Posted by lina on April 21, 19101 at 08:09:28:

In Reply to: AGAINST UTILITARIANISM posted by Kiki on March 30, 19100 at 05:22:01:

First of all, the notions used in the principles of this morality are vague. "Adding up" the happiness of several people desperately needs to be explained, as well as weighing one person's happiness against another's and deciding which is the "greater" happiness. Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, attempted to quantify emotion haphazardly by considering such qualities as intensity and duration. Not only is this method of quantification too artificial to deserve serious attention, but it leads to potential paradoxes. A more qualitative measurement of emotion is needed. I will do this later.

Secondly, even if we did have definite concepts, ignorance plays a significant role in devastating our ability to follow the rules. We don't always know the effects of our actions. And for certain, we definitely can't telepathically know what everyone is feeling and do complex integral calculus with emotions to figure out the correct action. The best we could do is to make hunches or guesses, and declare one as having a "good will" when he attempts to satisfy the goal of utilitarian morality more or less.

And finally, even if we did know all the facts, we could not obey utilitarian morality at all times. To see this, choose any instance in time. A proponent is required to follow utilitarian morality at this time as well as all other times. But, he/she does not know what to do at this time and must spend time thinking it through. The time spent thinking is a "waste of time" in the eyes of utilitarian morality and is forbidden. A way out is to agree that an individual is not to be called "good" or "bad" based on whether he/she obeys utilitarian morality at all times, but on whether the attempt has been made with honest effort.

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