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Liberty and Equality in Hedonistic Utilitarianism 1

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Liberty and Equality in Hedonistic Utilitarianism 1 LIBERTY AND EQUALITY IN HEDONISTIC UTILITARIANISM 1. What is Utilitarianism? How should societies be organized? Should we have a democracy with competing political parties, or rule of a single party? Private property or common resources? Religious liberty or an established church; strong privacy rights? How much freedom of expression on political, scientific, cultural, and artistic issues? And what about the policy of a country toward other countries: how much support does one country owe to others? Answering these questions depends in part on empirical knowledge: it is hard to decide what the best tax system is without having some ideas about how people respond to tax rates, and hard to know which form of democracy is best without some ideas about how different forms work. But our answers also depend on our political principles and values: on a political morality. So what political morality should we use to guide our answers? According to the utilitarian tradition of moral and political thought— whose great exponents included Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill—the correct standard is the principle of utility, or "greatest happiness principle." This principle provides the sole ultimate standard of right and wrong conduct. Here is a relatively crisp statement of the principle: Principle of Utility: In any circumstances, that action ought to be done (is right) and that institution ought to obtain (is right) which, of all the alternatives available, produces the greatest net balance of happiness Justice, Spring 2006—2 over unhappiness, when we sum happiness and unhappiness over all sentient beings, from now into the future. The crucial feature of utilitarian political morality is that it calls for the maximization of aggregate happiness: it is concerned only about happiness and unhappiness, and with respect to happiness, only about its sum—and not any particular distribution of happiness. It follows from this emphasis on aggregation that utilitarianism requires that we make simple trade-offs of the burdens on some people (say, slaves) and benefits to other people (say, masters). A large pleasure to a master outweighs a large—but not quite as large—burden of pain on a slave, no matter how severe the pain for the slave. The importance of an individual’s life for political morality, then, is exhausted by the amount of happiness in that life, and thus the contribution to the aggregate. 2. Two Reasons for Endorsing Utilitarianism Why might we endorse the principle of utility as the basis of our political philosophy? Two considerations are especially important to the utilitarian’s case for the principle. Consequentialism: Most fundamentally, the principle of utility represents a refinement of the intuitive idea that conduct and policy are right just in case they have the best overall results: Bentham said that “thinking men look to consequences.” Utilitarianism develops this consequentialist idea by identifying the goodness of an act’s consequences with the amount of happiness produced by the act.1 So if the right institutions or conduct are those with the best Justice, Spring 2006—3 consequences, and if one set of consequences is better than another just in case it contains more overall happiness, then what is right is what produces the greatest happiness overall. Moral Equality: By assigning the happiness of each affected party equal weight, the principle of utility also represents one way to treat affected individuals as moral equals. Utilitarianism does not require that individuals be equally happy, but in maximizing the sum, each individual’s happiness gets precisely the same weight.2 So utilitarianism is a universalistic moral view: the standards of right action take into account all sentient beings. The moral community is not confined to our own society, or to the current generation, nor do the members of our society or current generation or species get any special weight. 3. Utilitarianism, Rights, and Fairness The idea that the goodness of consequences is one important consideration in evaluating conduct and institutions is familiar and not very controversial. And the idea that consequences are better if they involve greater happiness is also plausible. But is this the whole story? Or does utilitarianism unacceptably narrow the range of considerations relevant to deciding what is right? Take the case of rights, for example. It is a commonplace in this political culture that individuals have rights that ought not to be abridged even in the name of promoting greater community welfare. We do not think it is legitimate to punish the innocent or to deprive people of their religious liberty simply Justice, Spring 2006—4 because such punishments and deprivations increase the sum of social happiness by contributing so much to the happiness of others. Or take the value of fairness. We ask whether policies or institutions are in some way unfairly burdensome to some individuals: we look to how opportunities, benefits, and burdens are distributed across people, and resist the purely aggregative idea that a large sum of small benefits distributed across a big group always outweighs a smaller sum of big burdens concentrated on a very small group. But for utilitarians, the principle of utility is the sole axiom of political morality. No matter what the kind or magnitude of the burden a policy or institution imposes on some, utilitarians must endorse it if it confers greater benefits on others. Aggregate happiness is all matters. What then does the utilitarian say about rights and fairness? Consider the issue of basic rights. The classical utilitarians were strong liberals: proponents of a fair legal system with protections for the innocent, rights to religious liberty, and freedom of speech and press. So they did not deny the importance of rights. But they did argue that rights are not independent bases of political argument, operating alongside the general happiness. Rather, people ought to have rights if and only if rights contribute to overall happiness. Take a contemporary example: Should people who are suffering and whose future prospects are dim, have a right to terminate their own lives and call on a doctor to help? To answer, the utilitarian asks whether the reduction in pain for the suffering individual is overbalanced by, for example, increased suffering Justice, Spring 2006—5 for family members, or greater suffering in society because assisted suicide indirectly reduces respect for life. If the reduced suffering is not overbalanced, then there is a right to assisted suicide. About bodily integrity more generally, the utilitarians thought that the burdens imposed by infringements of bodily integrity were greater than the benefits to others resulting from those infringements. And the same for religious liberty: the burdens on dissenters were greater than the benefits to others of religious uniformity. And that’s why people should have rights to bodily integrity and religious liberty. Common views about rights, then, mix truth and illusion: the truth is that rights are important; the illusion is that their importance is fundamental, indeed more fundamental than the general welfare.3 Instead, they are important because they increase overall happiness: they promote aggregate social welfare. And that, in the end, is all that matters. 4. Bentham's Interpretation of the Principle of Utility I have been discussing utilitarianism in general, and have referred several times to deriving various conclusions from the principle of utility. But to apply the principle of utility, we need to understand what happiness is, and what sorts of things produce it. Thus consider Bentham’s account of utility. First, then, "utility" is "the tendency to produce good consequences." So the principle of utility expresses the consequentialist idea that conduct is right just in case it has the best consequences. Justice, Spring 2006—6 But what makes some consequences better than others? Bentham’s proposes a hedonist theory of value on which pleasure (which he identifies with happiness) is the only thing good in and of itself, and not good because of its consequences.4 Knowledge and beauty, for example, are not good in themselves, but only for their effects. So conduct has utility only if it tends to produce pleasure5; and choices maximize utility when they are maximally productive of pleasure. But what is pleasure? Bentham tells us that pleasures are "interesting perceptions,"6 by which he means mental states that we take an interest in or find it desirable to have. And what produces pleasure and pain? Bentham's answer is (basically) a self-interested variant of psychological hedonism. "Psychological hedonism" is the view that people act to produce the greatest pleasure for themselves; the egoistic variant claims that what brings a person pleasure is principally a matter of the state of that agent—that pleasures and pain are principally “self- regarding”—from bodily enjoyment, money, power, and life itself. Bentham agrees that we sometimes derive pleasure from the pleasures of others— motivated by goodwill, we get the pleasures of sympathy or benevolence.7 Sometimes we derive pleasures from their pain: the pleasures of antipathy or malevolence.8 But self-regarding pleasures are the “most powerful, most constant, and most extensive.”9 Finally, to maximize the sum of happiness, we need to measure pleasures, and compare magnitudes across people. To this end, Bentham Justice, Spring 2006—7 proposes that the quantity of pleasure is determined by its two natural dimensions—its intensity, and its duration (the amount of time it lasts).10 Better pleasures are interesting perceptions that last longer and/or are more intense. 5. Utilitarianism and Liberty Thus far, I have been focusing on the foundations of political morality. But the classical utilitarians—Bentham and Mill—were political reformers. A utilitarian society, they thought, would not only be a more rational society—founded on a calculation on beneficial consequences—but one with greater freedom and equality.
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