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9 J. Value Inquiry 1 (1975)

handle is hein.journals/jrnlvi9 and id is 1 raw text is: 1 GOODNESS AND BENEFIT: An Interpretation of Utilitarianism THOMAS MORAWETZ 1. I shall argue that utilitarianism may be seen as the conjunction of two theses. The first thesis is that the moral goodness of an act is determined by the consequences of that act. The second thesis is that not all consequences, but only those which represent benefit or harm to persons affected by the act, are relevant in assessing its moral goodness. It follows that to call an act good is to imply that it has beneficial consequences. It also follows that to say that one act is morally better than another is to imply that it conveys greater benefit or less harm. I shall explain and qualify each thesis in turn, and I shall argue that the resulting theory is immune to familiar criticisms of utilitarianism. The theory is best seen as an analysis of moral reasoning about the good- ness of acts. On this view, utilitarianism claims that it is a distinctive feature of moral reasoning that judgments of goodness depend on assessments of benefit. The theory is descriptive and not prescriptive.1 It describes an aspect of moral reasoning and is not a proposal for the reform of moral reasoning or for the resolution of moral dilemmas. This interpretation of utilitarianism is a theory about the goodness of acts, and not about their rightness,2 obligatoriness, etc. I shall therefore not discuss whether every good act is obligatory, whether an act may be obligatory even if it is not good, or whether two equally good alternative acts can both be the right thing to do. Such questions require investigation beyond the two theses which I shall identify with utilitarianism. Finally, I shall not argue that this version of utilitarianism is a faithful re- presentation of classical utilitarianism or that it is the only defensible version. 2. The first thesis is that the moral goodness of an act is determined by the consequences of that act. A theory which put forth only the first thesis might ' Cf. P. F. Strawson's distinction between descriptive and prescriptive metaphysics. Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure. Individuals (London, 1959), 9. 2 Cf. Jonathan Harrison, Utilitarianism, Universalisation, and Our Duty to be Just, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. LIII (1952-53), 105: According to Utilitarian- ism, it is often said, an action is right if it produces at least as much good ...; Richard Brandt, Toward a Credible Utilitarianism, Morality and the Language of Conduct, edited by Hector-Neri Castaneda and George Nakhnikian(Detroit, 1963), 109: I call a utilitarian- ism 'act-utilitarianism' if it holds that the rightness of an act is fixed by the utility of its consequences.

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