John Locke, for example, is clearly an empiricist and clearly not a utilitarian. Yet in his political thought, there may be discerned, in the notions of majority rule and popular sovereignty, at least room for a type of utilitarian calculus.
David Hume, too, is an empiricist without being a utilitarian. Yet Hume uses the word ‘utility’ to express his emotivist view of ethics.
What is the connection, then, between utilitarianism and empiricism? If empiricism is generally allergic to metaphysics, then it will seek an ethical system which minimizes ontological commitments.
An empiricist would, presumably, flee in horror from a Platonic ethical schema which includes the existence of something called ‘the Good’ and includes the existence of numerous ‘ideal forms.’
Empiricism also is attracted toward observation, measurement, and detection. Utilitarianism, despite the notorious difficulty of trying to quantify utility, looks to somehow observing and comparing the utilities of different possible courses of actions.
Significantly, in that part of Copleston’s history titled “British Empiricism,” the first chapter is titled “The Utilitarian Movement.” In that chapter, he writes:
The first phase of nineteenth-century empiricism, which is known as the utilitarian movement, may be said to have originated with Bentham. But though we naturally tend to think of him as a philosopher of the early part of the nineteenth century, inasmuch as it was then that his influence made itself felt, he was born in 1748, twenty-eight years before the death of Hume.
Certainly, antecedents of both empiricism and utilitarianism are found well before the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. The traditional roots of empiricism are found in Epicurus and Aquinas. Although it is common to classify Aristotle as an empiricist, there are reasonable arguments which place him outside the mainstream of empiricism.
Unsurprisingly, then, Epicurus is also seen as a historical antecedent of utilitarianism, along with Aristippus. Copleston writes about Bentham:
And some of his works were published in the last three decades of the eighteenth century. It is no matter of surprise, therefore, if we find that there is a conspicuous element of continuity between the empiricism of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth. For example, the method of reductive analysis, the reduction, that is to say, of the whole to its parts, of the complex to its primitive or simple elements, which had been practised by Hume, was continued by Bentham. This involved, as can be seen in the philosophy of James Mill, a phenomenalistic analysis of the self. And in the reconstruction of mental life out of its supposed simple elements use was made of the associationist psychology which had been developed in the eighteenth century by, for instance, David Hartley, not to speak of Hume’s employment of the principles of association of ideas. Again, in the first chapter of his Fragment on Government Bentham gave explicit expression to his indebtedness to Hume for the light which had fallen on his mind when he saw in the Treatise of Human Nature how Hume had demolished the fiction of a social contract or compact and had shown how all virtue is founded on utility. To be sure, Bentham was also influenced by the thought of the French Enlightenment, particularly by that of Helvetius. But this does not alter the fact that in regard to both method and theory there was a notable element of continuity between the empiricist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Great Britain.
By contrast, those philosophers whose epistemology leans toward rationalism, or at least away from empiricism, tend to develop ethical systems which are not utilitarian.
An appeal to utility is ultimately an appeal to sense-data. A philosopher with ontological commitments to metaphysical entities - things not detectable, not directly or indirectly detectable, not in principle detectable by the senses - tends to conceive ethical systems which do not rely primarily, or exclusively, on a posteriori knowledge.
An empiricist, having to varying extents ruled out metaphysical objects, or at least having ruled out allowing metaphysical objects to play foundational roles in his system, has no alternative to but to use sense-data as the primary source of knowledge for his system. Such a system with therefore probably be utilitarian in nature.
