Question

Summary of Main differences between Virtue Ethics and Utilitarianism

1. The two different senses of happiness:

a. Virtue Ethics: Happiness as flourishing according to realizing and enjoying our normative essence or highest potentials – it is about becoming more fully human.

b. Utilitarianism: Happiness as accumulating and consuming immediate sense pleasures – it is about maximizing consumer preferences (without asking if it is ultimately good for humanity because there is no higher human essence to realize)

i. But utilitarianism still presupposes a normative sense of what it means to be human also, which it projects from its experience of the capitalist market.

2. Two different normative senses of the human and reason:

a. Virtue Ethics: We are primarily rational and political animals. This means we are inherently social and creatively relational persons.

i. Reason is that capacity we have to collectively organize our lives together so as to flourish according to our highest social nature as an end in itself.

1. Rationality is teleological (purposeful): to reason means to discover and conceptualize the end or purpose of a thing—it is about knowing what a thing’s most excellent form is, and how to find the fitting means for realizing holistically its qualitative fulfillment.

i. For Aristotle, our rational capacity develops not as an indifferent and purely individual cognitive capacity, but as a social capacity to reason about and imagine together a higher common good.

ii. As rational animals we are not just reason-using animals. The end-goal of reason oriented to the common good is human freedom, and the form of freedom is rational self-determination: the liberation from irrational forces through the rationality of virtuous activity.

b. Utilitarianism: We are primarily consuming and possessive individuals who competitively seek private pleasure by dominating each other—we have no inherent social or rational qualities, but are slaves to instincts, impulses and drives.

“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

i. Reason is not inherent to a social nature as a coordinating activity around higher ends: it is only a cold, indifferent calculator—that capacity we have to perform cost-benefit analysis in service to private irrational wants and market demands.

1. Rationality is purely instrumental—it is a functional device but not the end goal or form of a self-determining being: it’s not about becoming rational but about calculating efficient means to our appetites and irrational ends.

2. This means reason is not purposeful: it pertains solely to quantitative efficiency rather than choosing new qualitative ends. It is not identified with the freedom to choose truly emancipatory ends in themselves, but only to choose various efficient means to whatever predetermined ends (as irrationally given already by drives and instincts or market demands)

3. The two different senses of value:

a. Virtue Ethics: Value is inherent to the object or activity valued—it is the attractive power of the object that draws us.

i. Things have value according to their purpose or use, e.g. a hammer’s value is relative to its function, and its functional use is relative to a higher end in itself (like building a house for the higher quality of living).

ii. Other things have intrinsic value as an end in itself, e.g. a community is to be valued for its own sake: the activity of socializing/fellowship is a qualitative good in itself, since it is true to the fulfillment of our social nature (and not something to be used for lower functions).

1. Economic value is then determined according to the social usefulness for perfecting the objective needs of humanity as an end in itself, rather than human communities being used as a means for privately producing commercial exchange values solely to make money.

b. Utilitarianism: Value is conferred arbitrarily by the mere fact that consumers happen to privately desire something – as long as we get some pleasure (real or perceived), it doesn’t matter what the object is or its objective function.

i. In other words, all value is relative to the contingencies of market exchange and price: it is ultimately set according to the arbitrary dictates of consumer demand and fluctuating monetary price, and not according to inherent qualities, purposes or ends in themselves.

1. Viewing all things as potential units of private pleasure means that all things are potentially commodities to be bought and sold on the market, and therefore measurable by a monetary value. This view requires denying any objective values or intrinsic purposes to nature or humans that might resist monetization.

2. The economic activity of the community does not have any internal purpose or common good, but rather serves the external ends of producing exchange value for the market so that money can be privately accumulated—the social means of production are privatized, and the social form of surplus is in the form of private profit.

4. The two different senses of society:

a. Virtue Ethics: Holism – community is more than a mere aggregate of individuals or a mere convenient alliance: it is made possible by collective creativity, cooperation, and the sharing of social wealth. It thereby emerges into a new whole for its own sake, with greater social relations and qualities that allow individuals to flourish together at a higher level

b. society = a whole greater than the sum of its parts: think of society like a symphony, revealing new properties that make possible new capabilities in the members that would have hitherto been unknown.

i. The purpose of politics is to holistically unfold our higher social and rational capabilities for becoming active agents. It is about becoming active citizens in building community for its own sake.

1. This means politics is essentially oriented to (if not always in actual practice) the common good of transforming our relationships into a community of friends as an end in itself.

c. Utilitarianism: Atomism – society is understood as nothing more than a mere aggregate of private individuals who are externally related, competing with one another to accumulate private property, and coming together only to use each other for their particular ends.

d. Society is a void space in which individuals confront one another as bare individuals and not as members of a greater whole or common good. Think of random billiard balls colliding with each other, producing no greater whole or new properties no matter how they are arranged since they will always remain single units of quantitative force randomly related.

i. In other words, social life is seen as just an artificial body of commercial transactions and legal contracts between competing individuals in order to protect their private property from each other—this is a view that emerges only once a society is habituated to the total privatization of its social means of production—our material life activities are then no longer recognizably communal because they are organized as commodities on the basis of wage contracts for the arbitrary ends of someone else’s private profit.

ii. Politics is not for perfecting humanity as active social agents, but just a procedural and regulatory mechanism for controlling the chaos of competing private self-interests amongst individualistic consumers.

1. Political institutions are simply about maintaining an equilibrium amongst the competing forces of our base nature (i.e. balancing class division), and not about transforming human nature into new relationships that develop higher rational and social qualities (beyond class divisions).

2. Some philosophers characterize this difference of our modern political liberalism as a “politics of lesser evil” rather than a politics of the common good.