Bentham's quantitative hedonistic act utilitarianism and the felicific calculus, Mill's qualitative higher and lower pleasures, the distinction between act and rule utilitarianism, non-hedonistic preference utilitarianism, and the standard objections of calculation, fairness, partiality and the tyranny of the majority.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to explain utilitarianism as a consequentialist theory that maximises happiness, distinguish Bentham's quantitative hedonism from Mill's qualitative version, separate act from rule utilitarianism and hedonistic from preference utilitarianism, and evaluate the standard objections about calculation, the value of pleasure, fairness, partiality and the tyranny of the majority.

Bentham's act utilitarianism

Mill's higher and lower pleasures

Act, rule and preference utilitarianism

• Act utilitarianism judges each individual action by the happiness it produces. It is flexible but can demand laborious calculation and seems to permit terrible acts when they maximise utility.
• Rule utilitarianism judges actions by whether they follow rules whose general adoption maximises happiness. This better protects justice and promises but faces the charge that, to avoid bad outcomes, it must allow rule-breaking and so collapses back into act utilitarianism.
• Preference utilitarianism (Singer). Right action maximises the satisfaction of preferences rather than pleasure, accommodating the thought that people value things other than pleasure. It struggles with how to weigh and aggregate conflicting or misinformed preferences.

Objections

• The calculation problem. We cannot reliably predict and measure all consequences before acting.
• The wrong measure. Nozick's experience machine suggests we value things beyond pleasure (real achievement, contact with reality), challenging hedonism.
• Fairness and individual rights. Maximising the aggregate can justify punishing an innocent person or harvesting one person's organs to save several, ignoring justice and the separateness of persons.
• Partiality. Impartial maximising seems to ignore special duties to family and friends.
• Tyranny of the majority. The happiness of a large majority can outweigh and override the serious suffering of a minority.

The objections developed

The fairness and tyranny-of-the-majority objections are the ones examiners most reward, because they expose a structural feature of any aggregative theory: maximising the total says nothing about how happiness is distributed. The sheriff case (framing one innocent to prevent a riot) and the transplant case (killing one to save five) are the standard probes, and the point is not merely that utilitarianism gives a counterintuitive verdict but that it does so for a principled reason, namely that it treats persons as interchangeable sites of utility and so ignores the separateness of persons (Rawls). Rule utilitarianism is the orthodox fix: by assessing rules rather than individual acts, it can endorse a rule against framing the innocent because a society following such a rule does better overall. But the fix faces the collapse objection: whenever following the rule produces worse consequences than breaking it, a consistent utilitarian seems bound to break it, and once we allow "break the rule when doing so maximises utility" the rule theory reduces to act utilitarianism with extra steps.

The value-of-pleasure objection cuts deeper, because it attacks the theory at its base rather than its outputs. Nozick's experience machine suggests we value things beyond pleasurable experience (real achievement, authentic relationships, contact with reality), which tells against hedonistic utilitarianism specifically. Preference utilitarianism (Singer) responds by replacing pleasure with the satisfaction of preferences, which accommodates the wish to actually do things rather than merely to seem to, but it inherits new problems: how to weigh and aggregate conflicting preferences, whether to count misinformed, malicious or adaptive preferences, and how to compare preferences across persons. A strong evaluation shows that each refinement (Mill's higher pleasures, rule utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism) is a response to a specific objection that tends to generate a fresh one, so the theory's history is a series of trade-offs rather than a single fixed view.