This book, being the print edition of the open-access textbook “utilitarianism.net,” is intended to provide a systematic, approachable, and sympathetic introduction to utilitarianism. It comprises all of the systematic core articles to be found on the website, as well as a study guide on Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” but does not feature any of the site’s guest essays or introductions to prominent predecessors or proponents of utilitarianism. Its primary aims are familiarizing readers with the best version of utilitarianism the contemporary debate has to offer and convincing them that this position is worth taking very seriously. In doing so, the authors take care to dispense with, or at least clearly explain, philosophical jargon, clear up common misunderstandings of utilitarianism, and combat the most common objections to it. While this causes some unavoidable overlap with existing introductions to utilitarianism, this one stands out due to the breadth of relevant issues it covers, its argumentative focus that acknowledges the most recent developments in the literature (some of which have been spearheaded by its authors), and its emphasis on the practical relevance of utilitarianism.
The book is split into two parts, with the first part defining and developing utilitarianism and the second addressing common objections to utilitarianism thus developed. The authors begin the first part, in Chapters 1 and 2, by introducing utilitarianism and briefly discussing its main tenets. Utilitarianism, defined as the claim that one ought always to promote overall well-being (p. 10), comprises four notable features. It is consequentialist (directing one to promote overall value), welfarist (tying outcome value to the welfare of the individuals in that outcome), impartial (counting the welfare of each equally), and aggregative (favoring sum-ranking as the method for determining the amount of welfare in outcomes containing the same individuals). Even though these features are quite restrictive, they still leave room for different interpretations – room the authors briefly chart by attending to, for example, global, rule, and scalar consequentialism, multilevel views, and the subjective/objective distinction.
Chapter 3 sketches the most promising arguments for utilitarianism. The authors provide, after a short primer on moral epistemology, both a direct and an indirect justification. We have positive reason to accept utilitarianism, they argue, because it offers an intuitively plausible account of what fundamentally matters – what could be more important than improving the lives of sentient creatures? – as well as because only utilitarianism respects the specific kind of impartiality that is constitutive of morality: once we disregard all information that an impartial evaluator should not consider, most notably information about the specific identities of affected individuals, it is hard to see how utilitarianism could be avoided on principled grounds. The indirect justification complements this picture by highlighting problems of utilitarianism’s rivals, focusing on paradigmatic versions of deontology. Deontological views, Chappell, MacAskill, and Meissner claim, do not only have trouble showing central concepts or distinctions on which they are based to be of intrinsic moral significance, but they are also particularly susceptible to evolutionary debunking.
Chapters 4 and 5 discuss two important choice points for utilitarianism. On the one hand, the defining feature of welfarism leaves room for several different accounts of what welfare consists in. Chapter 4, following Parfit’s famous trichotomy, gives an overview of the three most well-known theories of welfare, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, and the practical import of this choice for utilitarianism’s prescriptions. This import, the authors argue, is quite limited since even theories disagreeing about what is of intrinsic prudential value often concede that the things preferred by their rivals are, nevertheless, instrumentally good.
Things are different regarding the second choice point: how to deal with situations involving different individuals or a different number of individuals. Even theories that coincide in cases of fixed populations can diverge when the population is subject to change, and this divergence has far-reaching practical importance. Deciding between the different views leads one into the thorny terrain of population ethics, which is the topic of Chapter 5. The authors discuss five central ways of extending utilitarianism (the total view, the average view, variable value views, critical level [or range] views, and person-affecting views), arguing that, while we should dismiss person-affecting versions of utilitarianism, most of the other, impersonal views are live options: each is faced with specific problems, and none clearly comes out on top. While the presentation of the different positions is exceptionally lucid and helpful, the brevity of the critical discussion is to its detriment. For one, some points are merely mentioned, not explained (cf. p. 85), which will leave both beginners and experts unsatisfied (though for different reasons). For another, the negative verdict about person-affecting approaches is not, it seems to me, borne out by the arguments provided. Given that each alternative is subject to problems that appear at least equally pressing, like the average view’s sadistic conclusion, much more would have to be said as to why they can, supposedly, claim any decisive advantage over person-affecting views.
As I said at the outset, the book is entirely systematic, not covering the specific views or arguments of any of the prominent proponents of utilitarianism in detail. However, although the voices of classical utilitarians are largely absent, their spirit can be felt throughout. This is because Chappell, MacAskill, and Meissner place a special emphasis on the practical implications of the utilitarian account: how can utilitarian insights be translated into personal and political action, and what kind of life should utilitarians lead? Chapters 6 and 7 address these questions. Chapter 6 lays out some important practical implications of utilitarianism, like the rejection of the distinction between doing and allowing, while in Chapter 7, the authors provide concrete advice on how to put utilitarianism into practice, unsurprisingly mirroring many of the counsels of the effective altruism movement. Chapter 8 closes the first part of the book by taking a look at close cognates of utilitarianism, which relax some of utilitarianism’s assumptions without straying too far from it, for example, by allowing for non-welfarist values or giving additional weight to the interests of one’s near and dear.
In the second part, the authors cover the most common objections to utilitarianism and sketch potential utilitarian replies. This part starts, again, with a more methodologically oriented chapter in which the authors canvas several different strategies utilitarians can use in response to criticisms and alleged counterexamples, and provide a collection of argumentative tools to this end. These strategies and this handy toolkit are then applied masterfully to show how utilitarians might respond to charges of opponents, with the authors taking care to sketch multiple possible approaches in each instance. To give just one instructive example of these chapters, each being devoted to one complaint against utilitarianism: in Chapter 16, Chappell, Meissner, and MacAskill discuss the claim that utilitarianism fails to account for the intrinsic value of comparative equality. In response, they argue, utilitarians could (i) reach across the aisle by pointing to the fact that, due to the diminishing marginal utility of most goods, utilitarianism has an innate tendency to favor more equal distributions of resources in practice; (ii) dismiss the objection by showing that the impression of equality’s intrinsic importance is misleading (e.g., because it confounds equality’s obvious instrumental with intrinsic value); (iii) contend that egalitarian views have, themselves, implausible implications, like taking losses of the better-off to be in one respect good; or (iv) simply bite the bullet and insist that utilitarianism, though not without any blemishes, still is the overall most plausible account on offer.
The chapters of this second part, with their approachable yet state-of-the-art discussion of issues that commonly arise when teaching utilitarianism, will be especially useful in the seminar room. They help to guard against common misunderstandings, to grasp the complexities of the theory, and to get up to speed with the latest developments in the literature in a clear and concise manner. Since the breadth of objections considered is impressive, most students’ curiosity will be thoroughly satisfied. All of this makes it one of the most accessible and comprehensive introductions to utilitarianism on offer that will be of immense help to all wanting to engage with it in earnest. More advanced readers, however, will in places miss the more in-depth treatment offered by utilitarianism.net’s guest essays as well as a more detailed discussion of foundational issues like the possibility of extensive measurement of welfare or utilitarianism’s commitment to full aggregation (which is only briefly addressed). Given the limited space and intended audience of an introductory treatment, and the openly available resources on the website, this can hardly be held against this book.
