NAME: HAMZA ALIYU MUHAMMAD

REG. NO.: CST/15/COM/00386

COURSE TITLE /CODE: COMPUTER SCIENCE AND SOCIETY /
CSC2222
UTILITARIAN CRITARION
Bentham presents his theory of utility in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (1789), which he wrote as a kind of moral guidebook for legislators as they
make public policy. Although the bulk of this work focuses on issues of criminal conduct,
the opening chapters systematically describe how utility is the ultimate moral standard
for all actions. Bentham states his principle of utility here: By the principle of utility is
meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever,
according to the tendency which 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.
Reference: [Principles of Morals
and Legislation, 1.2]. Two features of Benthams theory make it especially unique.
First, Bentham offers a bare-bones moral theory consisting of only one factor: the
pleasing or painful consequences of actions. Although earlier theorists put forward the
basic elements of utilitarianism, they also incorporated non-utilitarian doctrines into their
moral theories. Some of these extraneous doctrines are that morality is ultimately
founded on the will of God, that sympathy is needed to counterbalance human
selfishness, that virtues underlie our moral actions, that we rationally intuit our duty, and
that we judge conduct through a moral sense. For Bentham, some of these doctrines are
nonsensical, and the rest are irrelevant. His rejection of these more traditional elements of
moral theory gave utilitarianism the reputation of being Godless, impersonal, skeptical,
and relativistic.
The Second and most important feature of Benthams theory is his method for precisely
quantifying pleasures and pains, better known as the utilitarian calculus. He argues that
the complete range of pleasing and painful consequences of actions can be quantified
according to seven criteria:
(1) intensity; (2) duration; (3) certainty; (4) remoteness, that is, the immediacy of the
pleasure or pain; (5) fecundity, that is, whether similar pleasures or pains will follow; (6)
purity, that is, whether the pleasure is mixed with pain; and (7) extent, that is, the number
of people affected. In a footnote to a later edition of the Principles, Bentham summarizes

these criteria in a rhyme, which he says might assist us in lodging more effectually, in
the memory, these points: Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure -- Such marks in
pleasures and in pains endure. Such pleasures seek if private by thy end: If it be public,
wide let them extend. Such pains avoid, whichever by they view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few.
Mills theory that is distinct from Benthams concerns the place of moral rules in moral
decision making. Bentham is what scholars today call an act-utilitarian, whereas Mill is a
rule-utilitarian. The two approaches may be defined this way:
Act-utilitarianism: morality involves examining the pleasurable and painful
consequences of our individual actions.
Rule-utilitarianism: morality involves examining the pleasurable and painful
consequences of the moral rules that we adopt. Act-utilitarianism involves a two-tiered
system of moral evaluation: (1) selecting a particular action, and (2) evaluating that
action by appealing to the criterion of general happiness. For example, according to actutilitarianism, it would be wrong for me to steal my neighbours car since this particular
act would produce more general unhappiness. Rule-utilitarianism, though, involves an
intermediary step and so is a three-tiered system of moral evaluation: (1) selecting a
particular action, (2) evaluating that action by appealing to moral rules, and (3)
evaluating moral rules by appealing to the criterion of general happiness. For example,
according to rule-utilitarianism, it would be wrong to steal my neighbors car since this
act would violate the rule against stealing, and we endorse the rule against stealing since
it promotes general happiness. Mill develops his view of rule-utilitarianism in reaction to
two distinct issues. The first concerns whether we have enough time to calculate the
consequences of our actions before performing them. Throughout the day there are
countless actions that we perform, and it would be completely impractical to perform a
utilitarian cost-benefit analysis beforehand on each one.
Pleasure is Not the Only Important Moral Value pleasure that results from a course of
action, morality stands up to experiential and even scientific judgment. Hedonistic
utilitarian argue that we can record experiences of pleasure, quantify degrees of pleasure,
and use this as the basis of our moral judgments.
HUMAN RIGHT CRITARION
In Benthams time, human rights were not spoken of. He himself used the term natural
rights. This expression fell out of use, to be replaced by human rights, still employed
today, precisely to try to overcome the criticism led by Bentham. The occasion that gave
rise to Falacias Anrquicas was the declarations of rights of the French Revolution, the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789-91, and of the Constitution of

1795. Those rights of man, as distinct from the rights of the citizen, are the lexical
predecessor of our human rights. The semantic predecessor is natural rights. Human
rights, then, are the result of a metamorphosis suffered by natural rights. Human rights
are not the same as natural rights, but they originate from and owe some of their
characteristics to them.
Essentially, human and natural rights share the claim to precede positive law, its
foundation (base for legitimating criticism or praise of it) and unavailable to it. To
understand Benthams criticisms of natural rights, in the version of the French and
American revolutionaries,5 it is important to know if that criticism is applicable to
human rights, which in turn is important, since the analytical, positivist and
utilitarian criticism of natural rights (all of which Benthams contribution involved)
was rigorous and not to be taken lightly
Rights, it must be remembered, always import obligations. If one man
obtains a right to the services of another man, an obligation is, at the same
time, laid upon this other to render those services. It thus appears that it is
wholly impossible to create a right without at the same time creating an
obligation.
Every right is a benefit; a command to a certain extent over the objects of
desire. Every obligation is a burden; an interdiction from the objects of desire.
The one is in itself a good; the other is in itself an evil. It would be desirable to
increase the good as much as possible. But, by increasing the good, it
necessarily happens that we increase the evil. And, if there be a certain point at
which the evil begins to increase faster than the good, beyond that point all
creation of rights is hostile to human welfare
JUSTICE CRITARION
Justice is a name for certain classes of moral rules, which concerns the
essentials of human well-being more nearly, and are therefore of more absolute
obligation, than any other rules for the guidance of life; and of the notion which
we have found to be the essence of the idea of justice, that of a right residing in
an individual, implies and testifies to this more binding obligation
Individual rights33 are the essence of justice and justice is a part of morality;34 an
empirically evident morality but that, happily for our author, has revealed itself to be
much less malleable in the hands of the legislator than Bentham expected. It is a
question, then, of a morality that can enter into conflict with legality, but, except in
the most extreme cases will not lead one to predict the dissolution of the
government, the re-assumption by individuals of their natural rights, the
restoration of primitive anarchy, of the law of the strongest, to the elevation of the

individual conscience as the supreme judge for want of impartial institutionalised

judges. This is a morality that allows free criticism but only very exceptionally
disobedience, for that civil disobedience is such an extreme recourse, resorted to in
really essential matters, that only a Ghandi or a Martin Luther King would do it; thus
it does not become something useless or trivial. So it is a consensual morality, based
on the conventions that a society establishes as to what ought to be, a relative, historical
morality.
But a fully consensual morality is, by definition, conservative; for this reason attention
must be given to one of its sectors that is most immediately connected to law, namely,
justice. There can be found those rights that inspire law, and it is the place where
empirically evident, conventional morality interacts with the demand to make of it the
best possible version, in accord with the impulse given and demanded
by the spirits, by enlightened thinkers desirous of perfecting themselves and in so doing,
perfecting humanity. A humanity that must never be used as a means and that, in
consequence, cannot be directed towards the ideals dreamed of by learned minds but only
towards its greater happiness, better said, towards the purest expression of the most noble
of what it is. There is much of Rawls in Mill.
Moral rights are, then, the contents of justice. And justice is the part of morality bound to
legality; superior to law but not totally disconnected from it.
It remains for us to consider the connection between justice (moral rights) and utility.
Justice depends on utility, it is subordinate to it.
But this subordination is not, as is usual, in only one direction. Justice, moral rights, as
we saw, ground utility, they make it operative. But it also has potentiality in the opposite
direction. This potentiality has two aspects; on one hand, it allows rights to be ordered, to
establish their precedence:
If utility is the ultimate source of moral obligations, utility may be invoked to decide
between them when their demands are incompatible. Though the application of the
standard may be difficult, it is better than none at all Rights and Utilitarianism. John
Stuart Mills Role in its history.