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Utilitarianism and Punishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 February 2016

J. J. C. Smart
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Extract

Utilitarianism is the view that the rightness of an action depends entirely on expected utility, that is on the sum of the utilities of its consequences weighted by their various probabilities. I shall distinguish two forms of utilitarianism: hedonistic utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism. In hedonistic utilitarianism it is just a matter of pleasure and its opposite, unpleasure. Often utilitarians have used ‘pain’ instead of ‘unpleasure’, but this has the disadvantage that ‘pain’ can suggest ‘a pain’, and ‘a pain’ is not the opposite of ‘a pleasure’. If I annoy you I give you the opposite of pleasure but I do not necessarily give you a pain. In preference utilitarianism we take value to be satisfaction of desires or preferences. It is a difficult theory to work out in so far as we have to take ‘preference’ here to be intrinsic preference, and so need a clear distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic preferences.

Type
Theories of Punishment
Information
Israel Law Review , Volume 25 , Issue 3-4 , Summer–Autumn 1991 , pp. 360 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1991

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References

1 ‘Pain’ is not always the opposite of ‘pleasure’, and ‘displeasure’ colloquially has the wrong meaning here. It is better to say ‘unpleasure’, as does Broad, C. D. in his Ethics, edited by Lewy, Casimir (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For measurement of intensity of belief and desire see Ramsey, F. P., “Truth and Probability” in the collection of Ramsey's essays edited by Braithwaite, R. B., The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1931)Google Scholar and also in the collection edited by Mellor, D. H., Foundations (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978)Google Scholar. Also Jeffrey, Richard, The Logic of Decision, (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1983)Google Scholar chapter 3, in which there is an improvement on Ramsey's original idea.

3 Sidgwick, H., Methods of Ethics, (Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, 7th ed., reprinted with a Foreword by John Rawls, 1981) 418–9Google Scholar.

4 On this question consult Churchland, Patricia Smith, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

5 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984), especially Part 3Google Scholar.

6 Flew, Antony, “Retrospect and Prospect, Retribution and Deterrence”, in this issue, at p. 376Google Scholar.

7 See McCloskey, H. J., “An Examination of Restricted Utilitarianism” (1957) 66 Philosophical Review 466–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 James, William, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1979) 144Google Scholar.

9 Nor would someone in a Rawlsian ‘original position’ wish to take the risk of himself or herself being the poor lonely soul. See Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford University Press, 1973) secs. 3–4Google Scholar.

10 See Rawls, John, “Two Concepts of Rules” (1955) 64 Philosophical Review 3–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 I have found Maxwell, Mary, Human Evolution: A Philosophical Anthropology (London, Croom Helm, 1984)Google Scholar chap. 7, instructive in this connection.

12 See Smart, J.J.C. and Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge U. P., 1973) 98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a witty modification of the example see Ten, C. L., “Jim's Utilitarian Mission” (1979) 24 Philosophy 221–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, supra n. 9, at 20-1.

14 Not expecting ever to be in a Rawlsian ‘original position’ and not expecting anyone else to be either, I do not see what Rawls' use of this idea has to do with the price of fish.

15 Cambridge University Press, 1967.

16 See Kitcher, Philip, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T. Press, 1985)Google Scholar. I have also been helped by seeing a draft of Kim Sterelny's Critical Notice of this book, which later appeared in (1988) 66 Australasian Journal of Philosophy 538–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Alexander Rosenberg's review of Kitcher's book, (1986) 53 Philosophy of Science 607-8. While generally very favourable to Kitcher's book, this review suggests that some of the criticisms of Lumsden's and Wilson's sociobiological theories are not justified.

17 In practice it will usually be the case that remote consequences can be ignored, since the expected utilities of ever more remote consequences can diminish rapidly to zero or cancel one another out. However there are exceptions: an extreme example would be an act that started a thermonuclear war that would prevent hundreds of millions of years of further evolution of higher forms of life on earth.

18 H. J. McCloskey, in his paper “An Examination of Restricted Utilitarianism”, supra n. 7, has argued that rule utilitarianism is in a not much better case than act utilitarianism, since it is conceivable that a practice of secretly punishing (or telishing) the innocent would be optimific.

19 See Smart, J. J. C., “Benevolence as an Over-riding Attitude” (1977) 55 Australasian J. of Philosophy 127–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Smart, J. J. C., Essays Metaphysical and Moral (Oxford, Blackwell, 1987)Google Scholar.

20 Sir Walter Scott, The Chronicles of the Canongate.

21 Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987.