time whom he viewed as giving the naive advice of: "be good and virtuous and fortune will reward you". Whereas he believed that in order to rule effectively a prince must have order in his lands and unchallenged authority to his rule--if being nice gets you there, great, but often destroying your enemies and inspiring fear in your subjects will get you much better