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John Stuart Mill was an early and influential proponent of utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism is a kind of consequentialism that is classically concerned with maximizing happiness. What this means is that a course of action is considered good by utilitarian standards if its consequences provide more happiness for all the people they affect that would any other available alternative courses of action.^*

Who wouldn’t want that, right? But the devil’s always been in the details for utilitarianism, and this is complicated by a set of prior commitments that come with a design engagement.

Since that’s what we care about here, I’ll just talk about a long-standing problem for utilitarianism that’s particularly relevant under the auspices of design. Namely, utilitarianism’s seeming inability to account for personal projects.

Let’s return to our designer’s dilemma from Monday:

Imagine a graphic designer who creates magazine advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. She is hired to create an ad for a new drug which is designed to lower cholesterol, but which is also known to escalate the risks of heart disease and in rare circumstances, people taking the drug suddenly and unexpectedly die.

Applying straightforward utilitarian principles to this situation would yield the answer that our designer is obliged to design the advertisement in such a way that the dangers of the drug are prominently featured. This is the case because by choosing the design strategy which guarantees the highest level of risk comprehension among the public, our designer is generating the maximal available amount of utility.

Of course, any working designer will tell you that this is unlikely to yield happy clients, which in turn is unlikely to yield continued work. In this case, the client’s happiness is a critical personal project of the designer for which a maximizing algorithm cannot account. This means that utilitarianism in its most classical form will probably often be practically inapplicable for the working designer, on account of its failure to give an appropriate amount of moral leniency for his or her personal projects (i.e. keeping clients happy, making enough money to live).

A common recourse of utilitarianism is to altogether give up the maximization requirement and to hold instead that we morally ought to do what creates enough utility. This position is often described as satisficing consequentialism, and it certainly makes the consequentialist position more compelling to a working stiff.

I’ll take up satisficing more next week, but for now, it’s worth noting that while satisficing allows designers more flexibility with regard to the kinds of options designers have. Finally, it probably bears mentioning again that most relevant design situations aren’t so cut and dry as our example. Where willfully obscuring information that could lead to someone’s death is obviously not an option, our solution needs to extend to work in less dire circumstances — making a package look a little bit bigger, designing a tricky opt-out process — as well.

^* For the moment, I’m going to set aside the question of whether happiness is really the value we want to maximize. We’ll just assume it is, since utilitarianism is the most salient representative of consequentialism.