Utilitarianism: Restorations, Repairs, Renovations

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
most recently published works are Biblical Religion and Family Values,
Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics, and Religion and
Technology.

This unusual contribution to the vast English-language literature on
utilitarian moral philosophy ostensibly endeavours to defend Jeremy
Bentham’s classical version of utilitarianism by making a number of
renovations to the much-derided ethic. David Braybrooke, a professor
emeritus at Dalhousie University, makes use of his own philosophical
ideas concerning needs, the census notion, moral rules, statistics, and
social change in order to demonstrate that Bentham’s ethical model can
be updated in a way that frees it from some of the standard criticisms
that have been directed at it. While Braybrooke believes that his
renovated version of the model is faithful to Bentham’s
“master-idea” and mathematical approach to moral judgment, he
acknowledges that his own utilitarianism is significantly different from
Bentham’s. Still, he defends Bentham’s model from the criticisms
that it does not allow for a proper role for moral rules, requires
perfect information regarding the consequences of actions, demands
extreme sacrifices on the part of some people, and undervalues the
importance of needs.

Braybrooke says hardly anything about Bentham’s pronounced
preoccupation with pleasure, diminution of the importance of motives,
and confusion between psychological and normative issues. It is
ultimately difficult to discern how faithful Braybrooke is being to the
spirit of Bentham’s original model and how much his renovations
address the primary concerns of critics who see the model as
one-dimensional, impracticable, and deficient with respect to an
understanding of human spirituality. It is noteworthy in this regard
that Braybrooke has little to say about John Stuart Mill, the most
famous utilitarian and a sharp critic of his mentor Bentham’s extreme
views.

This book is composed largely of recycled material from the author’s
earlier books and articles, some of which go back to the 1960s. Thus
most of this material will already be, in serviceable form, in the
collections of university libraries that deem such material worth
having. Braybrooke is a clear thinker and a clear writer conversant with
the methods of mainstream analytical philosophy, but much of the
discussion in this book is, if not dated, at least peripheral to the
main concerns of students of utilitarianism.