Summary Of Bernard Williams Critique Of Utilitarianism

Bernard Williams' "Critique of Utilitarianism" focuses on posing objections to and looking at philosophical problems of utilitarianism. According to utilitarian theory, actions can only be made if they produce the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people. Williams believes that this factor cannot be the only consideration in making decisions, like utilitarianism claims it is. He uses an example in his text to illustrate and better explain his objections to the theory, which will be further discussed in this paper.

Williams explains a situation in which Jim accidentally wanders upon twenty captives tied up with an army that has guns pointed at them. Jim is faced with the moral dilemma of choosing between either killing one captive in order to spare the lives of the other captives, or refusing to kill the one and thereby allowing Pedro the soldier to kill all twenty captives. According to the theory of utilitarianism, the obvious choice would be for Jim to kill the one captive, sparing the lives of nineteen others. This choice would lead to the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people – having nineteen people given their lives back.

If something like this were to occur, however, the man’s integrity in this case is based on his own self-interest, his love for a woman. In Jim’s case, his integrity was based on being morally good. Having hesitation for killing someone could definitely be considered a universal moral good, whereas the man’s love for one woman could be seen as egotistic. So, if this man has a sense of good morality, the easy decision would be to let the woman go anyway. He could be making this decision to promote the happiness of the general population or he could be doing it because it is morally the right thing to do, thus making this example not so matter of fact a utilitarian