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Disturbances to Utilitarian

  • Ascetic Principle: Utility can be disturbed by this principle. This can be for monk, priest because they believe in heaven. They have their own goal, interest and are separated from society.
  • Arbitrary Principle: that is sympathy (the feeling or expression of pity or sorrow for the pain or distress of somebody else) and antipathy (strong hostility or opposition toward somebody). By virtue of sympathy and antipathy they can be ignore.

AFTER BENTHAM

Other notable exponents were the British jurist John Austin and the British philosophers James Mill and John Stuart Mill. Austin set forth a strong defense of the utilitarian theory in his Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832). James Mill interpreted and popularized the theory in a number of articles contributed for the most part to the Westminster Review, a periodical founded by Bentham and others to promote the spread of the utilitarian philosophy. John Stuart Mill, who made utilitarianism the subject of one of his philosophical treatises (Utilitarianism,1863), is the ablest champion of the doctrine after Bentham.

His contribution to the theory consists in his recognition of distinctions of quality, in addition to those of intensity, among pleasures. Thus, whereas Bentham maintained that the “quality of pleasure being equal, push-pin [a child’s game] is as good as poetry,” Mill contended that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” that is, human discontent is better than animal fulfillment. By this statement Mill seems to have rejected the identification of the concept “happiness” with “pleasure and the absence of pain” and the concept “unhappiness” with “pain and the absence of pleasure,” as found in Bentham’s works and in his own earlier formulations.

The British philosopher Henry Sidgwick, a contemporary disciple of Mill, gave a comprehensive presentation of Mill’s utilitarianism in his Methods of Ethics (1874). Somewhat later, the British philosophers Herbert Spencer and Sir Leslie Stephen, the former in his Data of Ethics (1879), the latter in his Science of Ethics (1882), sought to synthesize the utilitarian theory with the principles of biological evolution as expounded in the works of Charles Darwin.

Libertarianism, political philosophy emphasizing the rights of the individual. The doctrine of libertarianism stresses the right to self-ownership and, by extension, the right to private ownership of material resources and property. Advocates oppose any form of taxation and favor a laissez-faire economic system. Libertarianism is an assertion of individual liberty in the face of growing government involvement in all aspects of life.

Both the American philosopher and psychologist William James and the American philosopher, psychologist, and educator John Dewey were influenced by utilitarianism. Dewey substituted intelligence for pleasure, or happiness, both as the supreme value and as the most reliable method of achieving other desirable values.

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