Answer to Question #318542 in Philosophy for Jnls

Question

Does utilitarianism questions individual rights? What if violating the civil rights of a minority increases the sum total of pleasure of the majority?

Answer 1

Utilitarianism does not consider it a right if it affects the majority. For instance, if you had an incurable, deadly, and highly contagious disease, do you have the right to live how you choose any more? Utilitarianism says that for the good of humanity, you get locked up, despite having done nothing wrong. A strict utilitarian would argue that if it hurts the whole, it is not a right. The central intellectual problem of utilitarianism as a philosophy of governance is that it assumes that pleasure or happiness is a quantitate concept that can be observed with precision capable of comparing amounts at what is known as an interval level. This means that one could compare two peoples’ levels of happiness in a way that would not just rank them as more and less happy, but precisely how happy each one was. The problem with this assumption is that happiness is not the sort of concept that can be observed that precisely. At best we may be able to observe people as being more or less happy, but by how far they are apart is impossible to say. Because of this, it is impossible to sum the total level of pleasure of a group of people and saying that violating the civil rights of a minority, or even an individual, increases the total pleasure of a society is meaningless.