Question

Utilitarianism

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)

“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to, as well as determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.” (9)

I. What is happiness?

a. Immediate sensory pleasure and avoidance of pain: “By the natural constitution of the human frame, on most occasions of their lives men in general embrace this principle, without thinking of it.” (11)

i. Bentham identifies happiness with whatever is pleasurable and not painful—it has to do with matters of physical sensation and nothing higher.

1. We are nothing other than our sensible appetites—obeying the force of sense impressions given by our sovereign masters of pleasure and pain—without a higher rational or social nature (as in Aristotle)

ii. It is something we immediately pursue without always thinking about it. He has no concern for determining the actual sources of pleasure (whether you get it from eating a corndog, folding socks, or reading a book).

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1. All pleasures are of the same quality with no higher qualitative forms but only quantitative distinctions between them.

a. Are there really no pleasures that are qualitatively better or higher than others? Are there no inherent objective qualities to human nature which require higher qualitative forms of satisfaction?

iii. Happiness then pertains to psychological experiences of sensory feelings and not self-realization through holistic development.

1. Bentham’s morality can be understood as founded on psychological egoism – we are motivated only by the desire to maximize our own private self-interest, to acquire individualistic pleasure without limit.

2. Yet Bentham also thinks that we should act in such a way that will maximize the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people (within the interested party).

a. But what motivates the private egoist to consider the greatest happiness of the community in general? (More on this below)

iv. Because no particular pleasure is qualitatively better than any other, they must be continually weighed as to their comparative quantitative value within any given situation.

II. Determining what we ought to do: ethics is about calculating what actions will give us the most of what we currently happen to find pleasing.

a. But how do we account for the right activities to pursue in any given situation, especially when interests conflict?

i. Pull out a balance sheet and a calculator and get ready for some double-entry bookkeeping:

ii. The principle of utility concerns the utility of any activity in contributing to the sum total of happiness gained or the sum total of pains diminished.

iii. The six criteria – notice that they are all quantitative categories for measuring the force of sensations:

1. Intensity: how strong is the pleasurable sensation?

2. Duration: how long does it last?

3. Certainty or uncertainty: how likely will that pleasure occur?

4. Propinquity or remoteness: How soon will that pleasure occur?

5. Fecundity: How probable is it that sensations of the same kind will follow?

6. Purity: How probable is it that the sensation will not be followed by its opposite kind?

b. The calculus and its balance sheet

i. Adding up the sum total:

1. Calculating which action will produce the greatest happiness involves adding up not only the total pleasures but also the total pains and then subtracting the latter from the former—it is determined according to the greatest difference or net worth and not the highest sum: comparing two acts X and Y:

a. Act X: 10 pleasures – 5 pains = 5

b. Act Y: 20 pleasures – 16 pains = 4

i. We ought to do Act X because 5 > 4.

ii. If two acts produce no pleasure, then it is about doing the one with lesser pain

iii. Can pleasure/happiness really be quantified in this way?

c. Since utilitarians realize that there is not always time to calculate in every moment of ethical decision they concede that there are some general rules of thumb to follow in most situations, like:

· It is good to almost always tell the truth.

d. Yet, despite following general rules of thumb, utilitarianism is concerned solely with the consequences of actions, regardless of the means and motives by which those actions are carried out and ends achieved:

i. actions do not always produce the same results in every situation—e.g. telling the truth might cause greater displeasure in certain situations and so it need not always be considered as a means to happiness (even though it might be best to normally follow the rule of truthfulness in most situations).

e. Where might this new mindset come from? (that pleasures can be reductively homogenized and quantified and that their maximization justifies whatever means used)

i. It wasn’t that Bentham wanted a non-judgmental account of pleasure-seeking, but rather that he wanted to homogenize pleasures under a single measure and its one sovereign absolute judge. Who/what might this judge be? He gives us more than a hint:

“ Money is the instrument of measuring the quantity of pain or pleasure. Those who are not satisfied with the accuracy of this instrument must find out some other that shall be more accurate, or bid adieu to politics and morals.”

Bentham, Economic Writings

ii. For Bentham accumulating more money means more pleasures can be afforded and more pains avoided. (As we already discussed, the pursuit of money itself does not necessarily require practicing virtuous means such as honesty, fairness, goodness, etc.)

1. But then money itself becomes the highest utility, the end of economic activity

iii. Bentham’s assumption about society is that it is made up of individuals whose end is not community for its own sake, but rather the accumulation of private monetary wealth.

a. This should give us a hint as to why utilitarianism arose and became so popular at the time that it did—19th century England, one of the major birthplaces of modern capitalism.

III. The Social Context: What is community and the notion of the human being presupposed here?

a. Society is not a greater whole, but just a sum of individualistic parts

“The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what?—the sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.” (10)

b. His psychological egoism presupposes society as made up of atomistic individualism and mechanistic materialism (all have a precursor in Thomas Hobbes ca.1588–1679)

i. Atomistic individualism denies that we are inherently relational and cooperative, and so denies that society has emergent properties whereby the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts like a symphony.

1. Rather society is nothing other than the aggregate of individuals, externally related like random atoms or billiard balls colliding with each other as they pursue their own self-interest and fight over scarce resources.

2. Within a society organized exclusively for commercial interests of money-making (rather than vice versa) humanity begins to lose sight of its social nature and views itself, from the marketplace perspective, as a random collection of competing private entrepreneurs/consumers.

c. Here we see the shift of social relations no longer around C-M-C whereby economic activity serves the needs of building community, but instead inverted around M-C-M’ where our social nature and community building become means for the private ends of monetary accumulation.

Hence, social relations are not viewed as ends in themselves, but something to be exploited for private self-interest. Echoing Bentham’s utilitarian view of human nature, James Mill (John Stuart Mill’s father) says:

“That one human being will desire to render the person and property of another subservient to his pleasures … is a grand governing law of human nature … the grand instrument for attaining what a man likes is the actions of other men.”

James Mill, Government, section IV

Notice that in attaining pleasure one essentially encounters other humans as instruments, seeking to objectify their activity as an instrumental means to private profit.

1. Society and politics are then not a greater form of organization that emerges with the potential for fostering higher social relations and qualities that perfect our social nature—

2. Rather society and its politics for Bentham are just a fiction, i.e. a contractual artifice, for facilitating and regulating competitive individualism and its objectifying pursuit of private profit and private property.

a. Without a higher end or common good there is no real educative function in society and its politics (beyond STEM) whereby humanity might be raised beyond its animal instincts.

i. Politics is instead reduced to regulating our animal instincts by calculating the cost-benefit of total pleasure and pains as if calculating and balancing the numerical quantity of competing forces.

b. But is human nature unchangeably selfish and individualistic? Or have we become habituated to practice and believe such by the spectacle of our market reality?

i. Is it fair to make such a sweeping claim about human nature when many non-Western societies display social qualities and community building that does not foster such private individualism?

c. Is society just an aggregate of externally related individuals? Or is it a common project, with higher potentials, in which we are all integrally related, even if we don’t currently recognize such?

d. Similarly, aren’t we naturally social beings, whose social qualities give rise to society in the first place, before we become isolated individuals? How could we as a species evolve and develop higher forms of civilization if the latter?

d. Atomistic individualism and its psychological egoism bring some further internal problems for utilitarianism itself:

i. The assumption that humans are not intrinsically social and rational, thus not drawn toward the distinctively human life of a political animal suggests that society is the unintended consequence of non-social individuals solely pursuing their own private self-interests.

1. Why then should individuals care about the whole society?

a. If we are private egoists concerned only with our own individualistic pleasure, why care about the greater good of general utility, especially if one’s private pleasure doesn’t seem to be necessarily painful to the whole, and vice versa?

2. Also, why would the dominant majority of individuals care about a lone individual or minority group?

a. If we do consider the greater good of the whole in terms of the greatest quantifiable amount of happiness for the greatest number, and this whole is represented only in the quantitative terms of a voting majority, then why would they care about the claims of a minority group?

3. And if society is the unintended consequence of private self-interest amongst competing individuals who presumably do not consciously intend the greatest good in their individual acts, then who does the calculating for the greater good of the whole? A few government bureaucrats? Technocratic elites? The hidden hand of the market?

Notice that if citizens are only privately concerned with individualistic consumption, then politics and governance are not something they are naturally inclined toward ( hence the rejection of Aristotle’s political animal— but then how are we distinguished from mere cattle? ). Bentham then has a hard time accounting for why someone would want to enter public administration and concern themselves with the general utility of all – moreover, government then seems to become only the matter of an elite bureaucratic managerial class that can coldly and efficiently calculate all the private interests.

Or, like Adam Smith and other contemporaries, many will try to justify laissez faire capitalism in which government facilitates some kind of “hidden hand” of the market that somehow brings about unintended good for all by magically converting “private vices into public benefits” (Bernard Mandeville)—or, in other words, let the rules of the game rigged by the rich keep benefitting the rich .

4. This then brings us to the question of whether utilitarianism is really as non-judgmental as it often claims – remember that Bentham wanted to prejudge every pleasure as equal in solely quantitative terms so that they could be subject to the marketplace and its one sovereign absolute judge: money.

a. But is there really no other normative conception for what it means to be human other than the pursuit of private profit? Why must we uncritically accept this latter conception as the only normative form? (isn’t it a recipe for mindless consumerism and oligarchy rather than robust democratic participation?)

Summary of distinction with Virtue ethics: If the basic ethical framework for Aristotle’s virtue theory is a developmental movement, transforming our first nature into human nature as it could be if it realized its most distinctive capacities, then for Bentham it is simply a static framework as the regulation of brute nature in itself without transformation, since he believes there are no higher creative potentials to develop but only money to acquire for facilitating consumption — therefore he cannot say that some pleasurable experiences are truer to human nature because he cannot show how some pleasures rather than others might contribute to, or reveal, or occasion higher qualities. This also means he has no critical way of identifying dehumanization, alienation, and oppression since there is no distinctive human nature from which we could be alienated.

5. John Stuart Mill will try to rectify these problems in Bentham by elaborating a more sophisticated concept of utilitarianism oriented around a notion of humanity that better captures something of our higher qualities and social nature.