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Explain What Is Wrong With The Utilitarian Concept Of Beneficence

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What is wrong with the utilitarian conception of beneficence? Utilitarians base morality on the maximisation of utility, hence the concept of beneficence, trying to produce the most pleasures and suffer the least pains. Bentham, the founder of the doctrine of utilitarianism, recognised the fact that every moral argument will eventually fall back on the idea of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. In this essay, I will mainly focus on the aspect of individual rights and the inaccessibility of the concept. To start off, there is something fundamentally wrong about the mechanical process of calculating pleasures and pains if we consider the case of R v Dudley and Stephens (1884) 14 QBD 273 DC where a moral enormity seems to be sanctioned by utilitarians. There, a cabin boy was killed for food in order for …show more content…

Putting aside the legal context of the case, was killing the cabin boy right? Utilitarians say yes because utility was maximised, but isn’t there something inherently wrong about murdering an innocent child? Utilitarians only account for the result, never the means, they therefore allow violation of individuals so long as the aggregate pleasure generated is greater. The question here is that, should it ever be granted right to exploit a human’s vulnerability as such? Shouldn’t there be certain rights that every human being is entitled to (i.e. dignity, respect, the right to live etc.) simply because we are all rational individuals capable of reasoning? Morality should not therefore be something we can calculate by merely weighing costs and benefits. An objection towards utilitarianism is therefore the failure to consider the separateness of persons thus individual rights. To utilitarians, the only importance of a person is the way that he can contribute towards achieving utility in a community. This means that utilitarianism fails to

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