Can a Utilitarian Truly Acknowledge the Value of Justice?

In this essay I hope to assess whether an adherent to the ethical doctrine of Utilitarianism can truly acknowledge the value of justice. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist moral theory in which the emphasis of morality is placed firmly on the consequences of a person's actions. This places utilitarianism at odds with other ethical doctrines, such as deontological ethics or virtue ethics, which place the emphasis on a person's rational duty or their inherent moral virtue respectively. The key aim of utilitarianism is to judge every action by the amount of happiness it either creates or decreases in the person performing the act and those people affected by it.

The concept of utilitarianism first originated from the philosophies of David Hume and John Locke, before being fully developed into what it is today by the works of Jeremy Bentham and his student, John Stewart Mill. Bentham was the first to develop and adhere to a strict ideological structure for the doctrine, while Mill elaborated further upon his tutor's work, introducing significant refinements such as a classification system for the different types of pleasures and an improved version of Bentham's Ð''greatest happiness principle'.

Unsurprisingly in the divisive and confrontational field of ethics, utilitarianism has been criticised for various different reasons. A key criticism of the theory is that the purpose and intent behind an action are monumentally important and so by analysing only the consequences, utilitarianism is overlooking a crucial aspect of being able to determine the action's justice. Take, for instance, the example of a man who sabotages the car of a colleague he has taken a severe dislike to, in order to delay his arrival at an important job interview. The next morning the car's owner, after several failed attempts to start his car, takes the bus instead, causing him to arrive slightly late for his interview, but also to avoid a gigantic, potentially fatal car crash he would have been involved in if he had driven.

Critics would suggest that in the purely consequentialist eyes of a utilitarian, the man's act of sabotage would be seen as the moral equivalent of saving his colleague's life out of genuine concern and altruism. Utilitarians, however, would most likely respond to this criticism by pointing out that moral theories are primarily intended to be used not for judging events of the past, but for judging events yet to have taken place.

If a utilitarian was asked to pass judgement on the same event before it took place, they would almost certainly conclude that the man's malevolent intention to spoil his colleague's job interview would be much more likely to cause great misery in his intended target and his family than to save his life. It is a common misconception of utilitarianism that because it focuses primarily on the consequences of an action, it neglects the intents and motives behind it entirely. In fact, these aspects are usually crucial to the ability to judge the outcome of an action, and therefore do not go unnoticed by adherents to utilitarian ethics.

Another common criticism of utilitarianism is that, since it is obviously impossible to be able to categorically predict the consequences an act will have in the future, using that aspect of an action in order to determine its morality is flawed and erroneous. These critics would site an incident such as the sinking of the Titanic, for example, as corroboration of their claim. In the aftermath of the Titanic disaster, both the British and American inquiry committees designated to investigate the circumstances surrounding the event agreed that: "the existing regulations were far outdated and needed immediate revising. In addition to general proposals for improving safety conditions, the areas they focused on the most were the conduct of wireless operators, actions to be taken by ship captains in the presence of ice, lifeboat regulations, and shipbuilding codes."Ð'â„-

There is no doubt that these subsequent reforms in the laws concerning the safety of life at sea proceeded to save countless lives, perhaps avoiding disasters in which the loss of life would even have exceeded that of the Titanic disaster. This would give critics of utilitarianism the opportunity to allege that this was a more beneficial outcome than if the Titanic sinking had never occurred.

Utilitarians would claim in response, however, that they are not required to have an all-encompassing knowledge of what the consequences of an action will be, they are merely required to estimate to the best of their abilities the effect that the act in question will have on the people involved in it, in accordance with Bentham's Ð''greatest happiness principle'. Nobody could seriously suggest that it would be ethical for a person, if they had uncovered the structural defect in the Titanic which would cause it to sink, to withhold that information in view of the safety benefits it would give to sea travel in the future.

Clearly in such an extreme example the person in question would not even have to evaluate the ethical implications of their actions, but for more complex and multifaceted issues, the utilitarian would simply have to use the intentions, context, prior historical instances or any other pieces of information they had obtained in order to estimate the outcome, and therefore the ethical implications, of the act in question.

One of the most destructive criticisms aimed at utilitarianism disparages the theory's most crucial value, the Ð''greatest happiness principle'. This concept was first devised by Jeremy Bentham, who created an algorithm called the "felicific calculus" in order to gauge the amount of pleasure derived from an action, and consequently how moral it was. The principle was later revised by John Stewart Mill in his Ð''Utilitarianism' thesis, in response to criticism that Bentham's