Topics Ethics

Question Hello. Listening to a radio programme about utilitarianism I was struck by the difficulty of making a universal framework fit in our relationship-driven world, and how a concept of egoistic or relative utilitarianism might do this. That is, we maximise utility not equally over everyone but across those with whom we feel a relationship, and to the extent that we do. So, where a utilitarian sacrifices his children to make a small dent in third world poverty but ignores his newly unemployed neighbour because she is not starving, an "R.utilitarian" buys his children the cheaper laptop, using the balance to contribute to the starving and to help his neighbour out with an interest-free loan while she gets back on her feet. I googled every combination of relationship/relative/egoistic and utilitarianism that I could find, and came up blank. Please can you tell me what this theory is called, and who came up with it 200 years before I did? If not, please don't steal it before I write it up ;-)

Accepted:
June 13, 2015

Comments

Interesting. Here's a

Interesting. Here's a possible way of thinking about it. Utilitarianism (Capital "U") as a philosophical view says that the right thing to do is what maximizes utility, where "utility" is characterized in a very particular way: roughly, the sum total of well-being among sentient creatures (or something like that.)

That may or may not be the right account of right and wrong, but most people probably don't have a view on that question one way or another. However, it's at least somewhat plausible that people are utilitarians (small "u") in a different sense: they try to maximize utility, understood as what they value. Whether it makes us good or bad, many of us actually do value the well-being of our children more than we value the well-being of strangers, and our actions reflect that. A small-"u" utilitarian, then, might well behave as what you call an R-utilitarian. That would be because the small-"u" utilitarian is maximizing over what s/he values.

In any case, there's been a fair bit written on the place of relationships in morality. Here's a link to the results of a Google search, with papers by philosophers and social scientists.