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Whereas Machiavelli is a consequentialist, not all consequentialists are similar to Machiavelli. Perhaps the dominant body of thought in the history of political thought that judges the morality of an action by its consequences is utilitarianism, a body of thought which has a lot to say about the nature of politics as well. It is a complex body of thought that spans many thinkers and contains many variations of thought. At its core, however, utilitarianism argues that the morality (or lack thereof) of an act should be judged based upon the amount of happiness that the act produces. Utilitarians were often political reformers who proposed policy revisions in everything from punishing criminals to more recently giving all one’s disposable income to charity.

In perhaps the founding text of utilitarian moral thinking, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham outlines his ‘principle of utility’.

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do … By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever, and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government. (Bentham, 2012: 1–2)

In some ways this should not appear too controversial – no one is opposed to pleasure and in favour of pain as a general rule; but what Bentham is saying here is that this should be the grounding principle as to what politics should be about. Above, we have seen how Machiavelli thinks that politics is about glory; later on in this book we will see how Hobbes thinks politics is about stability, and how Paine suggests that the protection of rights is the proper aim of politics. For Bentham, it is about promoting pleasure and avoiding pain. An action is therefore good if it brings happiness, and bad if it results in pain; therefore, the rightness or wrongness of an act is determined by its consequences as opposed to its motivations.

Utilitarians question the helpfulness of rights in discourses around politics. For them it is better to talk of people’s happiness, or their interests. It is not so much that they would support active breaking of rights, but more that they feel discussion of other issues would lead to better results.

Let us take the following thought experiment. Suppose you are taking an afternoon stroll past a duck pond in your local park on a sunny summer’s afternoon. You hear a commotion and look up and notice that a child has fallen into the pond and is in trouble; you immediately think that it is a moral law beyond question that you should assist children in peril, remove your jacket, dive into the pond, and rescue the child. Is this a moral act? Very few would doubt that it is. If you are a Kantian (precisely what this means will be discussed below, but for our purposes it means someone for whom universal morality consists of universal laws based upon motivations), the fact that your intentions were pure and universal make this moral. If you are a rulebased utilitarian like J.S. Mill (again more on this later, but broadly it means that utility is best brought about by enforcing certain laws as opposed to making lots of individual calculations), again it appears moral as the rule that we should assist children in peril seems to be one that would increase overall happiness. And Bentham would certainly regard it as moral, although he would probably think the motivations and rule are largely irrelevant, and the crucial issue was the pleasure of the child at being rescued and the avoidance of pain.

But let us twist the example a little bit. Suppose you were taking the same stroll on the same sunny summer’s day, and you heard the same commotion, and noticed the same child in peril in the pond. But this time you did not immediately remove your jacket and dive into the pond to rescue the child because you thought there was an irrefutable moral law commanding you to do so. Instead, you glanced up and noted that nearby the child in need was Justin Bieber, or Cardi B, or George Clooney, or Christina Hendricks, or whatever celebrity you think is attractive. You think to yourself, ‘if I jumped into this pond and rescued the child, then Justin/Cardi/George/Christina or whoever would notice me, think I was brave, and maybe take me out to dinner as a reward’. So you remove your jacket, jump into the duck pond, and rescue the child. Is this still a moral act? Kant would almost certainly say not, as your actions were based upon potential consequences rather than motivations, and based on laws that cannot be universalized. You would have used that child as a means to an end rather than them being an end in and of themselves. Likewise, Mill, although a utilitarian, might have a problem with attempting to apply the rule that we should ‘rescue all children who are in the vicinity of attractive celebrities’ as one to promote general utility. Bentham would probably think that this was still a moral act, and despite the quibbles over motivations and rules, the end consequence is that the child was rescued so the happiness is equal to the scenario when the child was rescued for purer motives. For Bentham, those things that promote happiness are good, and those that lead to pain are bad; this applies just as much to politics and government legislation as it does to ethics.

Utilitarianism

Jeremy Bentham is generally regarded as the founding father of utilitarianism. Bentham was born in 1748 in London, and educated at Oxford. In addition to his writing on utilitarianism, he was a leading social reformer of his day. Whereas he was an opponent of natural rights arguments, he nevertheless supported the notion of legal rights when they could be said to increase the overall happiness of the people.

You can still visit Bentham to this day. Bentham played a role in founding University College London, and left his body to the college. His mummified remains are displayed in the main reception area.

Other utilitarians include father and son team James and John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick. It still has proponents in the contemporary world, with the works of Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who uses the idea to support vegetarianism and giving all of our disposable income to charity.

Utilitarian philosophers critiqued a large array of social and political policies when they were writing. For example, they championed reforms of the punishments that prisoners received; not upon the grounds of morality or rights, per se, but more on the overall manner in which they worked and the results that they brought about. One such reform was that of lowering the punishments associated with crimes such as theft. Utilitarians in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century noticed a problem with sentencing. Offences that we would regard as minor today such as theft might still be punishable by death. So the problem was that if you are caught stealing a pig, you have absolutely no incentive to go quietly and accept your punishment; if the punishment for stealing a pig is the same as killing the person who caught you stealing the pig, then you might as well fight your way out of the situation. You would have little to lose at this point, and the overall happiness would be improved by more lenient penal laws. Again, these proposals were put forward not because of human rights concerns, but to produce more happiness.

And this is the key contribution of utilitarianism to debates surrounding the nature of politics: contrary to many liberal thinkers such as Paine and Rawls (who we will address later in this book) who argue that the purpose of government is to protect rights, utilitarians do not really think we have rights. Bentham regarded the notion of rights as rhetorical nonsense on stilts. As a consequence of this, the purpose of politics is to promote happiness not rights. There are a number of ways in which protecting rights might lead to less happiness overall. Take the famous Trolley Problem. You are by a railway track and you notice that a train is out of control and is hurtling towards, and if unhindered will surely kill, a group of five people on the track ahead of it. Now suppose you could not stop the train, but you could pull a lever that would move the train onto another track, but that this act would certainly kill one person who was on that track. So you could do nothing, and five people would die, or you could take an action, and that action would result in one person dying. The overall happiness would probably be greater if you took an action that killed one person (or saved four lives to put it in a more positive way), but does not the one person have a right to life?

Governments take actions that lead to some people suffering all the time. Winston Churchill left Coventry undefended from Luftwaffe raids in the Second World War despite knowing that it was going to be attacked. He got the information from the captured Enigma machines, whose code had been deciphered by Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park, and feared that if he defended Coventry too rigorously, the Germans would suspect that their code had been broken, change it, and all strategic advantage would be lost. This would prolong the war, and possibly result in greater loss of life. Likewise, Truman had to consider this when the option of using the atomic bomb was available to him. American troops were in the process of island hopping on the Japanese archipelago at the time, and the hope was the dreadful firepower of atomic bombs would bring the war to a swifter conclusion and consequently save lives despite the terrible casualties. The residents of Coventry and Hiroshima at the time may dispute this philosophical sleight of hand.

These are extreme examples. When a government decides to give a shipbuilding contract to a port here, rather than there, its actions will negatively affect some citizens for the greater good. Similarly, if a person’s family home is demolished to make way for a motorway, wind turbines spoil the view from your study library, roadworks cause your commute to be extended by 20 minutes every day for the summer, and so on. Sometimes politics involves trade-offs between people’s interests. Whereas utilitarians don’t think people have rights, they do think they have interests, and these interests need to be borne in mind when discussing politics and ethics.

Whereas Bentham’s notion of rights being ‘nonsense on stilts’ leads to the possibility of me being horsewhipped in front of all of the readers of this book if they find it dull and it brings them happiness, most utilitarians would look to protect liberties even though they would conceptualize them differently from rights-based liberal thinkers. J.S. Mill was a rule utilitarian, meaning that he thought that overall we would be happier as a society if we applied certain types of rules. The ‘Harm Principle’, which we will discuss later in this book, is an example of such a rule; we will be happier as a society if we are allowed to do as we please even if certain aspects of that liberty causes us to be unhappy. So the ability to speak our mind freely trumps the hurt we might get if we are offended by something someone says whilst exercising their free speech. Mill also thinks that happiness is more complicated than it might seem, and thinks there are different levels of happiness. You might be happy after spending two hours watching Storage Wars on TV, but the quality of happiness is better if you spend that two hours reading the classics of the history of political thought. He justifies this with the highly questionable proposition that anyone who has known the more cerebral pleasures in life would not go back to the more basic pleasures. But do not college professors like football, or medical doctors basketball?

Activity 3. Please attempt the following tasks:

1 Why does Bentham think that rights are nonsense on stilts?

2 What is meant by rule utilitarianism?

3 Do you think that the person rescuing the child in the pond due to the attractive celebrity close by was committing a moral act?