The Poverty Of Utilitarianism
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The poverty of Utilitarianism A flawed attempt at a rational morality by Christopher G. D. Tipper $Date: June 1989$
Abstract: This essay starts by considering the limitations of Bentham’s notion of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, and introduces Mill’s suggestion that the concept be generalised to a discussion of ‘happiness’. The principle of utility as it applies to society is introduced and then an alternative known as Consequentialism is discussed. This is found to be without any foundation other than conventional Christian morality, and the Utilitarian enterprise is rendered moot. Finally, an analogy is drawn with the rational economics of Marx, which the Soviet experience has shown to be fatally flawed, and it is asked whether Utilitarianism is likewise now only a historical curiosity.
“The Creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the ‘Greatest Happiness Principle’, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness”. — Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill (Mill, 1863)
F
OR MANY people it is no longer satisfactory to rely on the maxims of religious philosophy in order to judge what is right or wrong, and Utilitarianism can be said to have achieved the greatest degree of progress towards forming a rational system of moral judgement. Its basic premise is simple. All value judgements should be made on the basis of maximising the happiness of the majority, and minimising the ‘unhappiness’ of the individuals involved. This is the principle of striving for the ‘Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number’. It is hoped that by couching all questions in terms of happiness (or its absence), and applying some kind of numerical value according to 1
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism import, that a sort of moral summation operation will yield the best course of action. This can be pictured as a set of scales on one side of which is a pan representing ‘happiness’. Any value judgement can then be carried out simply by assigning a weight to each ‘happiness’ factor, and counterbalancing it with the opposing ‘misery’ factors. The proper course of action can then simply be read from the position of the needle about the neutral point on the scale. There are quite clearly considerable difficulties to be overcome if the theory is to be in any way applicable. For instance, what do we mean by ‘happiness’? Jeremy Bentham, held by many to be the father of Utilitarianism, used the word ‘pleasure’ and its antithesis, ‘pain’, as the means of comparison. These at least have the merit of being readily understandable and so, it was hoped, easier to apply in a rigorous fashion. The concept of happiness was thus tightened up, so as to reduce ambiguity. It did not solve the problem of assigning weights to different types of happiness, and he sought to alleviate this by including a number of subsidiary factors. The two most important of these were the intensity of the pleasure and the duration of its experience. These qualities, and a few other subsidiary factors such as fecundity,1 provide an outline of a method for evaluating simple moral problems. To illustrate the point we could consider the question of whether a man should take exercise. On the negative side it could be argued that the pain involved, although of short duration, has high intensity. Does this outweigh the positive aspects of the better fitness that would follow and thus higher self-esteem? Are the effects of regular exercise more beneficial than infrequent or sporadic exercise? It is not at all clear whether self-esteem even counts as a pain in Bentham’s schema. In the end though the terms ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ are very restrictive and any argument that relies solely on these concepts is bound to crumble under the weight of its own disingenuousness. Consider for an instance a Utilitarian argument in favour of abortion: 1
Bentham identified this quality as the tendency of the pleasure to ‘reproduce’ itself.
2
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism “Artificial means of contraception all have physical drawbacks, either as long term health hazards or because they have pleasure-reducing effect. Abortion can be executed with no medical complications (executed by a qualified physician), does not usually carry any associated pain and does no person any injury. It is thus an excellent means of contraception.”2 A Benthamite would not even consider the emotional trauma that the woman undergoes during the whole process. What Bentham failed to account for in his definition were so called ‘intentional’ pleasures. These encompass the internal realms of the person, where honesty, love and freedom are important to well-being. These were alien ideas to Bentham and his disciples and were dealt with in a summary fashion. They attempted to dismiss such objectives as old-fashioned or romantic waffle. This is of course reactionary and anti-intellectual, and as such merits no further discussion. John Stuart Mills realised that for Utilitarianism to be in any way credible as a moral system that some adjustment would have to be made to the definition of pleasure. The main tenet of his position was that pleasure is the only thing that is desirable, and that the only measure of what was desirable was the fact that people want it. This amounts to a definition of something broader that can be likened to ‘happiness’, with its opposite quality being ‘unhappiness’. However, this still leaves us with Bentham’s original difficulty. Utilitarianism’s legitimacy as a moral system depends on being able to assign a meaningful value to each factor in the moral calculation. By using a more abstract concept of pleasure, we are compounding the difficulties of applying the system. How do you assign a value to the love of a mother for her son, who is about to be executed for a crime? Is there any chance that this love and her resulting unhappiness could outweigh the ‘happiness’ of a society against which the crime was com-
2
The notion of what constitutes a person must be carefully examined in a full discussion. For the purposes of the example, it is assumed that the foetus has no consciousness, and does not therefore justify the label ‘person’.
3
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The poverty of Utilitarianism mitted? It seems that the Utilitarian is no nearer a solution than any other school of moral thought would be. Certainly, happiness in some guise has to be a concern of any moral system. Even the most ascetic systems of belief, such as Shi’ism in the Islamic world, offer some kind of reward in the afterlife, where a good Moslem will find paradise beyond his wildest dreams. What is not so clear is that we should be striving for the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number. Indeed Eudaimonism (known also as Hedonism) eschews this principle altogether. Mill attempted to justify the principle from the point of view of the individual, thereby trying to reconcile self-interest with the interests of society as a whole.3 The argument runs as follows: The happiness of a person depends on the happiness of the individuals closest to him. Those individuals will also have the same imperatives and so, indirectly the whole of society’s happiness is the concern of the individual, in the manner of the ever-expanding web. What the argument fails to account for is the conflict that will occur between the interests of the individual and those of society as a whole. The error is also of the nature of a category mistake: the happiness of the individual is a palpable concept. The happiness of a society can only be gauged indirectly, by looking at the stability of its institutions, levels of violence and the general level of wealth. A thief will be happier for using the proceeds of his crime, but society will be less ‘stable’ if the practise were to continue. Having accepted as a principle that we should be aiming to find the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it becomes obvious that this is meaningless of itself. Do we mean attaining the happiness of the greatest number of people, or achieving the greatest total happiness? Clearly, Mill intended both, but further study shows his slogan to be Utopian in the extreme. For what this problem highlights is a conflict fundamental to almost every moral dilemma. For it appears 3
Self-interest and happiness must be intimately connected concepts, once one has accepted that an individual acts to attain his ultimate happiness.
4
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism that the two aims, while not mutually exclusive, do possess a certain conceptual polarity. Raphael has called it the £20 problem. (Raphael, 1981) Given £20, he asks, would it be better to give £10 each to two pensioners so that they may be warm and live throughout the winter, or would it be better to help out two hundred by giving them each a cup of tea at 10p each? The problem is one of finite resources. We can try to make as many people happy as possible (in the socialist mould) or try to generate new happiness among (inevitably) fewer individuals. It has been suggested that instead of talking about happiness as a commodity that can be parcelled up and redistributed, we think in terms of the consequences of actions. Happiness is after all the result of a satisfied desire. So called consequentialism states that the moral value of an action is determined by its consequences. This changes the viewpoint dramatically and appears to offer a solution to the £20 problem: if all two hundred pensioners were doomed to die, would it not be better to sponsor two of them, who would be allowed to live through the winter? But are we not relying on another set of moral values in making the judgement? Is this not the standard Christian principle of the sanctity of human life? What we appear to have accomplished, in proposing consequentialism as a viable alternative to Utilitarianism, is something that, when pursued to its logical conclusion, ceases to be Utilitarianism. Consequentialism replaces Utilitarianism with conventional Christian morality. Possibly the most interesting evaluation of Utilitarianism that could be made is one that is very rarely asked by philosophers. What would it be like if it were applied on a universal scale? Envisioning a society where Utilitarianism has been applied is not difficult. All that has to be done is to identify several features that are necessary for the system to be applied consistently in the manner envisioned by Bentham. First and foremost, the principle of the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number must be enshrined in the constitution. It must be at the basis of every decision: legal, political, economic, medical and 5
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism personal. Any action that cannot be justified by this principle is punishable by imprisonment, where the sentence is determined by the magnitude of the error. There could even be a situation where judges run the risk of sentencing themselves to gaol. In order to ensure consistency of application, a central committee would be assigned the task of evaluating consequences to a minute degree, and drawing up detailed tables of happiness values. These would at least govern every aspect of public life, if not personal life. Any individual who refused to accept the choice prescribed by applying the maximisation law to his situation must be punished accordingly. This could be especially problematical if the solution ran against the principles of an established religion. And who would enforce decisions? Why naturally this would require a large, efficient police force, answerable only to the state. It is becoming apparent that there are close parallels between the Utilitarian system and the theory of egalitarian economics proposed by Karl Marx. While the scenario above is slightly ludicrous, it points out very clearly the flaws inherent in Utilitarianism, which have likewise been exposed in Communism in the Soviet Union over the last seventy years. Utilitarianism, like Communism, is hopelessly Utopian. It provides an attractive model for ethical decision making, but turns out to be totally impractical. It merely shifts the problem of individual responsibility to one of assessing the relative merits of different consequences. And this points the way to a more sinister implication of the Utilitarian outlook: as with Communism, unscrupulous individuals can use its broad principles to justify any means available to achieve their ends. I am of the view that Utilitarianism is a brave but failed attempt to adapt to a secular world. It is hopelessly simplistic, and, by being so, it is easily abused. I have deliberately avoided discussing in more detail the internal structure of the theory in the hope of showing that the
6
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism actual foundations are deeply flawed, and that Utilitarianism is possibly a retrograde step when compared to other ethical systems.
7
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism
Bibliography J.S. Mill, (1863), Utilitarianism, 1st edition, London: Parker, Son, and Bourn. vivus 1806-1873. D.D. Raphael, (1981), Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. J.D. Mabbott, (1966), An Introduction to Ethics, London: Hutchison & Co. J.J.C. Smart and B. Williams, (1973), Utilitarianism: for and against, London: Cambridge University Press. B. Williams, (1972), Morality. An Introduction to Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Copyright © 1989 Christopher G. D. Tipper. All rights reserved.
8
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
Abstract: This essay starts by considering the limitations of Bentham’s notion of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, and introduces Mill’s suggestion that the concept be generalised to a discussion of ‘happiness’. The principle of utility as it applies to society is introduced and then an alternative known as Consequentialism is discussed. This is found to be without any foundation other than conventional Christian morality, and the Utilitarian enterprise is rendered moot. Finally, an analogy is drawn with the rational economics of Marx, which the Soviet experience has shown to be fatally flawed, and it is asked whether Utilitarianism is likewise now only a historical curiosity.
“The Creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the ‘Greatest Happiness Principle’, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness”. — Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill (Mill, 1863)
F
OR MANY people it is no longer satisfactory to rely on the maxims of religious philosophy in order to judge what is right or wrong, and Utilitarianism can be said to have achieved the greatest degree of progress towards forming a rational system of moral judgement. Its basic premise is simple. All value judgements should be made on the basis of maximising the happiness of the majority, and minimising the ‘unhappiness’ of the individuals involved. This is the principle of striving for the ‘Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number’. It is hoped that by couching all questions in terms of happiness (or its absence), and applying some kind of numerical value according to 1
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism import, that a sort of moral summation operation will yield the best course of action. This can be pictured as a set of scales on one side of which is a pan representing ‘happiness’. Any value judgement can then be carried out simply by assigning a weight to each ‘happiness’ factor, and counterbalancing it with the opposing ‘misery’ factors. The proper course of action can then simply be read from the position of the needle about the neutral point on the scale. There are quite clearly considerable difficulties to be overcome if the theory is to be in any way applicable. For instance, what do we mean by ‘happiness’? Jeremy Bentham, held by many to be the father of Utilitarianism, used the word ‘pleasure’ and its antithesis, ‘pain’, as the means of comparison. These at least have the merit of being readily understandable and so, it was hoped, easier to apply in a rigorous fashion. The concept of happiness was thus tightened up, so as to reduce ambiguity. It did not solve the problem of assigning weights to different types of happiness, and he sought to alleviate this by including a number of subsidiary factors. The two most important of these were the intensity of the pleasure and the duration of its experience. These qualities, and a few other subsidiary factors such as fecundity,1 provide an outline of a method for evaluating simple moral problems. To illustrate the point we could consider the question of whether a man should take exercise. On the negative side it could be argued that the pain involved, although of short duration, has high intensity. Does this outweigh the positive aspects of the better fitness that would follow and thus higher self-esteem? Are the effects of regular exercise more beneficial than infrequent or sporadic exercise? It is not at all clear whether self-esteem even counts as a pain in Bentham’s schema. In the end though the terms ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’ are very restrictive and any argument that relies solely on these concepts is bound to crumble under the weight of its own disingenuousness. Consider for an instance a Utilitarian argument in favour of abortion: 1
Bentham identified this quality as the tendency of the pleasure to ‘reproduce’ itself.
2
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism “Artificial means of contraception all have physical drawbacks, either as long term health hazards or because they have pleasure-reducing effect. Abortion can be executed with no medical complications (executed by a qualified physician), does not usually carry any associated pain and does no person any injury. It is thus an excellent means of contraception.”2 A Benthamite would not even consider the emotional trauma that the woman undergoes during the whole process. What Bentham failed to account for in his definition were so called ‘intentional’ pleasures. These encompass the internal realms of the person, where honesty, love and freedom are important to well-being. These were alien ideas to Bentham and his disciples and were dealt with in a summary fashion. They attempted to dismiss such objectives as old-fashioned or romantic waffle. This is of course reactionary and anti-intellectual, and as such merits no further discussion. John Stuart Mills realised that for Utilitarianism to be in any way credible as a moral system that some adjustment would have to be made to the definition of pleasure. The main tenet of his position was that pleasure is the only thing that is desirable, and that the only measure of what was desirable was the fact that people want it. This amounts to a definition of something broader that can be likened to ‘happiness’, with its opposite quality being ‘unhappiness’. However, this still leaves us with Bentham’s original difficulty. Utilitarianism’s legitimacy as a moral system depends on being able to assign a meaningful value to each factor in the moral calculation. By using a more abstract concept of pleasure, we are compounding the difficulties of applying the system. How do you assign a value to the love of a mother for her son, who is about to be executed for a crime? Is there any chance that this love and her resulting unhappiness could outweigh the ‘happiness’ of a society against which the crime was com-
2
The notion of what constitutes a person must be carefully examined in a full discussion. For the purposes of the example, it is assumed that the foetus has no consciousness, and does not therefore justify the label ‘person’.
3
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism mitted? It seems that the Utilitarian is no nearer a solution than any other school of moral thought would be. Certainly, happiness in some guise has to be a concern of any moral system. Even the most ascetic systems of belief, such as Shi’ism in the Islamic world, offer some kind of reward in the afterlife, where a good Moslem will find paradise beyond his wildest dreams. What is not so clear is that we should be striving for the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number. Indeed Eudaimonism (known also as Hedonism) eschews this principle altogether. Mill attempted to justify the principle from the point of view of the individual, thereby trying to reconcile self-interest with the interests of society as a whole.3 The argument runs as follows: The happiness of a person depends on the happiness of the individuals closest to him. Those individuals will also have the same imperatives and so, indirectly the whole of society’s happiness is the concern of the individual, in the manner of the ever-expanding web. What the argument fails to account for is the conflict that will occur between the interests of the individual and those of society as a whole. The error is also of the nature of a category mistake: the happiness of the individual is a palpable concept. The happiness of a society can only be gauged indirectly, by looking at the stability of its institutions, levels of violence and the general level of wealth. A thief will be happier for using the proceeds of his crime, but society will be less ‘stable’ if the practise were to continue. Having accepted as a principle that we should be aiming to find the greatest happiness of the greatest number, it becomes obvious that this is meaningless of itself. Do we mean attaining the happiness of the greatest number of people, or achieving the greatest total happiness? Clearly, Mill intended both, but further study shows his slogan to be Utopian in the extreme. For what this problem highlights is a conflict fundamental to almost every moral dilemma. For it appears 3
Self-interest and happiness must be intimately connected concepts, once one has accepted that an individual acts to attain his ultimate happiness.
4
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism that the two aims, while not mutually exclusive, do possess a certain conceptual polarity. Raphael has called it the £20 problem. (Raphael, 1981) Given £20, he asks, would it be better to give £10 each to two pensioners so that they may be warm and live throughout the winter, or would it be better to help out two hundred by giving them each a cup of tea at 10p each? The problem is one of finite resources. We can try to make as many people happy as possible (in the socialist mould) or try to generate new happiness among (inevitably) fewer individuals. It has been suggested that instead of talking about happiness as a commodity that can be parcelled up and redistributed, we think in terms of the consequences of actions. Happiness is after all the result of a satisfied desire. So called consequentialism states that the moral value of an action is determined by its consequences. This changes the viewpoint dramatically and appears to offer a solution to the £20 problem: if all two hundred pensioners were doomed to die, would it not be better to sponsor two of them, who would be allowed to live through the winter? But are we not relying on another set of moral values in making the judgement? Is this not the standard Christian principle of the sanctity of human life? What we appear to have accomplished, in proposing consequentialism as a viable alternative to Utilitarianism, is something that, when pursued to its logical conclusion, ceases to be Utilitarianism. Consequentialism replaces Utilitarianism with conventional Christian morality. Possibly the most interesting evaluation of Utilitarianism that could be made is one that is very rarely asked by philosophers. What would it be like if it were applied on a universal scale? Envisioning a society where Utilitarianism has been applied is not difficult. All that has to be done is to identify several features that are necessary for the system to be applied consistently in the manner envisioned by Bentham. First and foremost, the principle of the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number must be enshrined in the constitution. It must be at the basis of every decision: legal, political, economic, medical and 5
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism personal. Any action that cannot be justified by this principle is punishable by imprisonment, where the sentence is determined by the magnitude of the error. There could even be a situation where judges run the risk of sentencing themselves to gaol. In order to ensure consistency of application, a central committee would be assigned the task of evaluating consequences to a minute degree, and drawing up detailed tables of happiness values. These would at least govern every aspect of public life, if not personal life. Any individual who refused to accept the choice prescribed by applying the maximisation law to his situation must be punished accordingly. This could be especially problematical if the solution ran against the principles of an established religion. And who would enforce decisions? Why naturally this would require a large, efficient police force, answerable only to the state. It is becoming apparent that there are close parallels between the Utilitarian system and the theory of egalitarian economics proposed by Karl Marx. While the scenario above is slightly ludicrous, it points out very clearly the flaws inherent in Utilitarianism, which have likewise been exposed in Communism in the Soviet Union over the last seventy years. Utilitarianism, like Communism, is hopelessly Utopian. It provides an attractive model for ethical decision making, but turns out to be totally impractical. It merely shifts the problem of individual responsibility to one of assessing the relative merits of different consequences. And this points the way to a more sinister implication of the Utilitarian outlook: as with Communism, unscrupulous individuals can use its broad principles to justify any means available to achieve their ends. I am of the view that Utilitarianism is a brave but failed attempt to adapt to a secular world. It is hopelessly simplistic, and, by being so, it is easily abused. I have deliberately avoided discussing in more detail the internal structure of the theory in the hope of showing that the
6
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism actual foundations are deeply flawed, and that Utilitarianism is possibly a retrograde step when compared to other ethical systems.
7
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
The poverty of Utilitarianism
Bibliography J.S. Mill, (1863), Utilitarianism, 1st edition, London: Parker, Son, and Bourn. vivus 1806-1873. D.D. Raphael, (1981), Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. J.D. Mabbott, (1966), An Introduction to Ethics, London: Hutchison & Co. J.J.C. Smart and B. Williams, (1973), Utilitarianism: for and against, London: Cambridge University Press. B. Williams, (1972), Morality. An Introduction to Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Copyright © 1989 Christopher G. D. Tipper. All rights reserved.
8
XML to PDF by RenderX XEP XSL-FO Formatter, visit us at http://www.rende
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