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the benefit of the new highway is $39 million, building the highway would be a
good action.
Commentary
Performing the benefit/cost (or happiness/unhappiness) calculations is crucial to
the utilitarian approach, yet it can be controversial. In our example, we translated
everything into dollars and cents. Was that reasonable? Neighborhoods are the
site of many important relationships. We did not assign a value to the harm the
proposed highway would do to these neighborhoods. There is a good chance
that many of the homeowners would be angry about being forced out of their
houses, even if they were paid a fair price for their properties. How do we put a
dollar value on their emotional distress? On the other hand, we can't add apples
and oranges. Translating everything into dollars and cents is one way to put
everything into common units.
Bentham acknowledged that a complete analysis must look beyond simple benefits
and harms. Not all benefits have equal weight. To measure them, he proposed seven
attributes that can be used to increase or decrease the weight of a particular pleasure or
pain:
.
Intensity:
magnitude of the experience
.
Duration:
how long the experience lasts
.
Certainty:
probability it will actually happen
.
Propinquity:
how close the experience is in space and time
.
Fecundity:
its ability to produce more experiences of the same kind
.
Purity:
extent to which pleasure is not diluted by pain or vice versa
.
Extent:
number of people affected
As you can see, performing a complete calculation for a particular moral problem can
be a daunting prospect!
1.
It focuses on happiness.
By relying upon the Greatest Happiness Principle as the yardstick for measuring
moral behavior, utilitarianism fits the intuition of many people that the purpose of
lifeistobehappy.
2.
It is practical.
The utilitarian calculus provides a straightforward way to determine the right
course of action to take. Start by identifying the set of possible alternatives. Next,
consider each of the alternatives in turn. For each alternative, total up the antici-
pated positive and negative consequences to all of the affected parties resulting from
the action. Finally, identify the alternative with the maximum total. That alternative
is the right action to take. This process, conducted in a open manner in which all
