Utilitarianism and Injustices

Utilitarianism doesn’t fall into the trap of being purely relative. By the very virtue of human beings being 99.9% genetically similar there simply will not be an extreme variation in what people need to be happy. This does of course lead to small minorities being thrown under the bus so to speak. No matter what though there will always be people that don’t agree with everything. Nowadays minorities are treated poorly such as people who murder and get satisfaction out of it or pedophiles and people widely and rightly recognize that as okay. You can’t rationally criticize utilitarianism when such a scenario is unavoidable and possibly preferable. Some people just aren’t going to be happy and people must accept that. Of course the ideal scenario is for this group of unhappy people to be vanishingly small and is the ultimate goal of any utilitarian society. Utilitarianism gives you the proper target to be aiming at and due to the relative same-ness of humanity there are few outliers to be neglected. It is a perfect solution for an imperfect world. Scenarios where this could be vastly upset is if we made contact with aliens and they had completely different needs and desires. Of course this is something of red herring as many things would need to be rethought if such a thing happened.

            Mill also raises a good point when he defends his position against those saying utilitarianism is irreligious. When he says that wouldn’t any god want people to maximize their happiness it seems as if he is taking a jab at religion. He seems to want to life any abstractions and get to the core of what every human is searching for; happiness. Any laws which in any way inhibit the greater happiness being done and restrict people’s happiness while preventing no pain are unjust to any utilitarian. Many places that place God or anything else as an objective truth end up leading to a greater amount of unhappiness than good.  Felicific calculus can be used to see what really the better choice is although errors might be made such as can happen with any judgment of morality. Further reading on Mill shows how deeply he applied this calculus to his beliefs and this lead to him putting in support for movements way ahead of his time such as women’s rights. Jeremy Bentham another proponent of utilitarianism was even more ahead of his time by wanting the decriminalization of homosexual acts among other forward thinking ideas.