Week 11 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 11 — The Greatest Happiness, Tested — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Philosophy Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 10 of the term — credit this week's sentences to their authors, key two arguments for validity, run act and rule utilitarianism on a costly promise, weigh three objections fairly, and explain utilitarianism to someone new to philosophy.

This week you learned consequentialism and utilitarianism, Bentham on pain and pleasure, impartiality, Mill's Greatest Happiness Principle and his higher and lower pleasures, act and rule utilitarianism, the justice, rights, and demandingness objections, and Singer's drowning child. In Week 2 you learned standard form, validity, and the valid forms, including hypothetical syllogism and modus ponens, and in Week 10 you met ethical egoism. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Philosophy Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together.

The task

You will use this week's pinned sources: Dataset C's two quotations (Q5 from Bentham and Q6 from Mill, both English originals), Dataset J, the theory-matching set (illustrative), and Dataset B, the argument set (illustrative). The premises of Datasets B and J are written for teaching and are not claims the course endorses; the course keys Dataset B's arguments for validity only, never for soundness, because the premises are open questions. The everyday cases below were written for this assignment; they are illustrative and describe no real person or place.

Part A — get the sources right, then reconstruct. A post on a study-group forum reads: "Mill opened his book by saying pain and pleasure are our two sovereign masters, and Bentham's Greatest Happiness Principle says to do whatever makes you happiest. Mill agreed with all of it." Do three things:

Correct the post. Say whose book opens with the sentence about two sovereign masters, and quote that sentence exactly; say whose Greatest Happiness Principle is and quote it exactly; say why "do whatever makes you happiest" misstates utilitarianism, and which view it describes instead; and say where Mill parts from Bentham.
Key argument 3. Write Dataset B's argument 3 in standard form ("If an act maximizes happiness, it is right. If it is right, we ought to do it. So if an act maximizes happiness, we ought to do it."), name its form, key it for validity with a one-sentence reason from the definition of validity, and name the premise a critic rejects.
Reconstruct the drowning child. Write the reasoning of Singer's pond case in standard form, using Singer's principle as the first premise, mark any premise you add as "(added)", name the form, and say whether it is valid. Then say, in one sentence, what Singer says about whether the principle depends on utilitarianism.

Then work this problem, showing your reasoning:

Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation was printed in 1780 and first published in 1789. How many years separate the printing from the publication?

Part B — run the theory, then weigh it. Work this problem first, showing your reasoning:

Bentham's Principles was first published in 1789, and Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" dates from 1972. How many years separate them?

Then do three things:

Run both forms on a costly promise. You promised a neighbor you would feed their cat for a weekend, and then a paid job comes up that would take you out of town. Say how an act utilitarian and how a rule utilitarian would each approach the choice, and say which of these statements from Dataset J fits the act utilitarian's reasoning and which theory it is keyed to: "A broken promise is wrong if breaking it causes more misery than keeping it."
Weigh the three objections. State the justice objection, the rights objection, and the demandingness objection, each in its strongest form with an example of your own, and give a reply from the utilitarian side to each.
Name the disagreement. End with one plain sentence naming exactly where utilitarianism and its critics disagree.

Explain it to a non-expert

A coworker who has never taken philosophy says, "Utilitarianism means doing whatever makes me happy, right?" Write a 3–5 sentence message in everyday words that explains what utilitarianism says, why counting everyone equally is different from doing what makes you happy, and one honest limit or open question about the theory. Explain any term your coworker might not know.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a roommate who asks what a thought experiment is for. Model answer: "A thought experiment is an imagined case that tests an idea, the way a crash test checks a car without a real crash. You picture the case, notice what you think should happen, and ask whether the idea agrees. If it does not, the idea may need changing. One limit: our reactions to imagined cases can be wrong, so a thought experiment is a test, not a proof."

Use that pattern for your message to your coworker, with your own explanation of utilitarianism.

Revise and reflect

Put your first draft away for a few hours, then reread it against Chapter 11. For the correction, check each quotation word for word and each attribution against the chapter's record; for each reconstruction, underline any added premise and check the form's name against Week 2's list; for the promise, check that your act utilitarian weighs one act and your rule utilitarian weighs a rule; for each objection, ask whether its strongest critic would sign your statement of it and whether a utilitarian would sign your reply; and check that your coworker message keeps utilitarianism apart from ethical egoism. Make at least one change and keep both versions. Then answer one of these two options in 2–4 sentences; they carry the same weight:

(a) Which change made your sourcing or one of your reconstructions more exact, and which definition or pinned quotation showed you it was needed?
(b) Which change made your statement of one of the objections or replies stronger, and what had you left out at first?

Deliverables

Submit one document or recording that contains, in this order:

your Part A forum-post correction, your keying of argument 3, your pond reconstruction with Singer's note, and your first year gap;
your Part B year gap, the costly-promise analysis, the three objections with their replies, and your plain sentence;
your message to your coworker;
your first and revised versions of the part you changed, and your reflection.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about five minutes with a transcript. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the correction, the reconstructions, the evaluation, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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