utilitarianism to the other members of the ‘liberal family’. What makes utilitarianism
part of the family?
(a) As do Hobbes, Locke (despite his Christianity) and Kant, utilitarians reject
‘natural authority’. Although it is possible to give utilitarianism a Christian cast,
there is no doubt that it developed out of a secular, ‘natural–scientific’, world
view. The calculability of pleasure or happiness fits neatly with the rise of
science and the rejection of the idea that there are forces beyond human
consciousness.
(b) Utilitarians still hold to the liberal ‘presumption in favour of freedom’ and the
‘presumption of natural equality’. People are free to express their preferences,
and coercion is only justified in order to bring about the greatest good. And
people are equally ‘generators’ of utility – John Stuart Mill attributed this
formula to the earlier utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham: ‘each to count for
one and nobody for more than one’ (Mill, 1991: 198–9).
(c) In concrete political terms, utilitarians have invariably been progressive or
radical in their attitudes to social problems. In many ways they represent the
‘left-wing’ liberal alternative to the libertarianism of Locke and Kant, although
you need not be a utilitarian to be on the left of the political spectrum.
(d) Most important of all, utilitarianism grew in parallel with the development of
democracy. The high point of utilitarian thought was the nineteenth century,
although it continued to be the dominant philosophical method for justifying
political principles until the 1960s when there was a revival in contractarianism.
The decline of contract thinking around 1800 went hand in hand with scepticism
about using the contract – actual or hypothetical – to explain political obligation
in a masssociety. Utilitarianism seemed to provide a much more convincing
method of justification in democratic societies: the calculation of utility dovetails
with the counting of votes, although it was only in the twentieth century, with
the development of preference satisfaction as the definition of utility, that a
more direct link between utilitarianism and democracy was established.Conclusion: prostitution laws
We began this chapter with a discussion of anti-prostitution laws in Sweden, and
especially the prohibition on the purchase of sexual services. This may have seemed
a very odd case study to head a chapter on liberalism, but it is interesting in that
it reveals tensions within liberal political thought, especially when the Swedish
policy is compared to the Dutch one. A number of arguments have been advanced
by the Swedish government for the law:- Prostitution is ‘harmful not only to the individual prostituted woman or child,
but also to society at large’. - Combating prostitution is central to Sweden’s goal of achieving equality between
men and women, at the national level as well as internationally. Prostitution is
a gender-specific phenomenon: most prostitutes are female, and most buyers are
male.
188 Part 2 Classical ideologies