If you think that maximizing your own happiness is the way to maximize total happiness? Or is this properly just ethical egoism?

well, if one wants to rape someone for instance, does it maximize total happiness?

Usually not*, but if acting to maximize your own happiness is the best strategy to maximize total or average happiness (crudely like individuals seeking the best price in a market ends up increasing the total wealth of society), is that a kind of utilitarianism or not?

* I suppose it's possible to construct scenarios in which it does, but that's a pony for a different derby.

yes, I'd say that's a form of "rule utilitarianism". I'd answer the question above by saying, "well I'd never rape someone", and perhaps I would have it be against the rules to rape some one, that kind of thing.

add: so in a market, people understand theft is not beneficial to the market place, so rules form to stigmatize thieves, and prevent them from thieving. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_mercatoria

If I were a utilitarian, I'd be somewhat inclined to negative utilitarianism, so I wouldn't rape anybody because it increases suffering. OP is a sanity check on something I wasn't able to get across to somebody in a conversation.

Googling around just now, I think what I was ultimately looking for was 'welfare utilitarianism' -- if this is a thing -- as I was arguing that there are forms of utilitarianism which may seek to maximize not total happiness but a more equal distribution of happiness (eg a society of one person with 10 hedons and one person with 2 hedons is worse than the society of two people with 5 hedons each, even tho 12 > 10); and my thought was that everybody striving to maximize their own happiness is the best strategy to achieve a more equal distribution of happiness.

Or maybe it's prioritarianism that I was looking for, which would make me close to being wrong.

edit: nm

It is Adam Smith's general view and it is ethical egoism.

You need to take into account that people tend to enjoy not thinking of themselves as a pariah and that others tend to attack those that they think of as pariahs so as to not get stuck worrying about raping and pillaging too much.

But you don't actually think that, do you? All evidence suggests that everyone trying to maximize his own happiness is approximately the worst way to achieve equal distribution of happiness.

It's definitely not the worst way; everybody committing suicide would be a be a fairly bad strategy for total happiness.




As for OP, it follows the same mechanics as utilitarianism as such, but it isn't the same thing, as it's missing a crucial fundamental maximizing total well-being, not individual.

Utilitarianism is a moral theory that says that right actions are the actions that maximize (or satisfice) aggregate utility. Thus, according to this theory, there is no significance to maximizing your own happiness except insofar as it contributes to maximizing aggregate utility. Under some conditions (e.g. if you are the only sentient being alive) or some empirical assumptions (actions which maximize your own happiness always maximize total happiness) the view you describe and utilitarianism would be functionally equivalent. However, it is still conceptually distinct as there is a clear difference in meaning between individual and aggregate happiness.

I suspect you want to describe another theory which says that the best way to maximize total happiness is for everyone to act selfishly. However, that is not a moral theory so much as an empirical claim about society.

I made several mistakes; the one about making an empirical claim I sort of figured I was fudging, but the main mistake I made in what I wrote after was that I guessed that there were kinds of utilitarianism that may value (some) parity, so as to favor some distributions of happiness (where everybody has a decent amount of happiness) over others (where one or few have a lot of happiness and most have very little), even if the latter system has more total happiness. So this seems pretty clearly incorrect; that view I described looks like prioritarianism.

I wonder though if one is a welfare utilitarian, the aim is to maximize the number of people who have welfare (and as there is Mill's higher/lower distinction for pleasure, I assume there would be a higher/lower distinction for welfare -- access to health care being more important than access to parks or something), so that you do end up prioritizing a minimum standard of living.

I probably failed on this point as well, but the origin of the thought was that if people sacrifice their happiness because they think that other people will get more happiness from their sacrifice, this may tend to result in more net happiness, but less equality in the distribution of happiness. If everybody strives to maximize their own happiness, it may lead to more compromises and more equality, although less net happiness. I suppose this fails once we start considering the inequality of means to maximizing one's happiness.

I think you nutshelled the problem with Adam Smith's work.

Also, Marx's.

Good job.*

*I was going to go with an exclamation point there, but it seemed like it could be taken incorrectly as patronising. With the period, it looks sarcastic. I mean "good job" in the normal sense of "thank you" "well done" and "it made me think for a bit."