[SPC: The lecture notes below need to be tied more directly to the reading; the emphasis here is on explaining utilitarianism rather than the reading.]
This lecture is on utilitarianism, namely, the doctrine that morality is defined by whatever action results in the greatest sum of happiness for all people in the situation.
The major virtue of utilitarianism is that we take all people equally into consideration. Democracy. Majority rule. No one's happiness is more important than anyone else's.
Another virtue is that by concentrating on happiness, we avoid metaphysical (and thus undecidable) values like "freedom" or "God". Our analysis is fixed on what we can actually experience, to wit, happiness. Other values derive from that; they don't exist independently. In a similar way, Mill's "one very simple principle" — the so-called "harm principle" — gets us away from arguing that other people's behavior violates our own standards. Unless they're hurting us, we have no moral claim on their behavior. And "hurt" means a concrete hurt, not an abstract disapproval or discomfort.
One serious theoretical problem with utilitarianism: How do we measure happiness? Isn't happiness entirely subjective? And whatever does it mean to "sum" happiness across people?
Another, ultimately more serious problem: utilitarianism allows us to trade off one person's happiness against another's. There are no rights, because literally anything — silence, slavery, even death — can be justified if it increases overall happiness.
Response to the latter problem: "So what? You're trying to make the tail wag the dog. The reason we don't approve of these things is that we have found that they decrease overall happiness. But maybe sometimes these things do increase happiness; in that case, we want to be able to say they're good. What justification do you have for absolutizing them as bad?" In any case, look at how absolute "rights" are. I have a "right" to my property even if someone is drowning?
Another response: "These things are not really problems, because the declining marginal value of goods (or other, non-material things) guarantees a relative equality."
Another problem: utilitarianism assumes what seems like an inhuman indifference to one's own situation vs. that of others. As John Rawls expresses it, the Right must be consonent with the Good. Or as the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas expresses it, society must meet morality halfway.
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