Before
moving on to the critique of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, I would like to make clear my position on the
egoist utilitarianism versus universalist utilitarianism question. J.S. Mill is
a universalist utilitarian (you should do what will contribute to the general
happiness of mankind as a whole). I am an egoist utilitarian (you should do
what will contribute to your personal happiness). Despite this, in my analyses
of social/economic policies, I repeatedly justify my positions by saying things
like ‘this policy will promote the general prosperity of humanity’. Is this not
an inconsistency? Shouldn’t I, as an egoist utilitarian, just talk about what a
policy will do for my happiness and my prosperity?
In fact,
this is not an inconsistency. Even for the egoist utilitarian, universalist
utilitarian analysis can often come in handy in many ways. To see how, we must
review my discussion, in a previous post, of the social factors that must be
taken into account if egoistic decision-making is to be effective:
(Begin quotation)
2. Sympathy Effects:
As
humans live together in society, especially in families or communities, they
often become emotionally attached to one another and realize that others share
many common, ‘human’ traits with them. The result is the development of
feelings of sympathy between humans, defined as an emotional, empathetic link
between two or more humans, a link that can vary widely in intensity. When
bonds of sympathy are established between two people, if one perceives that the
other is hurt, some of that hurt will be transferred onto the perceiver, while
if one perceives that the other is happy, some of that happiness will be
transferred onto the perceiver. The stronger the sympathetic bond, the more
hurt or happiness is transferred. If an egoist who has developed bonds of
sympathy with another wants to advance his self-interest effectively, he cannot
ignore the effects that his actions will have on others. If he performs an
action that hurts someone he cares about, part of that hurt will be transferred
back to him through the bond of sympathy. This must be considered by any
rational egoist who has the advancement of his self-interest in mind. Hurting
yourself through hurting those you care about is not a good way of advancing
your self-interest.
3. Fear of Retaliation
or Hope for Recompense Effects:
One
of the first things that people living in societies together learn is that
other humans are egos interested in their own well-being just as they are, and
that this fact must be taken into consideration when evaluating courses of
action. Specifically, if an actor gratuitously hurts another person, he should
take into account the possibility that the hurt person will retaliate and hurt
the actor in return. On the other hand, if an actor gratuitously helps another
person, he should take into account the possibility that the helped person will
reciprocate the benefit and help the actor in return. Most people seem to have
a natural (and societally beneficial) tendency to reciprocate both harms and
benefits given by others. In many societies the retaliation/deterrent part is
institutionalized and formalized by governments, acting through law enforcement
agencies. These facts should not be ignored by rational egoists seeking to make
decisions that will advance their self-interests.
4. Higher Probability
that that Course of Action will Become a General Rule of Societal Action:
Every time
one member of society engages in an individually beneficial action that has
bearings on the rules governing the social order, it becomes more probable that
this kind of behavior will become a more general behavior amongst members of
society. This is so due to the addition of the actor to the number of citizens
engaging in that kind of action, and due to the possibility of imitation by
other citizens who see that this kind of action can be beneficial to
individuals. For example, if the actor is deciding whether or not to mug a man
in the street and steal his wallet, he should consider what would happen if
more and more people in society started doing that. Security of person and
property would become less secure, which would result in a less productive,
less prosperous, less peaceful, and more fearful society for everyone. The
actor was looking to benefit himself materially with his action, but his
material interests and other interests would be hurt if his action became
generalized and performed by more and more people in society. Now, this effect
is of course only a probabilistic effect (there is no guarantee that others
will imitate the action), and should be discounted by the actor accordingly.
Nevertheless, the reality of the effect remains, as demonstrated by phenomena
such as the impoverishment caused by widespread interest group politicking, and
must be taken into account by any rational egoist intent on advancing his
self-interest.
(End quotation)
Universalist
utilitarian analysis can definitely come in handy when egoistic actors are
considering these factors. For the sympathy factor, if the actor has a certain
degree of sympathy for members of the human race in general, advocating
policies that are good, based on the universalist utilitarian standard, will
benefit him through sympathy effects.
For the fear
of retaliation factor, the important thing to consider here is
institutionalized retaliation (law and police forces). When individuals live
together in a society, an important question to answer is: in what
circumstances can physical coercion be justifiably used to prevent or to retaliate
against certain actions of members of the society? In other words, what laws
(rules) should govern the society, and/or what policies should the societal
institution of physical coercion (government) implement using its coercive
power? Individuals, for many different reasons, will have many different
opinions on these vital questions. At the end of the day though, there can only
be one answer in a given geographical area. By definition, physical coercion is,
ultimately, going to be imposed on unwilling people. As a result, laws and
policies backed by a political force
majeure in a geographical region will be the ones implemented. Might
doesn’t make right, but it does make law and policy.
How to
achieve such a force majeure? There
are basically two approaches: the elitist approach and the broad-based
approach. The elitist approach involves trying to cobble together enough
special interest groups in a coalition to constitute a political force majeure in the relevant
geographical region. The favoured
laws and policies of these special interest groups are imposed on those too
weak to resist. The problem with this approach is that, the bigger and more
inclusive the force majeure coalition
gets, the more self-defeating the strategy becomes. Once the coalition reaches
a certain size, members of the coalition start losing more as consumers from
all the special privileges given to other coalition members, than they gain as
producers or privileged people from the special political privileges that they
lobbied for.
For example, policies that support
coercive labour unionism in a certain industry can be very beneficial to a
union member in that industry, in his capacity as a producer. If these policies
are extended to more and more industries though, even the privileged union
member will start losing more as a consumer than he gained as a producer. As a
consumer, he is greatly harmed by the inefficiency and higher prices the
policies cause in all the other industries, more than he is benefitted by the special
privileges he gains from the policy being applied to his own industry. Similar
reasoning applies to many variants of elitist interest group policy-making. The
only real way this strategy can work is if a narrow aristocracy holds all the
political power and the rest of the population are too ignorant or too passive
to do anything about their interests being constantly sacrificed to these
people. This sometimes obtains, even in the modern world, but not as much as it
used to.
The
broad-based approach relies heavily on universalist utilitarian analysis. The
strategy behind this approach is to pick a stance on a law or policy question
that you believe will benefit you, and then try to convince others that this
policy will benefit them all as well so that they will support you. Often, the
simplest and most effective way of doing this is by arguing for the merits of
your law or policy stance from a universalist utilitarian perspective. That
way, you try to make your argument appeal to as wide and as broad-based an
audience as possible, with the hope that if your argument is convincing, they
will support your stance and that stance will be implemented in the society.
This is the procedure that I try to use in my social policy analyses. This, in
turn, is why someone who read only my social policy analyses would probably
think (mistakenly) that I was a universalist utilitarian, rather than an egoist
utilitarian.
For the
general rule factor, the goal of preserving/creating a society that is as
peaceful and as prosperous as possible often plays a prominent role in the calculation.
This was the case with the mugging example I used in my explanation of this
factor above. More often than not, universalist utilitarian analysis will
approve general rules and modes of conduct that are conducive to a peaceful and
prosperous social order, and condemn those that are not conducive to this. This
information, provided by universalist utilitarian analysis, is vital for the
egoistic actor considering the general rule factor.
Thus, for
the egoist utilitarian, universalist utilitarian analysis is useful when
considering sympathy effects, when trying to convince a broad audience to
support your favoured stance on law and policy questions, and when considering
the desirability of general rules of conduct. Of course, and I will stress this
throughout my critique of Mill, while the universalist utilitarian standard is
useful, it is useful to the egoist actor,
when he is making decisions based ultimately on an egoist utilitarian
standard. When it ceases to be useful to the actor and starts demanding harmful
sacrifices from him, it should not be obeyed because doing so is supposedly ‘morally
right’, it should simply be discarded until it starts being useful again.
Critique of John Stuart Mill’s, Utilitarianism[1]
Chapter 2: What
Utilitarianism Is:
Mill: “If I am asked, what I mean by
difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable
than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there
is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or
almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective
of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.”
12
Brian: Philosophical matters should not be
left to majority vote to decide. The better answer would be to say: individual
people find different pleasures to be different in quality, based on their
subjective valuations, and will take this into account when making their
choices. There is no need for a majoritarian label of ‘better’ for one pleasure
over another.
Mill: “It is better to be a human being
dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a
fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is
because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the
comparison knows both sides.” 14
Brian: Better by what standard? And
actually, the human and Socrates do not know ‘both sides’ of the comparison,
they know only their own side. When did they have an opportunity to try out
life as a pig or as a fool? And if they haven’t, what can they possibly know
about the subjective feelings of happiness of the pig and of the fool?
Mill: “But it (that ‘noble’ pleasures are
better than ‘base’ pleasures) is by no means an indispensable condition to the
acceptance of the utilitarian standard; for that standard is not the agent’s
own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether; and if
it may possibly be doubted whether a noble character is always the happier for
its nobleness, there can be no doubt that it makes other people happier, and
that the world in general is immensely a gainer by it.” 16
Brian: Here’s the universalist
utilitarianism of Mill. As an egoist utilitarian, I have to ask: why should
people seek to sacrifice, in any circumstances, their own well-being for the
sake of the greater well-being of others? What command does this ‘greatest
happiness of the greatest number’ principle have over individual people? If the
goal of life is happiness, why sacrifice your own happiness for someone else’s?
Mill: “The utilitarian morality does
recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for
the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a
good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total
of happiness, it considers as wasted. The only self-renunciation which it
applauds, is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness,
of others; either of mankind collectively, or of individuals within the limits
imposed by the collective interests of mankind.” 24
Brian: Uh oh, another moral code that
applauds self-sacrifice, better to steer clear of it. I don’t need a moral code
outside of myself applauding and condemning things: only my applause or my
condemnation is what matters to me. Thus, if someone sacrifices himself for my
benefit, I may applaud the deed, though perhaps not the intelligence of it. But
I would never applaud my own sacrifice; that
is absurd. Anything that is genuinely bad for me, I condemn, and that is that.
Now, this doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t engage in actions that
might appear to be sacrificial to others. But for every such action, I myself
would know that they were not in fact sacrifices, but preferred courses of
action. For example, if I had a child and grew very attached to it, and saw it
going hungry, I might give my food to it, even if it means me going hungry for
a while longer. But this is not a sacrifice: it is making the best choice in a
bad situation, from my own subjective point of view. I would know that I valued
the sympathetic benefits to be gained from feeding my child more than the
direct hunger pangs I accepted in return. On the other hand, if I had the
choice to go hungry for the sake of saving a stranger that I didn’t know, my
calculation might be different. I might decide that I am not sympathetically
attached to this person enough to experience hunger pain for their benefit.
Universalist utilitarian morality might tell me that I should, because doing so
would increase the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’. But I wouldn’t
really care; because I don’t care what external moral codes have to say about
my actions.
Mill: “Nobody argues that the art of
navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to
calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with
it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life
with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong, as well as
on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and foolish.” 35
Brian: Generally, this is a very useful,
even indispensable, procedure. Nevertheless, sometimes it leads to error, as
when someone decides that a general category of things is right and another
wrong based on past experiences or on the experiences of his parents, but the
circumstances in the present have so changed with regards to the effects of the
things in question that the previous calculation is rendered obsolete. I
suspect that this is how a lot of dogmas, fixed ideas, and other moralistic
absurdities got their start, and then these outdated precepts stick around,
making people worse off because of their unsuitableness to their present
well-being.
Chapter 3: Of The
Ultimate Sanction Of The Principle Of Utility:
Mill: “The deeply rooted conception which
every individual even now has of himself as a social being, tends to make him
feel it one of his natural wants that there should be harmony between his
feelings and aims and those of his fellow creatures. (…) This feeling in most
individuals is much inferior in strength to their selfish feelings, and is
often wanting altogether. But to those who have it, it possesses all the
characters of a natural feeling. It does not present itself to their minds as a
superstition of education, or a law despotically imposed by the power of
society, but as an attribute which it would not be well for them to be without.
This conviction is the ultimate sanction of the greatest happiness morality.”
49
Brian: I think that what Mill has just
described is the sympathy factor of egoistic decision-making. I agree with
everything that he writes in this paragraph, except I think that it is a bit
misleading when he says that what he describes is “the ultimate sanction of the
greatest happiness morality”. The idea of morality includes the concepts of
‘objectively good’ actions and ‘objectively bad’ actions. If someone didn’t
have many sympathetic feelings (a possibility that Mill recognises in the
passage), and hence did not care as much about following universalist
utilitarian rules of conduct as others
with more sympathy, I don’t think that we can call his actions ‘objectively
worse’ than those of people who follow universalist utilitarian rules of
conduct more closely. I fear that Mill would be inclined to do just this, based
on what he has written elsewhere in the book. All we can really say is that if a person has a lot of sympathetic
feelings for others, then he should follow
universalist utilitarian rules of conduct pretty closely in order to advance
his well-being through sympathy effects. Without the if condition, the should statement
cannot legitimately be made.
Chapter 5: On The
Connexion Between Justice And Utility
Mill: “And the sentiment of justice
appears to me to be, the animal desire to repel or retaliate a hurt or damage
to oneself, or to those with whom one sympathizes, widened so as to include all
persons, by the human capacity of enlarged sympathy, and the human conception
of intelligent self-interest.” 78
Brian: I agree entirely with this passage,
the sentiment of justice can be traced to three important social factors of
egoistic decision-making (sympathy effects, natural retaliation urges, and
contemplation of general societal rules of action (“human conception of
intelligent self-interest”)). But I think that these ideas belong to a theory
of egoistic utilitarianism, not of universalistic utilitarianism.
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