Mark McDonough's List: Animal Rights Reading Group

• utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good.
• Utilitarianism is also distinguished by impartiality and agent-neutrality. Everyone's happiness counts the same
• humans were ruled by two sovereign masters — pleasure and pain.
• Actions are approved when they are such as to promote happiness, or pleasure, and disapproved of when they have a tendency to cause unhappiness, or pain.
• it would follow that we are not obligated to act to promote overall well-being when that is incompatible with our own.
• This generates a serious tension in Bentham's thought,
• Aware of the difficulty, in later years he seemed to pull back from a full-fledged commitment to psychological egoism, admitting that people do sometimes act benevolently — with the overall good of humanity in mind.
• Bentham's view the action (or trait) is morally good, right, virtuous in view of the consequences it generates, the pleasure or utility it produces, which could be completely independent of what our responses are to the trait.
• Thus Bentham's hedonism is a very straightforward hedonism. The one intrinsic good is pleasure, the bad is pain. We are to promote pleasure and act to reduce pain. When called upon to make a moral decision one measures an action's value with respect to pleasure and pain according to the following: intensity (how strong the pleasure or pain is), duration (how long it lasts), certainty (how likely the pleasure or pain is to be the result of the action), proximity (how close the sensation will be to performance of the action), fecundity (how likely it is to lead to further pleasures or pains), purity (how much intermixture there is with the other sensation). One also considers extent — the number of people affected by the action.
• Bentham's view was surprising to many at the time at least in part because he viewed the moral quality of an action to be determined instrumentally. It isn't so much that there is a particular kind of action that is intrinsically wrong; actions that are wrong are wrong simply in virtue of their effects, thus, instrumentally wrong. This cut against the view that there are some actions that by their very nature are just wrong, regardless of their effects. Some may be wrong because they are ‘unnatural’ — and, again, Bentham would dismiss this as a legitimate criterion
• Bentham's critics, of course,
• there is still a subset of laws that reflect the fact that some actions just are intrinsically wrong regardless of consequences.

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• By the principle^[2] of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever.

• • Sounds like hes saying that if we just killed animals quickly, then thats fine.