The Problem With Utilitarianism

i dont know if it will ever be practical to sacrifice a child for millions. unless you're a christian?

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

No, remember, it's all about me. Her conscience doesn't enter into it.

You're either being serious, confirming that your ethics are indeed that threadbare. Or you're being ironic, suggesting that you realize just how untenable your position has become, so you now deflect further rebuttals into the realm of humor. Whichever it is, I rest my case.

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

Night Ripper wrote:
No, remember, it's all about me. Her conscience doesn't enter into it.

You're either being serious, confirming that your ethics are indeed that threadbare. Or you're being ironic, suggesting that you realize just how untenable your position has become, so you now deflect further rebuttals into the realm of humor. Whichever it is, I rest my case.

Then you rest your case on nothing. Whether or not other people have no empathy doesn't change the fact that I have empathy and therefore such things are wrong to me. Why should my morality stem from anything but myself and my values? Have anything of substance to say other than declarations of victory?

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

If we should do whatever produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people and if raping a single child would produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people then we should rape that child.

This is the problem with utilitarianism. There's no mention of fairness, justice, virtue, honor. All human morality is just reduced to a form of arithmetic.

There are some lines we should never cross. It would be better for the entire world to suffer than to do something as evil as raping a child.

From the perseptive of libertarianism, ultilitarianism is anti libertarian. There is no avoiding this implication.

If one espouses ultilitarianism, one must logically also simultaneously espouse totalitarianism

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@stevecook172001,

stevecook172001 wrote:

Night Ripper wrote:

If we should do whatever produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people and if raping a single child would produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people then we should rape that child.

This is the problem with utilitarianism. There's no mention of fairness, justice, virtue, honor. All human morality is just reduced to a form of arithmetic.

There are some lines we should never cross. It would be better for the entire world to suffer than to do something as evil as raping a child.

From the perseptive of libertarianism, ultilitarianism is anti libertarian. There is no avoiding this implication.

If one espouses ultilitarianism, one must logically also simultaneously espouse totalitarianism

I should say, I make the above points with no particular axe to grind with regards to totalitariansim/libertariansim.

At least not at this juncture.

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@stevecook172001,

stevecook172001 wrote:

From the perseptive of libertarianism, ultilitarianism is anti libertarian. There is no avoiding this implication.

If one espouses ultilitarianism, one must logically also simultaneously espouse totalitarianism

That's interesting news about the 19th-century English hinkers and politicians who abolished the corn laws, moved established free trade, and just generally created the most nearly libertarian country in world history. These people were all Utilitarians, or heavily influenced by Utilitarianism. (For more information, Google "John Stuart Mill" or "Richard Cobden".

It's also news about the Chicago school of economics, dominated by people like Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, and Gary Becker. They powered the libertarian counter-revolution pushing back Keynesianism, and prepared the intellectual ground for the free-market reforms of the 80s. These people, too, were staunch Utilitarians.

Spinning off from Chicago-School economics is a libertarian reform movement in jurisprudence labelled "law and economics", pioneered by the economist Ronald Coase and the judge Richard Posner. They are both known as Utilitarians.

If you seriously believe Utiliarians are ipso facto anti-libertarian, you must have gotten your intellectual history from Ayn Rand, who famously called Milton Friedman a Socialist. I don't think you reach this conclusion from any fact-based account of intellectual history.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

stevecook172001 wrote:
From the perseptive of libertarianism, ultilitarianism is anti libertarian. There is no avoiding this implication.

If one espouses ultilitarianism, one must logically also simultaneously espouse totalitarianism

That's interesting news about the 19th-century English hinkers and politicians who abolished the corn laws, moved established free trade, and just generally created the most nearly libertarian country in world history. These people were all Utilitarians, or heavily influenced by Utilitarianism. (For more information, Google "John Stuart Mill" or "Richard Cobden".

It's also news about the Chicago school of economics, dominated by people like Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, and Gary Becker. They powered the libertarian counter-revolution pushing back Keynesianism, and prepared the intellectual ground for the free-market reforms of the 80s. These people, too, were staunch Utilitarians.

Spinning off from Chicago-School economics is a libertarian reform movement in jurisprudence labelled "law and economics", pioneered by the economist Ronald Coase and the judge Richard Posner. They are both known as Utilitarians.

If you seriously believe Utiliarians are ipso facto anti-libertarian, you must have gotten your intellectual history from Ayn Rand, who famously called Milton Friedman a Socialist. I don't think you reach this conclusion from any fact-based account of intellectual history.

When someone tells you X implies Y and then you say that some person believed X but not Y then all you've shown is that person didn't understand the implications of X. You haven't shown that X doesn't logically imply Y.

1 Reply

@Night Ripper,

As much as I enjoy discussing political philosophy here, there are limits to how much I can realistically write in an internet forum. These limits would be exceeded if I had to prove that all the above-referenced intellectuals were consistent thinkers who reached libertarian conclusions from utilitarian premises. You'll have to take my word for that. Alternatively, you are welcome to check by reading these writers' publications. You can also remain unpersuaded, which is fine with me too. Either way, I can't do your reading for you. I can only point you to the relevant sources.

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

As much as I enjoy discussing political philosophy here, there are limits to how much I can realistically write in an internet forum. These limits would be exceeded if I had to prove that all the above-referenced intellectuals were consistent thinkers who reached libertarian conclusions from utilitarian premises. You'll have to take my word for that.

All you need provide is a skeleton argument illustrating the claimed implication.

1 Reply

@ughaibu,

The skeleton argument, made in various versions by Utilitarians in Victorian England and at the Chicago School of Economics is empirical. After researching the outcomes produced by various economic and legal systems, they concluded that as a rule---

free markets, free trade, and other economic liberties tend to foster productivity,
free speech, free press, freedom of religion, and other civil liberties tend to make political errors easy to discover and correct, and
whatever inequities these freedoms produce can be corrected by technical fixes, without dismantling the basic framework of economic and civil liberty.

I can't list the all the empirical evidence and all the reasoning, but that's the skeleton of the Ultiliarian arguments for libertarian laws and institutions.

1 Reply

@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

The skeleton argument, made in various versions by Utilitarians in Victorian England and at the Chicago School of Economics is empirical. After researching the outcomes produced by various economic and legal systems, they concluded that as a rule---
free markets, free trade, and other economic liberties tend to foster productivity,

free speech, free press, freedom of religion, and other civil liberties tend to make political errors easy to discover and correct, and

whatever inequities these freedoms produce can be corrected by technical fixes, without dismantling the basic framework of economic and civil liberty.
I can't list the all the empirical evidence and all the reasoning, but that's the skeleton of the Ultiliarian arguments for libertarian laws and institutions.

Thanks.

1 Reply

@ughaibu,

You're welcome. In addition, let me recommend the book that I consider the best single instance of a Utilitarian making the case for libertarianism (*). It's John Stuart Mill: On Liberty. It's available as an e-book from numerous websites, including this one. Mill's essay on Utilitarianism is also worth reading.

_______
(*) Technically it's classical liberalism. But although somewhat more moderate, that's the same as modern American libertarianism for purposes of this thread.

1 Reply

@Thomas,

I've no interest in supporting Night Ripper's argument or example, but I have a few questions as to the limits of Utilitarianism's ethical efficacy. First, while utilitarianism seems like a useful tool for evaluating a particular moral action, it does not seem to provide the unquantifiable bases for making some value judgments. For example, what the value of one individual life is worth versus another individual life. It is easy to say that one life is worth less than two, or so on indefinitely, but a very difficult thing to determine a one v. one comparison. To extrapolate from my quandary, let me broach a possibly insulting question: What is the utilitarian argument for the abolition of slavery in the US? If the vast majority would lead far easier and pleasurable lives as a result, would the suffering of a small minority of people, who did not even enjoy the status of citizens, be "worth" it? If you were going to argue as to the political, or innately-human equality of that small minority how would you go about it? And how would your doing so be equated with Utilitarianism, strictly speaking?

I'm not asking the above questions in a hostile tone, I am simply trying to imagine it. I am not well versed in modern utilitarianism, so I'm sure some of the finer points have eluded me and the responses are obvious to someone more informed on the subject. I see how utilitarianism could be a useful critical tool to discriminate between current ethical norms, but I do not see how it could extend current, nor establish new, ethical norms. In other words, according to the view I have of it, utilitarianism could not be an engine to the ethical development of humanity, but more a filter through which this development must pass. I tend to dismiss the idea of progress as anything but a critical tool, so I'm not positing a moral/historical teleology as the background to my questions. I suppose I'm merely questioning how heretofore unheard-of ethical questions might arise in a utilitarian system.

I do own On Liberty, although I haven't looked at it in a long time, and I'm taking it down from the shelf as we speak, so hopefully I will have had an opportunity to review some of the points you want to address by the time you read this and (hopefully) respond. If you would prefer to summarize the points you would like to make in a bullet format like the one above, I would still appreciate it. As I said above, I hope you take my above questions and comments as naive and not as intentionally inflammatory.

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@Razzleg,

I've just read over a little of On Liberty, so I am beginning to imagine how a utilitarian endorsement of the abolitionist movement might read. Here is my projected utilitarian argument, based on my brief review of a portion of Mill's text: The human spirit will not be denied. Continued slavery would lead to many incidences of violent revolt, to the sympathetic freeing of some slaves, etc. until it would become self-evident that the abolition of the entire slave population was in the best interest of the whole of society.

But does this not show some of the limits of utilitarian discourse? The position of the so-called "slaves", for example, could not partake of utilitarian arguments, unless they were intended as akin to the sort of threat issued in a hostage situation: "We'll keep killing people until our demands are met." And if some white landowner were to point out the danger, couldn't some staunch defender of slavery point out that one could keep killing the leaders of revolt until a docile slave population was stabilized. It seems to me, that an argument for slavery could be made according to basic utilitarian principles; and while it might be regarded as pedantic or extreme, it might remain not untrue to the letter of utilitarianism. My point is that a diminishing margin of utility for certain arguments or positions could be arbitrarily assigned, but it wouldn't make the limit any less utilitarian. That is, the limits for utilitarian discourse are not established by utilitarian thinking, or utilitarianism must establish limits to its own method.

Am I totally off the rails here? I am still not entering this debate as a hostile party, but I am not seeing an intuitive solution to the possible problem I am referring to.

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@Razzleg,

Razzleg wrote:

I've no interest in supporting Night Ripper's argument or example, but I have a few questions as to the limits of Utilitarianism's ethical efficacy.

Whether or not you have an interest in doing so doesn't change the fact that you are doing so.

Razzleg wrote:

To extrapolate from my quandary, let me broach a possibly insulting question: What is the utilitarian argument for the abolition of slavery in the US? If the vast majority would lead far easier and pleasurable lives as a result, would the suffering of a small minority of people, who did not even enjoy the status of citizens, be "worth" it?

Exactly and while I never said that consequences were irrelevant, they are certainly not the whole story so utilitarianism can't possibly be true. In the end, there's more to morality than just happiness. There should be at least some kind of passing mention of justice, self-ownership, etc. Just saying that "right is whatever makes the most people the happiest" doesn't cut it.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

This is the problem with utilitarianism. There's no mention of fairness, justice, virtue, honor. All human morality is just reduced to a form of arithmetic.

Utilitarians are no less concerned about fairness, justice, virtue, and honor as anyone else who is concerned with morality. It's just that fairness, justice, virtue, and honor are all viewed through the prism of utility. For instance, a bargain is "fair" if it is viewed by the parties as producing the largest amount of utility for both sides. Now, that's not the "fairness" that, e.g., John Rawls talks about, but then that would just be imposing someone else's definition of "fairness" on utilitarians. It would be like a Christian criticizing Buddhism because it doesn't say anything about Jesus.

1 Reply

@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

Utilitarians are no less concerned about fairness, justice, virtue, and honor as anyone else who is concerned with morality.

I don't think so. If raping a child produces 5 units of sadness and 6 units of happiness then rape it is! There's no justice or virtue in that. Maybe I am defining these terms differently but so what? I'm accusing them of not conforming to my definition of fairness, etc, not theirs.

2 Replies

@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

stevecook172001 wrote:
From the perseptive of libertarianism, ultilitarianism is anti libertarian. There is no avoiding this implication.

If one espouses ultilitarianism, one must logically also simultaneously espouse totalitarianism

That's interesting news about the 19th-century English hinkers and politicians who abolished the corn laws, moved established free trade, and just generally created the most nearly libertarian country in world history. These people were all Utilitarians, or heavily influenced by Utilitarianism. (For more information, Google "John Stuart Mill" or "Richard Cobden".

It's also news about the Chicago school of economics, dominated by people like Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Ronald Coase, and Gary Becker. They powered the libertarian counter-revolution pushing back Keynesianism, and prepared the intellectual ground for the free-market reforms of the 80s. These people, too, were staunch Utilitarians.

Spinning off from Chicago-School economics is a libertarian reform movement in jurisprudence labelled "law and economics", pioneered by the economist Ronald Coase and the judge Richard Posner. They are both known as Utilitarians.

If you seriously believe Utiliarians are ipso facto anti-libertarian, you must have gotten your intellectual history from Ayn Rand, who famously called Milton Friedman a Socialist. I don't think you reach this conclusion from any fact-based account of intellectual history.

If a utilitarian believes that a restraint on freedom to act (or refrain from acting) by some people is permissable and desirable in order to afford a greater good, even if that restraint produces a greater proprtion of freedom overall, then yes, ipso-facto, such a utilitarian view is anti-libertarian.

If it merely espouses, in principle, the legitimacy of the limitation of the liberty of one, it is anti libertarian in principle. The numbers involved are of operational interets only. They are of no relevance in terms of the philisophical principle.

I repeat, I say the above with no particular axe to grind. This is beside the point of what I am saying here. For all you know I may agree with utilitarianism. It's simply that anti-liberarianism is a logically inevitable consequence of utilitarianism.

I can't see how you can logically deny this.

And please don't repeat the argument that it affords a greater freedom overall. This does not address the point I am making.

What bothers me is the implicit unspoken assumption that it is permissable to limit people's liberty. It's not the fact that such an approach limits the liberty of people. It's the philisophical squemishness evident in the lack of acknowledging this implication.

And lets not forget, such a ultiliatarian approach is not only implicated in limiting the freedom of some. it may aslo be sued as a justification of the diurect harmiong of some for th greater utilitarian good.

Who gets to decide what is for the greater good? Who gets to veto their decisions if they don't agree with them.

Now, in anticipatiuon of your reply to all of the above taking the form of arguning that I am using extremes to disporove the validity of something that would never operate at those extremes, how do you know they won'? We live in an blip of human history where the state has been fairly beignn by hiostorical standards. Even then not always so (See Stalin and Hitler for details).

And who the hell is Ayn Rand?

1 Reply

@Razzleg,

Razzleg wrote:

For example, what the value of one individual life is worth versus another individual life. It is easy to say that one life is worth less than two, or so on indefinitely, but a very difficult thing to determine a one v. one comparison.

In the law-and-economics school of thought, the basic approach that the value of your life is best measured by your willingness to pay for safety.

To caricature the practical process bit, they might---

compare the salaries of rabbit trainers to the salaries of lion trainers,
assume that the difference compensates for the risk of being killed by the lion vs. being eaten by the rabbit,
divide that amount by the probability of the risk happening, and
the result is the market value of a human life.

Steve Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has a Slate article describing the approach in some more detail. He concludes that by this measure, a human life is typically worth around $5 million. And that's (basically) how a Utilitarian would trade off lives against each other, and against other values.

Razzleg wrote:

To extrapolate from my quandary, let me broach a possibly insulting question: What is the utilitarian argument for the abolition of slavery in the US? If the vast majority would lead far easier and pleasurable lives as a result, would the suffering of a small minority of people, who did not even enjoy the status of citizens, be "worth" it?

The Utilitarian answer is that the premise of your question is wrong. When you realistically compare the intensity of the slaves' suffering with the extent of the slave owners' benefits, the institution of slavery did not create a net increase in happiness.

For empirical evidence, you might look at post-civil war work conditions in cotton fields. While far from ideal, they were substantially better for the laborers than slavery. If antebellum labor conditions had constituted a net benefit, that wouldn't have happened: Former slave owners could have recreated these conditions---gang labor etc---while paying a wage that the former slaves would voluntarily accept. But they couldn't. Slavery-era work conditions weren't sustaniable at any wage that former owners were willing to pay and former slaves were willing to work for. Which proves these conditions weren't a utility-maximizing arrangement.

But you're right: there are arrangements that one might call slavery that Utilitarians would approve of. For example, in the 17th and 18th century, European emigrants to America sometimes couldn't pay their passage in cash. To pay the captain anyway, they would allow him to auction them off into indentured servitude on arrival in America. Highest bid---whoever pays for the trip for the shortest time of indentured servitude---wins. Semantic niceties aside, this arrangement involves a period of slavery for the immigrant---typically 2-3 years historically. Yet I'm pretty sure most Utilitarians would approve of it: judging by the captain's and the emigrant's revealed preferences, it did provide a net benefit for both.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

I'm accusing them of not conforming to my definition of fairness, etc, not theirs.

Oh, I see. Well, in that case, you're a moron.

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The Problem With Utilitarianism

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