BY SEAN WALSH
There are decent utilitarian grounds for junking utilitarian thinking.
Photo: Jeremy Bentham, founder of the utilitarian crime family, in a box, where he belongs.
What the philosophers call utilitarianism is actually a family of moral theories with all the feuds, competitiveness and fickle alliances that families tend to have. There may be nuances involved, but there is an intellectual genealogy which takes you from Jeremy Bentham to Peter Singer, a traceable line of descent. There is no striking family resemblance in play, aside from a presumably congenital moral priggishness.
I need to say straight away, and without apology, that this family’s influence is ubiquitous and pernicious. For any offence against decency you will be sure to find a utilitarian argument lurking in the vicinity, sometimes offering to help clear up the mess it was responsible for in the first place.
Utilitarian thinking is there in the Net Zero climate idolatry, it motivates the new eugenicists of the assisted suicide movement, it underwrites the ridiculous “thought experiments” of the effective altruists.
(Indeed, it’s hard to see how any of those tiresome and contrived ethical counterfactuals, like the “trolley problem” or the “shallow pond” argument, can be reformulated once their utilitarian assumptions are abandoned. So these also can be added to the charge sheet.)
Utilitarianism benefits from its proximity to a sentiment or intuition that nobody would dispute: that it is better to have a world in which there is more good than bad and therefore we should choose to act in ways more likely to bring this about. Even I would go along with that, and a more militant defender (if not practitioner) of Catholic social teaching you’d struggle to find.
But it is one thing to think that we should act in ways which, ceteris paribus, are likely to increase overall happiness or decrease overall harm. It is quite another to stipulate that the moral content of a choice or action is determined only by its consequences.
There is something unattractive about morality as mathematics, the suggestion that in negotiating “ethically” the caprices and ambiguities of a fallen world we are applying some sort of moral calculus. But the objection goes beyond aesthetics, or perhaps it’s better to say that the unattractiveness of the theory is an indicator of more structural flaws.
Genuine mathematical theories can be beautiful, and (I think this was Paul Dirac’s view) their beauty is what makes them likely to be true. But mathematics requires rules of procedure and demands clarity of terms. Utilitarianism fails badly here.
How do you define happiness or harm except by using moral resources unavailable to the theory itself? And how do you have methods of calculation unless you can be clear just which people fall within the scope of our choices?
Take this example. Singer, famously, lectures us that geographical distance is irrelevant when it comes to the moral demands placed on me by the needs of other people, for this is accidental and therefore inessential to the moral calculation. And just as we should not favour those who contingently happen to be close to us physically, nor should we disregard our duties to those who happen to be distant in the future. Hence we must include future generations as potential but nevertheless real victims or beneficiaries of current choices or policy formulation.
But if we have obligations to those not yet born, do we have duties also to those now passed? And if there is an asymmetry here, how does the utilitarian calculus deal with that. These are very mysterious variables indeed.
Take the moral lunacy du jour, “Net Zero” fetishism. I happen to agree that we have obligations to future generations, and that some of these are to do with the environment. I dispute, however, that these can be calculated because the issue here is not one of calculation but of stewardship.
These are obligations which cannot be contained within the dubious and vague metrics of utilitarian “mathematics”. They are preserved and passed down the generational line within a shared cultural space, preferably one generated in part by traditions of family farming. It is the farmer and not the moral ersatz scientist who is the policy expert here.
Perhaps the defeater for utilitarianism is that it assumes that moral objectivism implies that human beings must disregard the particularities of their own situation in deciding how they ought to act. This does not follow, however. And no plausible moral theory should urge that what makes you you must be abstracted away before you can know which of your choices are good and which would please the devil.
This is not far from the objection to utilitarian ethics formulated by the philosopher Bernard Williams. It must be the case that a picture (I hesitate to say theory) of human nature logically precedes a workable moral philosophy. And utilitarianism has nothing to offer here. It is insensitive to the fact that people attach value to their own projects and priorities and what can this fact be if not a moral one?
Williams was a classicist as well as a philosopher, and in his brilliant Shame and Necessity offers a tentative moral anthropology, one which integrates the insights of Homer and the Ancients. These poets were, at the very least, not making the intellectual error of assuming that we can mathematise the requirements of the human heart.
And has it ever occurred that one way to maximise the overall happiness might be to disregard utilitarian thinking completely, whether it’s true or not?