Utilitarianism

I’ll try to make this quick. Regarding the doctrine of utilitarianism, people like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill tried to scrape some intellectual edifice together that, in the perceived absence of God, would include goodness in their sense of reality, rather than to simply end up with egotism and the satisfaction that of its desires as the highest virtue - which could of course become very unpleasant. The baby of goodness shouldn’t be thrown out along with the bathwater of God. So Bentham ended up trying to argue happiness was the highest good, and acts that promote happiness are good, acts that promote unhappiness are bad, and on the grander scale of things, the acts should aspire to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number. 

There was even devised something called a Hedonic Calculus, which would help calculate the overall pleasure and pain generated by an action, considering factors like intensity, duration, certainty, and extent. Where could one go wrong? Rationalism was pointing the way. 

So anyway, to take one look at what this greatest happiness of the greatest number can quickly justify:

 Gang rape. 

Yes, there is a victim, but there’s only one. Think of the weighing scales - it’s the happiness of the greatest number that we should be concerning ourselves with. Still, it makes one uneasy. Perhaps the Hedonic Calculus can come to our rescue.

So perhaps one tries to tweak the formula, but after a while of all this awkwardness, the rationalists start to realise they’re better off without this awkward goodness. Everything becomes so messy. Is it really even an element reason needs to concern itself with. Let the ego satisfy itself however it wants, and if that at times leads to the unhappiness of the greatest number, well, them’s the breaks.