Philosophers are sometimes criticized for theorizing too much about reality and the ideas we use to define it, and paying little attention to investigating the nature of what makes us truly happy.

This is an ill-advised accusation for two reasons. The first is that it is not the task of philosophers to study the habits that can contribute to making large groups of people happy; that is the role of scientists. The second is that there is at least one philosophical trend that puts happiness at the center of its field of interest. Its name is utilitarianism .

What is utilitarianism?

Closely related to hedonism, utilitarianism is a theory of the ethical branch of philosophy according to which morally good conducts are those whose consequences produce happiness. Thus, there are two basic elements which define utilitarianism: its way of relating the good to the happiness of individuals and its consequentialism .

This last property means that, contrary to what happens with some philosophical doctrines that identify the good with the good intentions that someone has when acting, utilitarianism identifies the consequences of actions as the aspect that must be examined when judging whether an action is good or bad .

Bentham’s Calculation of Happiness

Examining the goodness or badness of acts by focusing on the intentions we have may seem easy in assessing the degree to which we are morally good or not. In the end, we need only ask ourselves whether our actions were intended to harm someone or rather to benefit someone.

From the perspective of utilitarianism, however, to see whether we stick to good or evil is not so easy, because the clear reference to our intentions is lost, an area in which each of us is our only judge. We now have the need to develop a way of “measuring” the happiness generated by our actions. This enterprise was undertaken in its most literal form by one of the fathers of utilitarianism, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham , who believed that utility can be evaluated quantitatively as it is done with any element that can be identified in time and space.

This hedonistic calculation was an effort to create a systematic way of objectively establishing the level of happiness that our actions result in, and therefore it was totally in line with the utilitarian philosophy. It included certain measures to weigh the duration and intensity of the positive and pleasant sensations experienced and to do the same with painful experiences. However, the claims to objectify the level of happiness of an action can easily be questioned. In the end, there is no single, unquestionable criterion about the degree of importance to be given to each “variable” of the level of happiness; some people will be more interested in the duration of these, others in their intensity, others in the degree of probability with which they will bring about more pleasant consequences, and so on.

John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism

John Stuart Mill is considered one of the most influential thinkers in the theoretical development of liberalism, and was also an enthusiastic defender of utilitarianism. Stuart Mill was concerned with solving a concrete problem: the way in which the interests of the individual can clash with those of other people in the search for happiness. This type of conflict can easily arise from the fact that happiness and the pleasure associated with it can only be experienced individually, and not socially, but at the same time human beings need to live in society to have certain guarantees of survival.

That is why Stuart Mill relates the concept of happiness to that of justice . It makes sense that he would do it this way, because justice can be understood as a system of maintaining a framework of healthy relationships in which each individual is guaranteed protection against certain attacks (turned into infractions) while still enjoying freedom to pursue his own objectives.

The Types of Happiness

If for Bentham happiness was basically a question of quantity, John Stuart Mill established a qualitative difference between different types of happiness .

Thus, according to him, happiness of an intellectual nature is better than that which is based on the satisfaction produced by the stimulation of the senses. However, as psychologists and neuroscientists would find out years later, it is not easy to delimit these two kinds of pleasure.

The principle of the greatest happiness

John Stuart Mill did something else for the utilitarianism he had come into contact with through Bentham: he added definition to the kind of happiness that should be pursued from this ethical approach. In this way, if until then it was understood that utilitarianism was the pursuit of happiness which is the fruit of the consequences of actions, Stuart Mill specified the subject of who to experience this happiness: the greatest possible number of people .

This idea is called the principle of the greatest happiness : we must act in such a way that our actions produce the greatest amount of happiness in the greatest number of people possible, an idea that resembles a little the moral model proposed decades earlier by the philosopher Immanuel Kant .

Utilitarianism as a philosophy of life

Is utilitarianism useful as a philosophical reference through which to structure our way of life? The easy answer to this question is that discovering this depends on oneself and on the degree of happiness that the implementation of this form of ethics generates in us.

However, there is something that can be conceded to utilitarianism as a generalizable philosophy; today there is a greater number of researchers willing to carry out studies about the habits of life that are associated with happiness, which means that this philosophical theory can offer some clearer guidelines of behaviour than 100 years ago.