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PROFESSOR: OK, so what I want
to do today is to finish up
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the lecture that we were engaged
with last week about
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utilitarianism and then to move
on to what is perhaps the
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most dead-guy-on-Tuesday lecture
of the semester, that
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is, an explanation of the
philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
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So in order to make up for the
fact that the second part of
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the lecture is fairly dry, we'll
have a couple of clicker
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questions in the first
part of the lecture.
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OK, so as you recall from our
lecture last class, John
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Stuart Mill, in the selections
from Utilitarianism that we
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read, says two extraordinarily
famous things that serve in
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some ways as the heart of
the utilitarian view.
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The first thing that he says is
that he articulates what's
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known as the greatest
happiness principle.
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This is a principle that's
supposed to tell you what it
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is for an act to be
morally right.
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And what Mill says is, there's
a proportionality between the
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rightness of the act and
something that it produces.
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In particular, a proportionality
between the
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rightness of the act and the
amount of happiness it
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produces, regardless of how that
happiness is distributed.
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In particular he says "actions
are right in proportion as
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they tend to promote happiness,
they're wrong as
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they tend to promote the reverse
of happiness," and the
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happiness with which we're
concerned is not the agent's
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own happiness but "the happiness
of all concerned."
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The second extraordinarily
famous saying that he says in
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the opening passages of
Utilitarianism is that the
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motive with which an act is
performed is irrelevant to the
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act's moral worth.
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He says the motive has nothing
to do with the
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morality of the action.
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"He who saves another creature
from drowning does what is
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morally right, whether his
motive be duty or the hope of
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being paid for it."
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So we might summarize what
these principles say, as
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saying that the first one tells
us that what matters for
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the morality of an act is the
aggregate amount of happiness
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that it produces.
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And what we're concerned with
here are aggregates, not
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We're interested in how much
good is done overall, not
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where those pieces of good
might happen to fall.
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And what the second principle
tells us is that what the
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utilitarian, who is after all
a consequentialist, is
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concerned with are
consequences.
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They're interested in the
outcome of the act, not the
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process by which that outcome
was achieved.
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So the first reading that we
did for last class was a
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selection from Mill's
Utilitarianism where he
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