PHIL103: Moral and Political Philosophy

Monetized utilitarianism attempts to measure happiness, to the extent possible, in terms of money. As the Ford Pinto case demonstrated, the advantage here is that it allows decisions about the greater good to be made in clear, objective terms. You add up the money on one side and the money on the other and the decision follows automatically. This is a very attractive benefit, especially when you're dealing with large numbers of individuals or complex situations. Monetized utilitarianism allows you to keep your happiness calculations straight.

Two further varieties of utilitarianism are hedonistic and idealistic. Both seek to maximize human happiness, but their definitions of happiness differ. Hedonistic utilitarians trace back to Jeremy Bentham (England, around 1800). Bentham was a wealthy and odd man who left his fortune to the University College of London along with the stipulation that his mummified body be dressed and present at the institution. It remains there today. He sits in a wooden cabinet in the main building, though his head has been replaced by a wax model after pranking students repeatedly stole the real one. Bentham believed that pleasure and happiness are ultimately synonymous. Ethics, this means, seeks to maximize the pleasures – just about any sensation of pleasure – felt by individuals. But before dropping everything and heading out to the bars, it should be remembered that even the most hedonistic of the utilitarians believe that getting pleasure right now is good but not as good as maximizing the feeling over the long term. (Going out for drinks, in others words, instead of going to the library isn't recommendable on the evening before midterms.)

A contemporary of Bentham, John Stuart Mill, basically agreed that ethics is about maximizing pleasure, but his more idealistic utilitarianism distinguished low and highbrow sensations. The kinds of raw, good feelings that both we and animals can find, according to Mill, are second-rate pleasures. Pleasures with higher and more real value include learning and learnedness. These aren't physical joys so much as the delights of the mind and the imagination. For Mill, consequently, libraries and museums are scenes of abundant pleasure, much more than any bar.

This idealistic notion of utilitarianism fits quite well with the College Board's response to the KDCP episode. First, deciding against canceling student scores seems like a way of keeping people on track to college and headed toward the kind of learning that rewards our cerebral inclinations. Further, awarding free prep classes to those unable to pay seems like another step in that direction, at least if it helps get them into college.