WHAT'S THE USE OF UTILITY?

Elijah Millgram, Vanderbilt University (II-A)

Consider the rather old-fashioned variety of utilitarianism that takes utility to be a matter of pleasure and pain, that is, of how one feels. Utilitarianism recommends taking actions or adopting policies that maximize the total amount of utility (or, in some variants, the average amount of utility per person.) Utilitarianism is thus committed to what we can call the Presumption of Effectiveness: that, normally, there are available policies and actions, choice among which will make a significant difference to utility. I propose to argue that the Presumption of Effectiveness is false, that we consequently have a new reason for regarding this variety of utilitarianism as unsatisfactory, and that there is something interesting to learned from all this about the role of pleasure and pain, and hedonic tone more generally, in our mental lives.