Where utilitarian ethics fails

Utilitarianism, based as it is on maximising happiness for the greatest number of people, fails in a number of crucial respects, but perhaps the greatest failure is the confusion of ends and means. As with Situation Ethics, a utilitarian always argues that the end justifies the means, or to put it another way, goodness is always made relative to the end of maximising net welfare or happiness. I want to show you two ways in which this ethical mindset is failing our world today – in the hope you might agree, and do something about it.

The first area is education. The utilitarian view is that there must be some measurable good to come out of our experience at school. Remember it is the empirical basis of utilitarianism that gives it its superficial attractivenss: we aggregate or add up measurable benefit to have a total which we can plot on a graph and (so the Government hopes) see the graph going up every year. We can measure pleasure (by the hedonic calculus) or happiness (by some form of questionnaire) or welfare.

But, like pleasure, the measurement of educational benefit is very difficult and I would argue counter-productive. We have league tables, achievement tests, and that rather horrible import from the tax man, value-added measures. But the only really valuable measure, a detailed interview with you aged 65 to see if you have had a fulfilled life and managed to cope okay, is wholly missing. I think Mill recognised this problem when he moved his own version of utilitarianism much closer to Aristotle’s idea of happiness being the flourishing life. I discuss this point in some detail in my book Utiltarianism and Situation Ethics.

One implication of this utilitarian, means to an end view of education is to increase the stress and anxiety levels on teachers and pupils. Ask any teacher how they feel just before an OFSTED inspection and they will say “worried”. Quite rightly so: the idea that an inspector might catch me on the day I have a filthy headache and have forgotten my notes and (intended ironically) threaten to hit young Jones (“our children must know they are safe”) is quite horrendous. And it has now been established that parental expectation has increased the anxiety levels of young people in a way that is counter-productive and generates all sorts of mental health issues (depression, breakdown, eating disorders and so on). Click below to read more….

A second area is Just War and western foreign policy. Despite high-sounding principles, western governments have proved to be entirely utilitarian in their conduct of foreign policy and this has greatly ratcheted up the tensions and dangers existing in the world today. For example, we have consistently felt it is okay to invade foreign governments without a UN resolution (Iraq, for example). A more serious and ongoing issue is that of drone strikes in countries like Pakistan – sovereign countries who seem powerless to stop them. Nine year-old Nabila ur-Rehman went to the US Congress to ask why the US and Britain persist in a policy that kills and maims so many innocent people, including herself and her family. According to the Brookings Institute, nine innocent people die for every one terrorist killed in a drone strike. And remember they are only alleged terrorists: there is never a due process of law applied to prove terrorism.

The end justifies the means, apparently, but we apply a double standard. The double standard is this: we would be militantly angry if the US planted a drone missile on Surrey and killed Auntie Flo. We would feel the anxiety of the small villager in the Swat valley, the same anxiety our parents or grandparents felt in Sussex and Kent in the era of the unmanned bomb called the doodle bug (1944-5).

And it would fuel the recruitment and militancy of the very terrorism we are trying to stamp out. Utilitarian thinking in this sense adds up to a failure of moral imagination.

Image: War in Winter by Breughel, copyright Peter Baron

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