The principle of maximizing happiness: 1. The highest principle of morality is to maximize happiness.
The sum of all happiness is greater than the sum of pain.
Specifically, utility is happiness itself, in order to avoid pain. Accepting the utilitarian principle is the basis of morality. The only goal that people are eager to achieve is to pursue happiness and get rid of pain.
Utilitarians emphasize the greatest happiness that most people get, but at the same time they do not exclude the happiness that individuals have. Therefore, it is required to cultivate people's noble sentiments in general and let most people have the same happiness, so as to achieve the ultimate goal.
The ultimate binding force of utilitarian principle is the inner subjective feeling. It can form a strong binding force according to one's emotions and ideological realm. When the external binding force is insufficient or contrary, it has a powerful role.
Utilitarians point out that what they call happiness covers everything people pursue, such as money, fame and virtue. Utilitarians point out that the pursuit of money and reputation may cause certain harm to the group or other members, so it needs to be kept within a certain range, while the desire for the latter is well-being and needs to be pursued as much as possible. At the same time, utilitarians point out that money, fame and so on were originally the means for people to pursue happiness, but now they have become a part of happiness. Therefore, it is obvious that happiness is the only purpose that people pursue.
Utilitarians believe that justice and skills are inseparable, not antagonistic. All issues related to justice are issues related to utility.
After reading utilitarianism, I can't help but think of Justice I read the other day, which contains some arguments against utilitarianism.
1. This book (P 10 1) mentioned the famous saying of bentham, the founder of utilitarianism: everyone is a complete person, and no one can be equal to several people. To prove my worry: utilitarianism admits that its own happiness is of equal value to the happiness of others. So imagine a scene: there is a village where residents live and work in peace and contentment, but there is a child who is locked in a cold basement and lives in a place where there is no sunshine all the year round. The only condition for this village to live and work in peace and contentment is to sacrifice the children's lifelong freedom, so it is obviously contradictory to follow the above viewpoint and the principle of maximizing happiness emphasized by utilitarianism.
2. In this book, utilitarians turn everything with moral importance into a single measure of happiness or pain. (P46) No judgment. Everyone's preferences are equally important (as mentioned above) and have obviously been measured by the same scale. However, different people have different likes and dislikes about the same thing. Edward Thorndike, a social psychologist, did an experiment to investigate some young people who received government relief, such as "How much should I give you if you have a tooth pulled out" or "Let you cut off a toe" and "Let you swallow an earthworm raw", and finally made a table. The price of tooth extraction is $4,500, while the price of raw earthworm is 10W. If it is really measured by a unified scale, is the pain of swallowing an earthworm really 20 times that of tooth extraction? This is obviously absurd.