A critique of utilitarianism

Bernard Williams

In J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: for and against, Cambridge, 1973, pp. 77–150

Abstract

Bernard Williams offers a sustained and vigorous critique of utilitarian assumptions, arguments and ideals. He finds inadequate the theory of action implied by utilitarianism, and he argues that utilitarianism fails to engage at a serious level with the real problems of moral and political philosophy, and fails to make sense of notions such as integrity, or even human happiness itself.

Quotes from this work

In one, and the most obvious, way, direct utilitarianism is the paradigm of utilitarianism—it seems, in its blunt insistence on maximizing utility and its refusal to fall back on rules and so forth, of all utilitarian doctrines the most faithful to the spirit of utilitarianism, and to its demand for rational, decidable, empirically based, and unmysterious set of values.

utilitarianism
p. 19