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5/4/22, 1:01 AM Week 4 Overview - Utilitarianism: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-4-overview-utilitarianism?module_item_id=17540436 1/3

Week 4 Overview - Utilitarianism

We are now in the modern world and we find a different moral logic at work, one that does not refer to higher qualities or capacities intrinsic to our nature, but rather one that accepts humans as nothing other than consuming animals. Within our modern capitalist society value is understood not as born out of our socially creative capacities to meet real human needs but rather as arising from market demands seemingly determined by subjective consumer preferences. Jeremy Bentham founded the ethical theory of Utilitarianism—building largely on Thomas Hobbes's mechanized worldview that reduces humans to machines—in order to accommodate this new reality in which the market no longer serves the social needs of community-building, but rather society serves the ends of monetary market exchange and private profit. Hence, Bentham's framework is called "utilitarian" because it views anything and everything as quantitatively priced and potentially utilized for the sake of arbitrary private pleasures. For Bentham happiness is nothing other than the presence of pleasure and the absence of pain, which he believed could be simply calculated.

Bentham is credited with at least trying to come up with an objective criterion that everyone within a market society could use to assess the pursuit of happiness. What will be important to see, however, is how Bentham’s uncritical acceptance of the monetary market and its consumerism leaves him unable to ask whether what we just so happen to want, whether what the market just so happens to demand at any given point in time, is actually good for us according to any standards that might transcend the marketplace and its calculations (remember Nussbaum's criticisms of the preference based approach?). If ethics began as a discourse about that common good beyond commercialism by which we are able to realize our most distinctive capacities for enabling full human flourishing, then with Bentham’s utilitarianism we find an

5/4/22, 1:01 AM Week 4 Overview - Utilitarianism: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/week-4-overview-utilitarianism?module_item_id=17540436 2/3

inability to rise up to the critical task of ethics. It is instead John Stuart Mill who will provide an important corrective to utilitarianism, nuancing and supplementing it with a higher view of our distinctive human qualities whose fulfillment should be the criterion of happiness. In doing so he began to fundamentally challenge the market ordering of our social relations around the exclusive ends of private profit and subjective consumption. But in doing so, does he begin to leave the framework of utilitarianism and veer closer to virtue ethics?

To read: Review the materials on the Launchpad page Introduction to Utilitarianism (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/launchpad-introduction-to- utilitarianism) , which includes my video and lecture notes Read Sandel, What's the Right Thing to Do, chapter 2 Read the Lecture notes on Bentham (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034406/download?wrap=1)

(https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034406/download? download_frd=1) and on Mill (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034358/download?wrap=1)

(https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034358/download? download_frd=1) , as well as the summarizing notes comparing and contrasting virtue ethics and utilitarianism (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034376/download?wrap=1)

(https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034376/download? download_frd=1) . Read Bentham in Justice Reader, pp. 9–14 Read Mill in Justice Reader, pp. 14–31 Read Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, ch. VII, sections 4–7 (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034404/download?wrap=1)

(https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/files/68034404/download? download_frd=1) (pp. 196–204).

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5/4/22, 1:01 AM Week 4 Overview - Utilitarianism: UCOR 2910 02 22SQ Ethical Reasoning in Business

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Complete the Reading Assignment Questions (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/assignments/7016120) assignment, which is due by Saturday at midnight Answer the Case Discussion Questions (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/discussion_topics/7964150) regarding the Matrix videoclip which is located on the discussion page. Your initial post is due by Wednesday and 2 subsequent posts by Sunday. Please review the Class Participation and Discussion (https://seattleu.instructure.com/courses/1603225/pages/class-participation-and- discussion) page for discussion expectations.