An Introduction to Utilitarianism: From Theory to Practice

by Prof. Richard Chappell, Mr. Darius Meissner, William MacAskill

An Introduction to From Theory to Practice is a state-of-the-art text, simultaneously accessible to introductory students and informative for more advanced readers. Two key features set it apart. First, its comprehensive coverage of the arguments for and against utilitarianism is unparalleled. Second, it takes seriously the practical implications of utilitarianism for how we should live, with a particular emphasis on utilitarianism's impartial beneficence and its focus on effectiveness. Guided by the conviction that practical ethics is more about how best to use our limited time and resources than which victims to hit with trolleys in thought experiments, its practical upshots should prove amenable to utilitarians and non-utilitarians alike.

Genres: Philosophy

264 pages, Paperback

Published October 11, 2024

Reviews

[LogosApe Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Why Do We Need Moral Theories?”

“When we make moral judgments in everyday life, we often rely on our intuition. If you ask yourself whether or not it’s wrong to eat meat, or to lie to a friend, or to buy sweatshop goods, you probably have a strong gut moral view on the topic. But there are problems with relying merely on our moral intuition.”

Historically, our moral intuitions have justified slavery, sexism, and racism. This is unsurprising, as our intuitions were shaped by evolutionary pressures of the African savannah, the environment in which humans primarily evolved in, to help us survive in our hunter-gatherer groups of no more than 100 members. Because of this, our intuitions fail to be reliable when addressing moral questions on a global or universal scale. 

Instead of relying purely on our intuitions, we now use reason to figure out and inform us what is considered moral and what isn’t.

An Introduction to Utilitarianism: From Theory to Practice (2024) by Prof. Richard Chappell is a peer-reviewed book that’s a must read for anyone looking to understand how utilitarianism can be used as a moral framework for us to live ethically.

The aim of moral philosophy is for us to critically reflect on our moral intuitions and, through the use of reason, develop a consistent theory that will tell us what we ought to do, and why. This will help us identify which moral judgments of today are misguided, enabling us to make moral progress.

Utilitarianism is one such moral theory. It aims to maximise the sum total of well-being in the world (i.e., Actions that increase total well-being are right; actions that do not are wrong). Many falsely presume that utilitarianism justifies slavery, inequality, and violates human rights since it only focuses on the outcome of total well-being. However, these criticisms are actually based on a lack of understanding of what utilitarianism really entails, and reading this book will shed light on why this is so. 

Readers of this book, upon gaining a sufficient understanding of the moral theory, should be able to confidently refute a well-known critique of utilitarianism presented in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, which many have mistakenly accepted as a successful critique of why utilitarianism. I’ll briefly explain why in my future review of Ursla’s short fable.

This introductory book puts forth the arguments in favour of utilitarianism, and what I like most is that it considers the most famous objections to the theory and shows how utilitarians can successfully counter or accommodate them. Lastly, it expounds on the practical applications of utilitarianism and its implications on how we should live our lives if we want to do the most good in the world. 

The compelling arguments in favour of utilitarianism have shaped my decision to be a flexitarian to alleviate farmed-animal suffering (idk if i can ever be a vegetarian, but to offer an perspective: if everyone cuts their meat consumption by let’s say half, it’s effect is equivalent to converting half the of the world’s population into vegetarians; the first seem more tractable). Utilitarianism has also convinced me that there’s a moral duty to donate a portion of my income, both locally and globally, in the future once I’m working. This is to help alleviate global poverty and inequality. The median-income of Singaporeans is 19.4x greater than the global median: only 1% of the world is richer than the middle income earner in Singapore, even after taking into account standards of living and currency exchange. It is evident that we have the power and capacity to greatly improve the lives of others, at little expense to our lifestyles and well-being. So I hope more people would consider giving instead of consuming, which studies have shown to improve long-term well-being of the giver as well. A win-win.

Overall, this book is a 5/5 due to its clarity, comprehensiveness, and accessibility to a wide range of audience who have little to no prior knowledge on moral philosophy. Anyone who’s interested in using sound reasons, rather than just intuitions, to determine what is morally right or wrong should pick up this book. The best part is that this book is made publicly free online at utilitarianism.net! 

Just as we look back with disgust at our ancestors who justified slavery, sexism, racism, we must ask ourselves… What other moral judgments of today—such as the exploitation of animals, environmental destruction (i.e., climate change), rampant consumerism, and the neglect of global poverty and inequality—are misguided, and will be viewed with equal disgust by our descendants? Utilitarianism is, to me, the most defensible moral framework that can help us to identify them and inform us to act on correcting them, enabling moral progress both at the individual and species level. But don’t let anyone do the thinking for you! Read it to see if you yourself are moved by the arguments. If you’re convinced, it would also mean that you have to reflect on what changes you would have to embark on in your personal life to live ethically and improve the world.

[Manuel Del Río Rodríguez · Rating 4 out of 5]

*How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Read the Utilitarians*

Back in high school, I quite liked philosophy, but we never went very deep into it, especially not ethics (there was a subject by that name, but it was reserved for students whose parents didn’t want them to study Catholic religion). At university, I took a couple of courses -one on Medieval thought, another on Anglo-Saxon philosophy- but both were very short and narrowly focused, and on my own, I read a few books, but none dealt with morality either. This gap was compounded by my long attachment to Communism, which lasted from my teens into my early thirties. Its underlying moral stance (implicit in its founding texts and explicit in its historical practice) held that ethics were merely obfuscation, ideological smoke screens in service of class interests. The ends (liberating humanity from oppression) justified any means, including mass murder and terror.

When I finally rid myself of the Marxist memeplex, I swung, pendulum-like, to the opposite end of intense deontological inclinations, and I very developed rigid views (which I still subjectively hold on to) about human dignity, rights, and freedom as inviolable, and a really visceral disdain for any “ends justify the means” arguments. I am also quasi-religious in my devotion to truth as an absolute, to be cultivated inflexibly. So when I finally began seriously reading and thinking about ethics, around three years ago, I was primed to dislike Utilitarianism. I found its popular formulations amoral, its conclusions counterintuitive, and its reliance on bizarre thought experiments off-putting. Still, my growing interest and interaction with Effective Altruism forced me to give it a fair intellectual hearing. And, in truth, I probably gave it too much of one: before reading this book, I have already gone through Singer, Mill, MacAskill, Ord, and the introductory EA course (while still not having gotten around to Kant or Aristotle).

This ongoing ethical Pilgrim’s Progress has transformed many of my views. I still find consequentialist theories disagreeable and possibly wrong, but I no longer hold strawman versions of them. And the book I’m reviewing today has played a major role in that shift.

*The book*

An Introduction to Utilitarianism: From Theory to Practice is a rather short volume (about 225 reading pages) by Richard Yetter Chappell, Darius Meissner and William MacAskill. You can read it for free online, but I prefer a physical copy because philosophy is something that requires much pondering, and I don’t find computer screens conducive to a really attentive reading. It is an attempt at providing a more nuanced and detailed take on Utilitarianism than most University Ethics 101 provide, with a strong focus on practical applications and on dealing with the most common arguments for rejecting Utilitarian arguments. The first part (chapters 1 to 8, Utilitarianism Explained) deals with the the first of these, the second part (chapters 9 to 18, Objections and Responses) with the latter, and the practical applications make an appearance all through the book, although most clearly in chapters 6 and 7. There’s also a conclusion wrapping it all up (and lots of chapters also come along with a very nice and useful summary), and some study notes for Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality” at the end.

*What I liked*

The first thing worth mentioning is that this book would make for a superb textbook in the subject. It is very clearly written, mostly non-nonsense, clarifies technical terminology when needed and keeps to short, very readable chapters. The only thing that might be lacking in this regard are exercises.

It also gives a really nuanced view of the different spectrum of Consequentialist ethical theories, explaining the shared principles and those were divergences occur. It also dispels many of the simplest arguments made against Consequentialism quite effectively, while not strawmanning them in any obvious way, or pretending ethics is something simple with trivially obvious solutions. I’d say it is difficult to come from reading this book and being able to doubt the earnestness and intellectual honesty of its writers. One of the notions I found most enlightening in it is the distinction it makes between utilitarianism as a criterion for moral assessments versus its use as a decision procedure to guide practical action.

I also really liked the way arguments are presented in the Objections and Responses chapter. The authors present a menu of options from which to choose: one can either accept that the objections and the intuitions they arise from have some truth to them (and try to accommodate them within a Utilitarian framework) or reject them, which is usually presented through a series of three-pronged arguments: you can either try to debunk the intuition, show that rival ethical systems don’t do any better when trying to deal with it or just bite the bullet, i.e., accept that in some bizarre, extreme cases Utilitarianism will give an answer that will feel deeply anti-intuitive and unlikeable but which might still be right - we don’t get to choose the weirdness of the world.

*What I didn’t like*

One thing I was expecting and that I really missed was some justification of why one might want to accept the Utilitarian axioms in the first place. The authors just present it some self-evidently true intuitions in the beginning (you can’t trust most moral intuitions, we have a bad tack record with them…) which are not self-evident to me, and which implicitly take moral realism as a given (which I don’t; in fact, it is anti-realism that seems obvious, self-evidently true to me). I don’t think this is the book’s fault, though, and I just probably need to engage with some big, detail, Metaethics textbook, but this creates a problem when reading the book: I feel the authors manage to make a case for logical consistency of what they say given their premises, but I just don’t feel like I share a lot of those premises.

Chapter 5, on Population Ethics, is rather dense (I think it’s a problem of the subject itself, not the authors) and again, it is difficult to find a lot of it meaningful unless you’re already assuming a Consequentialist framework. In fact, this can be said for most of the objections chapters too: they are about how to deal with the objections given that you are a Utilitarian/Consequentialist.

I could do some further nitpicking, as in counterarguments I didn’t find persuasive or convincing enough, but this is only to be expected in a book debating morality. As the authors state, ethics is difficult and highly non-trivial, so disagreements are not to be considered a bug, but a feature. Once again, we don’t get to choose the weirdness of the world, or the difficulty of dealing with some of its areas. And if you want to check them out, they will appear in the notes I will be publishing inmy substack (https://booksandnotes.substack.com/) on each of the chapters anyway.

*Conclusion*

This book didn’t convert me, but it did something more important: it made me think, and it helps me take Utilitarianism seriously, not as a caricature of moral coldness or mathematical fanaticism, but as a sincere, thoughtful attempt to grapple with the complexities of ethical life. I still don’t buy the premises, but I now recognize the internal coherence and moral ambition of the system. For anyone, like me, who has reflexively recoiled from “the greatest good for the greatest number,” Chappell and colleagues offer a surprisingly humane and intellectually honest invitation to reconsider.

[Matthew Romer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really exceptional book, giving a clear, thoughtful, and enjoyable introduction to utilitarianism. In addition to doing a good job of covering all the basics, there are some things that (to me at least) really make it stand out relative to other texts:
- It does a fantastic job of emphasizing the subtle but critically important distinction between (act) utilitarianism’s criterion of rightness and its recommended decision procedure. This is something that many critics (and even proponents!) of utilitarianism don’t properly grapple with, and often leads to significant misunderstandings
- It spends time explaining how philosophy is done and what kinds of tools are used to make philosophical arguments, rather than always jumping straight into the arguments themselves
- It successfully takes on an ambitious scope including covering population ethics and nine common counterarguments to utilitarianism
- The prose, high-quality editing, and layout make it just a really nice book to read.

With all that said, there were a few things that I wish had been done differently:
- I think it’s a miss to have not included anything on the nature of personal identity in the book. Arguments based on a reductionist account of personal identity are in my view some of the strongest responses to the separateness of persons objection and the some of the best ways to handle the dualism of practical reason, and I think the book is weaker for not including them
- I think De Lazari Radek and Singer’s forward picks needlessly controversial examples that might alienate some potential readers at the very beginning of the book
- There are some points where I worry that the authors aren’t presenting the strongest-possible versions of arguments against their own views

But these are comparatively minor things compared to the book’s exceptional strengths. I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in ethics!

[Caleb Peppiatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

On the surface, this is a fairly comprehensive work, arguing for a totalist conception of utilitarianism. It overviews several useful aspects of a desirable normative theory, and responds to common objections.

However, one should not be overly allured by its self-presentation as an objective textbook. The three authors all agree with one another in forwarding a specific formulation of utilitarianism, and the literature they cite all occupy the same bubble. This is most notable in their treatment of population ethics, as Simon Knutsson has pointed out. They omit and unfairly characterise rival positions, and barely mention suffering-focused, minimalist, negative utilitarian or other views that deny that pleasure can neatly counterbalance suffering. The recommended resources sections all are highly narrow in their scope of authors covered, and tend to merely bass the baton onto their friends and allies, rather than affording each theory supporting literature.

This book is fine as an introduction, particularly for combatting misconceptions of utilitarianism, yet should not be regarded as an impartial or complete textbook.

[Andy Masley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best introduction to utilitarianism that I've read. Most introductions aimed at new readers aren't as ambitious in what they cover and leave the reader with a bunch of vague generalizations (I like the Very Short Introductions series but they're often guilty of this). The authors make sure to go deep on each concept in clear straightforward language.

[Boris · Rating 5 out of 5]

A modern in-depth introduction to Utilitarianism. It clearly introduce the ethical framework, its varieties, and real-life implications. Importantly, not only does it share objections to Utilitarianism, but answers / rebuts them. A must read for any philosophy student.

[Steven Lochner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to Utilitarianism. The authors are deliberately sympathetic to the theory, but are fair in assessing the various objections.

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very informative and easy to understand; a well written introduction to utilitarianism. The occasional humorous footnotes were very enjoyable:)