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Jeremy Bentham
Utilitarianism has become so entrenched in modern life, and particularly in public policy, that we often don’t even realize that an ethical framework is being deployed. Instead, we assume that the best action is going to be the one that produces the best consequences, and we’re accustomed to thinking that what counts as the best consequence is total human welfare.
But how do we measure happiness or welfare? One method that is is used is to measure the market cost of various goods (modern economic theory has its roots in utilitarianism). For goods that aren’t bought and sold on open markets (e.g., spending time hanging out with friends), we can measure how much people value a good by asking them what payment they would accept in order to give it up. At the same time, we have to keep in mind that for most people, their happiness cannot be reduced simply to material possessions (i.e., “Can’t buy me lo-o-ove“).
It’s worth distinguishing utilitarianism from several nearby positions.
1. ETHICAL EGOISM. The ethical egoist claims that morality demands that individuals always act in their own best long-term self-interest. Utilitarianism, similarly, evaluates what is good based on people’s preferences (Mill referred to the total sum of happiness of all people affected by an action). However, the utilitarian does not say that each individual should act in their own self-interest. Rather, individuals should do what is required for the good of the group as a whole, and it is the total welfare that determines what that desired action is.
John Stuart Mill
2. EPICUREANISM: Utilitarianism does share some elements with ancient Greek epicureanism. For instance, both hold that pleasure and pain are the measure of what is good and bad. And both put a high value on empirical investigation. For both, “the good life” is a life that has a high ratio of pleasure to pain, and so pursuit of pleasure is a basis for moral action. However, one difference is that Epicurus thought that this evaluation of pleasure and pain would lead people to value and pursue tranquility or a state of mental peace. Pursuing tranquility would lead people to withdraw from politics and other stressful situations or concerns. In contrast, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were very involved in politics. Mill was a Member of Parliament for several years and an advocate for women’s rights.
3. COMMUNISM: It seems ironic that utilitarianism has close relations both with the evaluative practices of capitalist economics, particularly cost-benefit analysis, and also with communism. In structure, the socio-economic theory of communism resembles Bentham’s utilitarianism in that both prioritize the good of the group over the good of the individual. However, the two theories differ at many points as well. For instance, redistribution of goods to create social and economic equality is a central tent of communism. But a common criticism of utilitarian theories is that they don’t necessarily pay attention to distributive justice. Indeed, Karl Marx was a prominent critic of utilitarianism.
Some key ideas from this week’s lecture:
- Kantian ethics responds to the need for moral truths to have an independent justification which depends on reason and not just on intuition or implicit agreement.
- Kant argues that if a law is to be morally valid, then it must follow with absolute necessity.
- He provides such an algorithm in the form of the Categorical Imperative.
- The Categorical Imperative is similar to–but more universal and less personal than–the Golden Rule.
- The Categorical Imperative is both universal and exceptionless. In this way, its form resembles mathematical truths.
- The core of morality is not what we do but why we do it.
- Principle-based ethical theories are called deontological.
If you have any questions, feel free to raise them in the comments section.
Just for fun, here’s what a political attack ad against Kant would be like:
In class, we’ve distinguished between descriptive theories and prescriptive (or normative) theories.
Psychological egoism is descriptive: it says that people act selfishly (as a matter of fact). We can disprove this thesis when we give examples of people acting unselfishly.
Ethical egoism is normative: it says that people should act selfishly (whether they actually do or not). Acting to further one’s own self-interests becomes the way to define morality for the ethical egoist. An ethical egoist believes that an altruist is not living up to the highest standards of integrity. The egoist believes that the altruist is manipulated and weak for not pursuing egoism.
Looking at actual behavior does not necessarily tell us much about how people ought to behave. If morality were nothing more than always following our intuitions, there would be no point to having either moral codes or ethical theories.
However, I do think (and many other philosophers agree) that we can learn something from studying actual behavior. For example, we can learn whether people find it easy or difficult to act in ways they believe are moral.
I used the example in class of the ultimatum game, which shows that many people value fairness above self-interest. Studies by economists and psychologists have shown that while extreme acts of altruism are rare, altruism that meets the following criteria is quite common:
1. People are willing to sacrifice their own material well-being to help those who are being kind.
The attempt to provide public goods without coercion departs from pure self-interest. Experiments show that people cooperate to contribute toward a public good to a degree greater than would be implied by pure self-interest. Individually optimal contribution rates, as defined by the standard utility model, are close to 0 percent. However, in experiments, the willingness for an individual to contribute to a public good is highly contingent on the behavior of others.
2. People are willing to sacrifice their own material well-being to punish those who are being unkind.
Evidence is provided by the ultimatum game, consisting of two people, a proposer and decider, splitting a fixed amount of money. The proposer offers a division of the money, then the decider decides if he or she refuses or accepts the proposal. If the decider says yes, they split the money according to the proposer’s offer, but if the decider says no, neither person gets any money. The standard utility model would find that any offer proposed to the decider should be expected if it is greater than zero because utility should increase with any increase in income. Along the same lines, the standard utility model would predict that the proposer would offer the smallest amount of money possible to the decider in order to maximize his or her own utility. However, data shows that deciders are willing to punish any unfair offer and proposers tend to make fair offers.
3. Both motivations 1 and 2 have a greater effect on behavior as the material cost of sacrificing becomes smaller.
So, to return to the student’s question:
You [actually it was David Kannyo] brought up the end to slavery as an example of moral progress. There is no minimum sentence or punishment for people found guilty of human trafficking in the US. (That’s the fancy modern word for dancing around the term slave trade.) And, in this article I read, a man found guilty of selling two teenage girls into the sex slave industry was sentenced to only 5 years imprisonment.
Anyway, in thinking about this, I came across a question I can’t answer dealing with moral relativism. It seems that the major counter-argument to relativism is that it leads us to a world of moral chaos. But the harder I look the more I come to the conclusion that we do live in a world of moral chaos.It seems that we keep being told in class and in the book that relativism is a naive moral position but I’m failing to see why?
Yes, so this is exactly the question that I hope I can make some sense of. First, I want to save for later the question of moral chaos. Perhaps we do live in a world of moral chaos. But there might be different ways of explaining it.
I don’t want to deny that there are sophisticated forms of moral relativism. There are some. Also, moral objectivism can raise some problems too. These questions are way too deep to answer in one week. In fact, we could have an upper-level philosophy class on only this question and still cover only a fraction of the material! My aim is just to identify some common inconsistencies that can be found in a version of naive relativism.
Here’s the problem. Say I’m an objectivist. And I think that slavery is wrong. I think that it was wrong in 1700, and I think that it was wrong in 1860, and I think that it is wrong in 2010. I think that slavery is wrong in the United States, in Sudan, and in Pakistan. I think that slavery is wrong because holding people in bondage is to treat people as animals and allows them no control over their lives. Because I’m an objectivist, I can give reasons of that sort. They are moral reasons, and they justify my position.
At the same time, I see that there are moral dilemmas that cannot be easily resolved. I understand that sometimes girls are sold into sexual slavery because it is the only way that their parents can afford to feed the other children in the family. The parents here have to make a regrettable choice. Perhaps their poverty is such that none of the options available to them achieves a positive result. I can understand that, and I can sympathize with it, and I can still say that slavery is immoral. This lays the foundation for treating it as a problem and for trying to change the conditions that force the parents to make that choice.
Now, do you think that there is something wrong with slavery? Always wrong with slavery? If you do, then you cannot also be a relativist. A relativist might say: if it happens in a culture, then it’s OK in that culture. Relativists cannot pass a negative judgment on others–not even within the secret walls of their minds.
A relativist says: slavery is wrong just in case the culture says it’s wrong. Thus, slavery was morally OK in Alabama in 1850 but not in 1870. Why? Because the Confederate States lost the Civil War. But isn’t there something odd about that? Should the moral status of slavery (its rightness or wrongness) depend, for example, on the size of the population in these warring factions or on which side had more industrial development?
So this is why we call naive relativism a threat to ethics–it’s because the reasons that relativism gives for moral beliefs are not rational reasons. They are contingent reasons.
The objectivist can argue about moral problems. The objectivist can reason about what is good or bad, and why, and whether moral problems have solutions. The objectivist can also change his or her mind and explain why that happened. The objectivist can say “I used to be in favor of the death penalty because I thought x and y. But then I learned something new and saw it in a new way. I had overlooked the importance of z, and so now I think that the death penalty is wrong and should be abolished.” That is how we do ethics.
But the relativist can only ask: “Do people believe that?” And if they do, then go with the flow.
So, to repeat, it is not consistent to agree to both these statements:
- People make their own moral rules.
- Abortion should be illegal. (Or any other policy that would deny others the ability to make their own moral choices.)
Now, what is the objectivist’s answer to the question of moral chaos? Is this the same as asking “If ethics is objective, then why don’t we all act according to the same ethical rules?” Here are just a few reasons, and there are many more:
- We don’t all know the same things, and we sometimes disagree about the facts.
- Some people know what’s right but do what they know is wrong because they are led by passion rather than by reason or a moral sense.
- Thinking about ethics is really hard, and there are many things to take into account.
- Sometimes we know what is right (ending slavery) but we don’t know how to do it–or we know in general how to do it (e.g. by ending poverty) but we don’t have the resources.
In a private e-mail, one of the students in our class (anonymous because I didn’t ask permission to quote), asked me if knew that there is a modern-day slave trade. And also asked some hard questions about moral relativism. These are both worth thinking about, so I’d like to share my answers with everyone.
Yes, it’s astonishing that there is a contemporary slave trade. And it’s also astonishing that, depending on how you define it, it’s so huge: hundreds of thousands if not millions of people–worth billions of dollars–around the globe annually.
What counts as slavery today? A basic definition of slavery is treating a person as though they are property, denying them basic freedoms and forcing them to engage in unpaid labor. Many activities fit that description, including sex trafficking, in which girls are forced to work in brothels–sometimes sold into the sex trade by their families. (I’ll say something in class about some people at RIT who are working to help keep girls out of this sad situation.)
But human trafficking is not just a problem for girls–both boys and girls are sometimes sold (in some parts of the world) to work as child soldiers. In addition, there is forced labor in mines and other industries. Women who are forced into marriages where they are treated only as servants and have no freedoms–and sometimes not even enough food–can also be considered slaves.
Finally, there are also human trafficking cases in the US and even in New York State. In 2002, there was a case of illegal migrant farm workers who were brought here to pick in orchards. They were not paid, were barely fed, were forced to live in squalor, had no means of communication, and were told that if they tried to leave, then the landowner would call Immigration and they would be deported or possibly killed. Yes, it is against the law to attempt to immigrate illegally to the United States. But it is also illegal to hold people in bondage, and this case was tried as a federal slavery case.
Here are some 2007 Department of Justice statistics (from this site):
- 83% of all alleged reported trafficking incidents involved sex trafficking, and one third, or 32%, of the total involved the sex trafficking of children. 71% of sex trafficking victims were under age 25.
- Over 90% of the victims, overall, were female. Hispanics are particularly hard hit: Hispanic victims constituted 37% of all sex trafficking victims and 56% of labor trafficking victims.
- It’s also clear that sex trafficking is a local problem. The stats show that U.S. citizens accounted for 63%, or a clear majority, of sex trafficking victims.
Reminder: a homework assignment is due on Wednesday. And, yikes, there’s also one due on Friday!
Anxious? Confused? Read more about my expectations for homework (“reflective comments”) here.
The history of this assignment, in case you’re wondering, is that for a while I tried having no check-up on how and whether students were reading the assignments, except for the most important writing assignments and the final exam. Most students did not, in fact, read, and it showed in our boring and pathetic discussions. And a number of students told me that they wish they had read, but they just needed more pressure or more reward.
So then I tried frequent in-class quizzes. That was no fun for anyone. I hated making them, students hated taking the class time away from discussion to take them, and there were always some people who had tried to do the reading but just happened to zone out on the thing I asked about.
But the last time couple of times I taught this class, these homework assignments were quite successful. You get credit for doing the reading, they’re hard to fake, I listen and respond to your thoughts, and our discussions are really great because nearly everyone is prepared with something to say. I hope you, too, think that this is a good solution.
In class today, we considered two scenarios published by the moral psychologist Jon Haidt.
In one exercise, we evaluated how we felt about a set of comparable scenarios. (Which would you rather do: stick a pin in your own palm, or in the palm of child you don’t know?) Haidt argued that if people are only motivated by self-interest, as classical economics assumes they are, then they would rather stick a pin in someone else’s hand.
However, most of us would rather stick a pin in our own palm than in a child’s palm or, presumably, anyone else’s palm. Also, there were a number of situations in which a “rational” person would have no particular preference, but people with particular moral outlooks do. For instance, some people would never slap their father (or mother!), not even with permission or as part of a comedy skit, though they would have no problem slapping a friend in that situation.
What this exercise showed is that many people have moral commitments that are distinct from their own rational self-interest. One such moral commitment, founded on a shared emotion, is that incest is wrong even if it creates no deplorable consequences. On a rational level, it’s hard to explain why it would be wrong. But on an emotional level, the reaction is very strong and immediate. It would not be surprising if there were a biological and evolutionary reason for such an emotion.
If you’re interested in Jon Haidt’s work, here is a TED talk called “The real difference between liberals and conservatives” and here is a Bloggingheads interview on “Happiness and the Foundations of Morality.”
I’d also like to point out a fascinating article on psychopaths. It is by John Seabrook and published in The New Yorker. Seabrook says that psychopathy is
the condition of moral emptiness that affects between fifteen to twenty-five per cent of the North American prison population, and is believed by some psychologists to exist in one per cent of the general adult male population. (Female psychopaths are thought to be much rarer.) Psychopaths don’t exhibit the manias, hysterias, and neuroses that are present in other types of mental illness. Their main defect, what psychologists call “severe emotional detachment”—a total lack of empathy and remorse—is concealed.
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