Blame utilitarianism!

I’ve heard Kant blamed for the Holocaust too many times to not quibble with your last statement, but I do agree that among some there is a visceral rejection of utilitarianism in all its instances. I am not sure why this is exactly, but I think the cold rationalism celebrating by most utilitarians is very off-putting for normal humans, and that same calculative logic of costs and benefits seems to be the very antithesis of moral thinking (to many).

Is Kant the one with the idea you should only do something if it would be sanctionable for everyone to do that thing? Like you ought not pick wildflowers because if everyone picked wildflowers… Or was that someone else? Kant like walking in a very routine way didn’t he?
Peter Singer is well mannered and polite face to face in my limited experience – he came to walk one of the old tracks through the bush here one time, although one of his party met with a small mishap on the trail and had to go to hospital. The ends of some of his logical paths are rather repugnant though insofar as I’m aware of them – although as far as I know it only goes to rhetoric with him, unlike a dramatic protagonist words don’t turn to deeds with him, so presumably he has some pause about this conclusions or else at least is restrained by law…

I think utilitarianism largely operates as a euphemism for market rationality and as the latter expands to encompass human relations broadly speaking (that is, when extra-market relations become akin to market relations) people find the forms of behavior it engenders to be problematic.

people find Peter Singer so damn sinister because his worldview is extremely unsettling for the vast majority of individuals. usually, the crucial tell which reveals that Prof. Singer is something akin to a certain Peter Seller’s character is the combination of the ‘infanticide should be legal’ stance, and the ‘don’t eat meat’ stance. even in the link provided above( @4 ) we see the interaction of these two positions to be the real stumbling block.

i mean, one could cite Singer’s opposition to any number of traditional cultural values as a source for this perception – his aversion to materialism (ie consumerism), or decrying the preference of friends and family over abstract human individuals, or the argument that the value of life is situationally and developmentally dependent. but at the end of the day, i really believe it is his rejection of anthropocentricism (real or perceived) which ruffles peoples’ feathers, so to speak.

I mean, does Peter Singer actually feel pain, anyway?

SoU: Nice strawmanning, but the point for me is that Singer continues to advocate the desirability of killing people in various categories well after people like Berube have demonstrated that he simply doesn’t have the knowledge to make the judgments he does. He’s got the classic tyrant’s confidence in his own insightfulness, though he lacks the tyrant’s power to put those whims into practice. He’s not a practical threat to most people the way someone like GW Bush was, but he is an influential voice in some biomedical decision-making, and puts at risk categories of people that include people I like and care about, and people Berube cares about, and he shows no sign of feeling that he has anything to learn about the limits of his own mental grasp.

“Sinister” is a very convenient shorthand for all this.

Brett @10: consequences matter

What else matters?

@11 –

Not sure how I was “strawmanning” – given that I wasn’t trying to argue against the purported views, merely trying to characterize the arguments of detractors, per my experience, in line with the OP. You seem to be itching for a debate over Singer as an ethicist or infanticide or something, but i don’t think that is the point of this thread.

SoU, John H. asked a question I felt qualified to answer. Unlike most questions asked by posters here. :) So I answered it.

Geo, that’s a heck of an endorsement. I’ll take a look at it. Thank you, seriously.

People don’t like utilitarianism because it undermines their privilege.

geo @13

“Brett @10: consequences matter

What else matters?”

Isn’t the problem that you don’t know what the ends will be of these sort of actions? I’m not sure what is supposed to count as a nonconsequentialist moral system exactly, but it seem to me that you have some kind of control over intentions and actions, but not so very much control over ultimate ends?.

“The age of chivalry is gone. – That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

Heh, yesterday I read “Rival Views of Market Society” by Hirschman (recommended by Henry in the post below), and, what a coincidence, that’s just what it talks about. He calls it the “feudal-blessing thesis”.

It’s quite the jump from ‘the bloody history of the French Revolution’ to ‘proportional voting’, Mr Russello!

I believe the alternative to consequentialism is the view that acts themselves, regardless of consequences, are to be evaluated according to their piety, aesthetics, pleasure, or for some other immediate or intrinsic reason.

If only consequences matter, then nothing matters, because every action and event has further consequences and metaconsequences which are all that matter, and can never come to ground anywhere; or have no consequences.

I have read only a small part of Peter Singer’s oeuvre — Animal Liberation and some articles — and I came away with the distinct impression that Singer was a kind of philosophical provocateur whose favored modus operandi is to take some set of things his targets generally believe and show how principles derived from that set can be extended to support things they find reprehensible, like vegetarianism or infanticide. Given that most people maintain contradictory ideas and principles, this seems to me to be a sort of shooting fish in a philosophical barrel, and could give people the feeling that they were being played. On the other hand, that sort of thing can be useful in (for example) political disputes as a form of polemic. And I have to acknowledge that, being a vegetarian, Singer’s work has helped me shut up people who objected gratuitously to my practice, for which I am thankful.

“Why do so many people hate utilitarianism so much? No one hates Kant’s ethics this much, but it’s just as weird a theory, isn’t it? And quite influential. When was the last time that someone blamed Kant for damn near everything?”

Like some others, I’d like to object to this: there are a lot of people who hate, hate, hate Kant. To start with, the majority of philosophy students I teach. But I also know a lot of philosophy professors who hate Kant. If you mean why do so many people *in the average population* hate utilitarianism, it’s a different matter. They don’t hate Kant or deontological ethics because they have no idea what it is. If you explain it to them (especially the “categorical imperative” part), many will hate it.

The general population hates utilitarianism because it’s used as a short-hand scapegoat for scary politics: in usage, it’s like “fascism”; it’s definition in the general populace is “justification of political views I don’t like.” I have a student this term who equates it with “the ends justifies the means” and he equates the latter with Stalinism. Both equations are bullshit, of course, but many think that way. 50 years ago, for Americans utilitarianism was equivalent with communism (caring more about the greater good than my hard earned money!). Remember the presumed inferiority of Spock’s consequentialism to Kirk’s, Bushian, from the gut, passionate Kierkegaardianism? Now it’s equated with Obamacare death panels, stem cell research, and vegetarianism. Of course, that’s all bullshit, since utilitarianism is the real logic of capitalism, not of the left, but oh well.

I do find Singer sinister. In part because of his overconfidence in his conclusions despite often very dubious reasoning, in part because of his moralistic self-righteous tone. And also because of arguments like this one, in which he endorse in principle (not in practice!) the systematic genocide of carnivorous species:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/the-meat-eaters/

The worst part is that he is not willing to follow utilitarian logic to its most logical and only truly reasonable conclusion: end sentience in order to ensure the lowest absolute level of suffering: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/should-this-be-the-last-generation/

Like truly rational people, I don’t accept the equation of suffering with evil or of pleasure with good. But if I did, at least I’d be freaking consistent about it. And I do think that many forms of suffering are sufficiently evil that it’s absolutely absurd that anyone can claim to be a utilitarian and endorse the active promotion of sentient life.

His argument is: “I am enough of an optimist to believe that, should humans survive for another century or two, we will learn from our past mistakes and bring about a world in which there is far less suffering than there is now.” Ivan in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov has already answered that absurd argument. Putting aside that it’s utterly absurd to believe such a world will be achieved soon, permanently, or even frequently, it ignores the long history of quantitatively unmatchable animal and human suffering that got us their. If that’s the price of admission, on behalf of billions of years of torture, I respectfully return my ticket.

Ha! While I was cavalierly tossing off another uncompromising defense of consequentialism, William was subtly probing the defenses.

“Treating everyone else purely as means to an end” is, I respectfully suggest, a straw person. If one asks (as you apparently have throughout your career) whether, in the long run, people learning, with many errors along the way, to make for themselves decisions about what affects them won’t have better consequences than making them passively accept directives from above and eventually wind up with an atrophied ethical sense, then I think one can make a strong consequentialist case for democratic socialism.

But you’re right to puzzle over my tone, and you’ve led me to puzzle over it. After all, if I really believe that consequentialism is a null hypothesis, that it’s simply a description of the way we inevitably make moral decisions (or any other kind), then why get all fierce about it? Much better to take Rorty’s good-natured, benignly neglectful approach: metaphysics is just a way of talking, which our culture is gradually outgrowing, so just let it happen, with occasionally a gentle nudge to help the process along.

…then I think one can make a strong consequentialist case for democratic socialism.

As it happens, I think so too, with emphasis on the democratic. Then again, one can make an equally strong case for democratic socialism on a deontological basis, in that what really makes us cringe, whether we admit it or not, are egregious offenses against human dignity. The trolley problem; Sophie’s choice — in one case circumstance imposes the dilemma, in the other human evil does. In both cases, the individual, without the leisure to query his justification database, is forced to make a choice (not choosing also being a choice) and accept the guilt which comes as a consequence, even though the consequence is most definitely not one of those which a consequentialist is usually tasked with justifying.

It doesn’t matter in such extremities that the individual isn’t really to blame for the outcome. The damage to his/her psyche is already done. Here we stop talking about ethics, and begin talking about tragedy. If we were really to take such moments seriously — not just the extreme examples, mind, but the everyday ones — I think we’d be much closer to a way forward which might pacify, if not resolve, all of our ethical dilemmas.

As others have pointed out, Singer is actually kind of creepy. Also, unlike many ethical theorists, he thematizes the repugnant consequence, which makes him an easy target. On the other hand, JS Mill has got to be about the least-hated moral thinker ever.

Brett @10: consequences matter

What else matters?

The character and dispositions of the agent would be one obvious and not implausible answer.

Some of the comments above seem to lack basic knowledge about the arguments and theory by utilitarians and by Singer. I’m sure you would like to see of yourself as people that base your claims, especially harsh and angry claims, on correct information about that you are making claims about. So here are two suggested readings:
Bykvist (2009) Utilitarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed
Singer (2011) Practical Ethics 3rd edition

geo 11.03.13 at 3:41 pm:

Anarcissie @29: every action and event has further consequences and metaconsequences which are all that matter, and can never come to ground anywhere; or have no consequences.

Ditto. Morality is always provisional.

Someone said, though, that only consequences matter. If this is the case, then nothing matters, because the succession of consequences never terminates. For things to matter, some of the consequential chains must terminate in something which can be evaluated without regard to its consequences.

Anarcissie: acts themselves, regardless of consequences, are to be evaluated according to their piety, aesthetics, pleasure, or for some other immediate or intrinsic reason

But how do you know an act is pious or beautiful or pleasant unless you know its effects?

Because the gods tell you; or because you think or feel that the act is pious or beautiful or pleasant in contemplating it beforehand, regardless of its effects.

js.,

Isn’t the reason we value intention or principle and character because we primarily care about consequences? I want people to act on reasonable principles because they’re more likely to act with good consequences most of the time. I want to be around people of good character–generous, honest, courageous, etc.–because I expect them to more often act in ways that have good consequences.

Imagine a world where intentions and character were causally unrelated to action, so that better character and intentions never increased the chances of better actions. In such a world, why would I value intention or character?

Oops. #47, which just restates Anon @46, was also meant as a reply to js.

The problem with utilitarianism is that it works best as a tool for aiding analysis in a more comprehensive systems than it does as a system all on its own. In the framework of other values, it makes sense to take actions which increase the performance of those values. But utilitarianism doesn’t have good independent means of defining what has utility and what doesn’t. It isn’t good at defining what counts as the happiness we are trying to maximize, the suffering we should try to minimize, and the group of beings we are trying to do that with. It makes sense as a way to try to work with other moral systems, but it doesn’t really work as a moral system of its own.

Its popular problem exists because of the way it tends to be used in public discourse–it assumes we can understand and quantify all the utilities across all people, but since in practical reality we usually can’t, it overpromises. See for example the question posed to the disabled activist in Donald Johnson’s link above at #4.

“This doesn’t satisfy Singer. ”Let’s assume we can prove, absolutely, that the individual is totally unconscious and that we can know, absolutely, that the individual will never regain consciousness.””

And:

“A philosophy professor says, ”It appears that your objections to assisted suicide are essentially tactical.”

”Excuse me?”

”By that I mean they are grounded in current conditions of political, social and economic inequality. What if we assume that such conditions do not exist?”

”Why would we want to do that?”

”I want to get to the real basis for the position you take.””

It is like the ticking bomb torture hypotheticals. They are used more to shut down the person you are debating with, than to actually get to useful common ground. Utilitarianism gets a lot of popular hate because it uses those tactics as a core part of the philosophy, which people resist even if they can’t articulate why with less than ten years of philosophy training. At every turn you are presented with “assume things that have nothing to do with reality”. Philosophers may enjoy that game, but most people don’t.

Donald Johnson @ 4 “he thinks that when she was a baby her parents should have had the right to kill her”

I think that when I was a fetus my parents should have had the right to kill me.

I’m not pro-infanticide, but treating speculation about the moral permissability of infanticide as abhorrent whereas believing that abortion is unobjectionable seems silly to me. I assume most here believe the latter (I do at least), and evidently the people opining on Singer believe the former. I don’t get it. Also, the Peter-Singer-wants-me-dead rhetoric of that NYT article was a bit much.

Should parents be allowed to abort fetuses because they are disabled?

Sebastian: But utilitarianism doesn’t have good independent means of defining what has utility and what doesn’t.

Yes, true. But then, there aren’t any independent means of defining utility or value, if by “independent” you mean “deductive” or “foundational” or “intersubjectively valid, apart from anyone’s context/preferences/temperament.”

At every turn you are presented with “assume things that have nothing to do with reality”. Philosophers may enjoy that game, but most people don’t.

Yes, again. That’s why Rorty gave up on philosophy. I incline to think he was right.

It might surprise everyone to know that Tay-Sachs disease has been eliminated by telling people who are carriers not to marry each other. Will no one defend the right of the hypothetical sufferer to exist?

Maybe you should ask whether people with Downes Syndrome or autism should have the right to exist since many can answer that question for themselves.

And as a matter of fact Tay-Sachs disease has not been eliminated, nor, am I aware, that the State is empowered to tell carriers not to marry. States which have that kind of authority probably have a lot more for the population to worry about than the chance of having children with a rare disorder.

Should parents be allowed to abort fetuses because they are disabled?

Samuel Johnson’s description of Bentham quoted in The Riteous Mind suggests Bentham might have been on my end of the spectrum himself and a prospective candidate for abortion should there have been a pre-natal test for Aspergers in his parent’s day.

One problem I have with consequentialism as a moral code is that I can’t track backwards from consequences to distinguish between a causal action decided by the careful weighing up of potential outcomes and the same action decided upon by the flip of a coin.

Consequentially the actions are the same but one action is moral and the other is blind luck.

And re Holbo’s original question:

Maybe a lot of people hate utilitarianism because they sense this deeply awful consequence of it.

Shatter face @58
“One problem I have with consequentialism as a moral code is that I can’t track backwards from consequences to distinguish between a causal action decided by the careful weighing up of potential outcomes and the same action decided upon by the flip of a coin.

Consequentially the actions are the same but one action is moral and the other is blind luck.”

I think this is going to the heart of the problem with utilitarianism. Consequentialism only makes sense anyway within an enclosed textual formal – a logical sum, a novel, a play – which is framed and has a beginning and conclusion.

Life doesn’t really have such frames, at least at the level in which actions matter (perhaps someone would argue the frames would be he beginning and the end of the universe or some such, so I make this exception).

But even within a framed narrative, most writers are not going to devise a protagonist who actually knows what is going on – the protagonist usually exists in the imagined time and space with the frames of the work. The philosophical protagonist on the other hand attempts to sit outside the frame of the text – which is easy of course, because it is a stand in for the author, who does sit outside the frame of the text. But this is odd – I’m sure there must be a name for this device – but I don’t know what it is – the omniscient protagonist perhaps?

geo
“But how do we assess the intentions or principles or characters of the agents, if not by reference to consequences?”
I probably would normally judge character by facial expressions, tone of voice, words chosen, ideas expressed, actions etc.

I find Singer extremely useful, because IMinexpertO he does what a philosopher is supposed to do: think things through. My memory of his work (it was a couple decades ago) is that he starts with innocuous-looking premises, and follows them with rigorous logic to disconcerting or even horrific conclusions.

Many people are repelled by this, and say the problem is Singer, or his logic. I say that what he’s done is proven that there was something wrong with those premises. I don’t get the impression that he does as much examining of his premises as he ought, but at least he does a philosopher’s job.

Singer and other utilitarians are often hated not really because of their positions, but because they don’t recognize other people’s feelings enough — and don’t acknowledge their own.

“Yes, true. But then, there aren’t any independent means of defining utility or value, if by “independent” you mean “deductive” or “foundational” or “intersubjectively valid, apart from anyone’s context/preferences/temperament.”
”

I agree, but the implications are different for utilitarianism–or at least that fact is employed differently. Utilitarianism is (at least usually) presented as if it was in scientific contrast to more primative moral systems which rely on God or universal truths as their axioms. But instead of admitting that they just introduce their own axioms, they smuggle them in the back door. That is why utilitarianism is a great tool for other moral systems to use, but a crappy stand alone.

*deductive argument.

Does anyone here find Planned Parenthood types ‘sinister’ – because i would imagine that all of them, at one point, thought that your parents should have the option, both legally and morally, of terminating your life? My guess is ‘no’ – but i don’t see how the logic of the above is that different from the opening line of argument in that NYT piece

hint: the most prominent slogan of the abortion rights movement in the US was “our bodies ourselves.” Upon some reflection on this it really should not be hard to identify the criterium by which abortion is fundamentally different from infanticide.

adam.smith, I guess what Singer does is bring into focus our framing of personhood, to what living creatures do we extend personhood and the relationship or kinship that that implies, and where do we draw the line? the criterium is not necessarily fundamentally entirely and altogether different, there was that ill and dependent unconscious violinist argument/thought experiment thingy
http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
which concludes “At this place, however, it should be remembered that we have only been pretending throughout that the fetus is a human being from the moment of conception. A very early abortion is surely not the killing of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have said here.”

“The age of chivalry is gone.”

Chivalry was the slave master’s name for the system of slavery.

@ZM – ah right, thanks for reminding me of that. I do think that argument makes pretty clear, though, why people find Planned Parenthood not just acceptable but worthy of support and Singer creepy.
I agree with Thomson that this isn’t the _only_ argument for abortion rights (which is what her last sentence alludes to). A first trimester abortion seems less problematic to most people for a reason, but because drawing lines is so hard, that’s a much trickier argument to rely on.

A minor point that I don’t think has been made is that utilitarianism is consequentialism combined with a particular preference-based theory about good consequences.

A lot of people who want to attack consequentialism present their position as an attack on utilitarianism, thereby helping themselves to all the objections to preference-based theories of the good.

Also, what weareastrangemonkey said

To be fair to Singer, I understand he is in the process of reconsidering his particular sort of utilitarian approach due to climate change and also growing populations. I’m not sure where this will lead him next.

A minor point that I don’t think has been made is that utilitarianism is consequentialism combined with a particular preference-based theory about good consequences.

Well, classical utilitarianism (Bentham & Mill) was hedonist: utility was defined in terms of subjective states of pleasure and pain (yeah, it gets a bit more complicated with Mill but it’s still hedonist). This isn’t strictly preference-satisfaction because one or more of my preferences might be satisfied (or a negative one violated) without my knowing about it, and so without my experiencing any subjective states with regard to such. The thought that such events should indeed matter in moral evaluation led to the more common acceptance of desire- or preference-satisfaction based versions of utilitarianism/consequentialism in the 20th century. (I used “utility” in my earlier comments to cover both versions.)

But as I’d hoped I’d made clear, my problem is with the use of maximizing principles as the standard of moral evaluation. I don’t really care what value it is you want to maximize; as long as you’re trying to maximize some value, you’ve got some very deep problems using the relevant principle as the standard of moral evaluation (of actions, agents, or whatever). For instance the Rawlsian critique I mentioned above; but see also Bernard Williams’ “Utilitarianism and Integrity”. On the other hand, if you’re not using a maximizing principle, the view isn’t really a consequentialist or utilitarian one, at least as these terms are generally understood.

(This answers geo @76 as well.)

So, in short:

Utilitarianism is hated because of its popularity.

John, I don’t think you’ve ever discussed this topic before.

js.’s latest comment suggests a musing on the idea that “utilitarianism” could be a tradition (or something along those lines) that one could get right or get wrong, and maybe Bentham/Mill defined it once and for all or maybe Bentham/Mill made a first crack at defining it and didn’t get it quite right, but that those who adhered to it but thought of it differently than others could still be accused of those others’ faults, because they really truly adhered to something different from what they professed to.

What are the chances that sentence/paragraph is readable after the past weekend I’ve had? Very little.

I was wondering if any utilitarian philosopher has ever discussed under what circumstances it would be morally permissible to kill a utilitarian philosopher. If the answer is “never”, why not? What makes them such privileged creatures? Is it tenure? Suppose you had a railroad track which split into two branches and there was a baby with a disability unwanted by his or her parents on one track and a utilitarian philosopher lying unconscious on the other and a train was coming and you had control of the switch.

I think Peter Singer has done some good with his arguments for giving all of our excess income to UNICEF–I don’t follow his advice, but I do write slightly larger checks, not because of him, but because it’s an obvious thought which has probably occurred to almost everyone at one time or another. We privileged folk can save lives at very little cost. I also like his defense of animals. These are, loosely speaking, arguments in favor of compassion. I don’t see the point in arguing for the right to kill babies. It might have some theoretical interest to ethicists as a demonstration of some postulate being incorrect in a particular ethical system, but nobody else should care.

#53 – “the Peter-Singer-wants-me-dead rhetoric of that NYT article was a bit much.”

I don’t think it was. Singer wrote a eulogy for her after she died. In it he described her as “Someone whose very existence I had questioned.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/magazine/28mcbryde-t.html?ref=magazine&_r=0

I think our deontological intuitions are also utilitarian, except that their utilitarian assessments are not being calculated on the fly, but had been tested over generations, and proven useful. This is how they became intuitions. You can challenge them all right, but it’s hard. The burden of proof is on you, for all the short- and long-term unintended consequences.
I guess, this is the conservative angle.

Just wanted to say that I appreciate these philosophy heavy posts John. I always learn a lot from both the OP and the comments.

Well, I think the question of why people in general hate utilitarianism has been answered: Peter Singer. Nasty old Singer points out that human life is more valuable than property, and that “I like the way it tastes” is hardly a sufficient reason to torture and kill a sentient, so people spend page after page railing about the infanticide thing, and even harping on his demeanor of all things.

However, more interesting is the question of why a certain class of conservative, such as Nock, hates utilitarianism. This kind of conservative looks around and is deeply disturbed by the fact that we live in a society where the value of everything is quantified, where instrumental value is the only recognized value. They are horrified by this “leveling down.”

The source of this, is of course, the commodification wrought by capitalism. Challenging capitalism is forbidden to the conservative, so they take aim at Bentham instead to relieve their cognitive dissonance.

Jumping back from the (very interesting) discussions above to the question of the OP, I’ll chime in based upon my recent experience teaching an intro course in this stuff (Sandel is our text) to US HS seniors.

The point at which they start getting really queasy about util is after we read Omelas. The vast majority of them are fundamentally not ok with that society, and will respond to “but it makes sense from a util standpoint” with “then util is bad.” Interestingly (and, yes, obviously inconsistently) when they had to write about Yucca Mountain and the Western Shoshone most of them opted for building the waste facility and use explicitly util rationales for their decision. I think where many ended up was that it’s ok to be utilitarian, so long as it doesn’t hurt anybody too badly. It certainly is true that some objected to util in a way which none did to (eg) Kant. (Neither of the Randroids in the class had read enough Rand to know that Kant had supplanted Jimmy Carter as History’s Greatest Monster.) Some didn’t even see util as being a moral system at all. I’d occasionally see sentences such as “A utilitarian would do x, but if you think about it from a moral point of view you’d do y.” It’s as if util is just a formula, devoid of moral content.

I do, of course, fully realize that all of the inconsistencies and problematics in my students’ thinking may well have been the result of defective instruction, but I can’t help thinking that they’re at least a little bit typical of folks who have just scratched the surface of these issues.

I think that JR @99 is on to something regarding the aversion to utilitarian thinking among conservatives – and i think that this critique of utilitarian thinking as a misdirected critique of late capitalist society (as a society of calculating hedonists) also has some play among the left. the big difference between these two criticisms, obviously, is that the left sees a large role for something like social justice (in the social utility function trumping that of each individual) in utilitarianism, and cheers, whereas the conservative’s reaction to this element is just another ‘harumph’.

Conservatives are fine with utilitarianism if pleasure units are measured in dollars.

There’s a way in which the now-nonexistent conservative who wants to move carefully before a big change would serve as a complement to utilitarian social schemes.

Perhaps the inconsistency is in the fine lines between inconveniencing someone and killing them:

“Based upon lifestyle differences alone the Nuclear Risk Management for Native Communities project found that Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute people were exposed to radiation through unique exposure pathways that included diet, shelter and mobility. Radiation exposure risk for adults are as much as 15 times greater than non-Native American communities downwind, as much as 30 times greater risk for children, and as much as 60 time greater risk for inutero exposure.

Politically weak, socially and economically isolated the Western Shoshone people are vulnerable to exploitation. For the Western Shoshone Nation the stakes are MORTAL. The abuse continues as the Western Shoshone Nation is targeted for the disposal of nuclear waste from 115 nuclear reactors at 75 sites in 30 states. From the Western Shoshone perspective, nuclear waste streams from the reactor communities would become a river as they enter the Western Shoshone country, placing a disproportionate burden of risk upon the land and people of the Western Shoshone Nation.”

From: A Western Shoshone Perspective on Yucca Mountain

This looks interesting:

Hare: Could Kant have been a Utilitarian?

Somebody smarter / less tired might want to have a go.

dsquared makes a crucial point, especially in the modern age, when power relationships and technology intersect in the ways that they do. Consider an example of runaway consequentialism from the current debate over education:

Bill Gates and Arne Duncan independently (ha!) decide that we’d all be better off if our educational system were more efficient in delivering the trained human resources that our society requires. They reason that our present school systems aren’t efficient, and aren’t delivering, largely because no one is realistically monitoring the results. Never mind what the teachers or Diane Ravitch say, they’re part of the problem.

The next thing you know, they’re tearing down schools in Chicago, shell-shocked teachers are dutifully teaching the test (when they’re not looking nervously over their shoulders), and nobody, absolutely nobody can put a hitch the consequentialist juggernaut’s gitalong without becoming an administrative non-person.

Is this a good thing? Is it really the greatest good for the greatest number? Bill Gates is convinced. Arne Duncan is convinced. The rest doesn’t matter, not, at least, until they’ve had their way with us.

Arne Duncan and Bill Gates’ educational “reforms” are cruel and cause suffering. Suffering is evil. Therefore these “reforms” are evil, as well as ineffective and destructive of the middle class. Therefore, I would say these men are evil, as well. From a utilitarian standpoint.

Slavery and “efficiency” (via Brad deLong):

..[W]hen she started researching account books from the mid-1800s, a period of major economic development during the rise of industrialization in the United States, [Caitlin] Rosenthal stumbled across an unexpected source of innovation. Rosenthal, a Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in business history at Harvard Business School, found that southern plantation owners kept complex and meticulous records, measuring the productivity of their slaves and carefully monitoring their profits—often using even more sophisticated methods than manufacturers in the North. Several of the slave owners’ practices, such as incentivizing workers (in this case, to get them to pick more cotton) and depreciating their worth through the years, are widely used in business management today.’ Though it appears this is all news to historians of business, historians of slavery have been pointing this out more or less since the 1970s. In an oft-cited 1973 article in the Journal of Economic History, R. Keith Aufhauser pointed out that the task system… enabled plantation overseers to calibrate particular jobs to the capabilities of particular slaves…. Historians since the 1970s pretty well demolished Eugene Genovese’s assertion slavery was a feudal anomaly within an emerging bourgeois capitalist economy, and I can’t think of any recent work on slavery that hasn’t emphasized slavery’s ruthless capitalist aspects. —http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/01/16/the-messy-link-between-slave-owners-and-modern-management/
Excerpted by Dave Noon, “Treason In Defense of Scientific Management” : http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/11/treason-in-defense-of-scientific-management

Harvard Business School is evidently less depraved than its Kennedy School of Government and its School of “Education Reform”.

How about the transcendentalist crew? Ah, Little Women

In these discussions, I think it’s worth _something_ to remember that, at an important time, the utilitarians were strong opponents of slavery, while the natural rights theorists had pretty much all lined up in favor of it.

Agreed. For all that I’ll hate on utilitarianism, I have immense respect for Mill. Even beyond the slavery question, The Subjection of Women is pretty fucking great, and while I can find a lot to disagree with in chap. 5 of On Liberty, there’s a lot of other stuff in there that’s indispensable. (And actually, there’s lots of good stuff in Utilitarianism too—it’s just the stuff that’s separable from the doctrine of utilitarianism.)

Oh, also: people going on about “deontology” or whatever should maybe have a look at Kant’s Anthropology. (I mean, I know no one will, but hey, it’s worth a shout.)

@120 –
I am well aware of the tenets of utilitarianism as professed in this and that book, but my interest in those realms of pure theory is rather limited. As many people upthread have noted, utilitarianism is extremely context and fact dependent. As a consequentialist system, you have to make judgements about outcomes, which requires specification of causal mechanisms, understandings of social patterns and unintended effects, etc etc.

All of that means that when we investigate utilitarianism, we must pay attention to how it has operated in the real world, the practical conditions for its existence and patterns of action that accompany its invocation. So sure, utilitarianism in theory has this democratic element (which i noted clearly in the post you objected to), but in practice I think that we an awful lot of Irish Potato Famine or Hiroshima type decisions couched in the utilitarian language for this not to be a problem for the theory.

In so far as you suggest we are ‘choosing’ democracy or choosing to have experts make these judgements, i think you betray the idealist trappings of your approach. We never made that choice – the social contract is just a metaphor after all.

So sure, you can talk all you want about Mill and his democratic bona fides (which i would call into question – you brush away the question of the colonies far too easily imho), but Mill doesn’t encompass utilitarianism – not even close. The history of utilitarianism has dark corners as well as shining lights, and i think it is interesting to probe those dark corners, regardless of whether or not the academic proponents of the theory want to admit that they share a room.

1. Ticking time-bomb cases, etc: you never hear this about Omelas, despite – or perhaps partly because of – the fact that its central conceit is so manifestly contrived and inexplicable. There isn’t really that much wrong with trolley cases, applied properly. If you need some kind of visualisation for your abstractions (and it seems many do), then it seems to me more honest and less misleading to generate one’s abstract examples from scratch than to adapt real events with all their attendant baggage. (This ambiguity, aided by the TV series 24, is one of the many things wrong with the Time Bomb Case). Obviously, if one is hostile to ethical theory in the first place, then abstractions will be irritating. But be clear about it.

2. Examples such as that of Bill Gates’s do-gooding are not really germane – Gates is wrong, and his natural property rights give him far too much power. What is particularly utilitarian about that? As UserGoogol rightly suggests, a good utilitarian (operating in full deliberative mode, as one should be when considering great matters of public policy) would be extremely well-attuned to the need to use evidence, and to change course as new evidence comes to light. This is precisely because consequences (obviously) matter. If one were to face a truly knife-edge decision of great, er, consequence, then the failure mode of utilitarian reasoning would be all-or-nothing, but that’s because of the grave situation one is in, and the same applies to any other ethical approach. But that is of course quite the opposite of a ‘runaway’ failure. (Please excuse my irritating philosophical habit of dumping unadorned abstractions on the reader. See 1.)

3. I don’t suppose anyone is really an inconsequentialist. Perhaps Libertarianism, thogh only a political, quasi-legal doctrine and not an all-encompassing ethic, comes closest to attempting a mechanistic moral system in which only intrinsic features of bodily actions are of interest. For the rest of us, actions are partly defined by their consequences – whether from the external, evaluative perspective (in which case we take into account the intentions, beliefs etc of the actor, and categorise their action accordingly) or from the ethical perspective of the person deciding what to do (in which case we obviously don’t).

4. The Doctrine of Double Effect is of interest here – in fact I think it is the ideal entry point through which to approach these issues. The general function of the DDE is to clarify the interaction between ‘side constraints’ or absolute prohibitions on the one hand, and on the other the general requirement to promote good ends. This is of interest here only as an illustration of something that should be obvious – that whatever ethical system you come up with, however incorrigibly rigid the duties it posits (and what could possibly go wrong there?), you will really need to allow for some opn-ended responsibiity to promote good ends in a way that can’t be neatly axiomatised in supposedly inconsequentialist terms. Specifically the DDE’s function is precisely to try to delimit the scope of deontic rules, so as to ensure that prima facie moral dilemmas can be resolved. (This is where trolley cases might be used to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. we shall not indulge ourselves.) Since every act has consequences propagating out through the future, and since some of these consequences may be of a ‘wrongmaking’ kind yet others ‘rightmaking’, we’d better try and decide which consequences take precedence in characterising a certain contemplated course of action. I can’t possibly go into the whole topic here; the point for now is just that the idea of workable deontological constraints is far from straightforward and in particular depends on that of what ? Bennett calls ‘The Act Itself’. There are other consequence-excluding principles which tend to get tangled and confused with the DDE – for example, the doing/allowing distinction and the novus actus interveniens principle. Neither is entirely convincing, but in any case this stuff is not at all straightforward. (Just out of interest, the first of these is rejected by Asimov in formulating the First Law of Robotics; the second would be relevant to the example provided by Watson Ladd (is this right? – ed)

5. So why do people hate utilitarianism (do they? The question does come up much, I shouldn’t think, outside push-polls or discussions which invite hasty adversarial postures). One aspect is its demandingness. In reality, Le Guin has it backwards. The child is not in Omelas, but thousands of miles away, and there is no grand bargain of unexplained origin to provide a cast-iron case of direct moral resposibility, but only a huge messy world of interconnected causes. And, of course, Omelas is not perfect but only gets cheaper iPhones and a new disposable T-shirt every day, while the child is actually rather a lot of children, and not, should this be deemed relevant, ‘feeble-minded’. Trying to do your best to promote the general good, for every moment of every day, without any restriction on the scope of this duty, is not easy. In that context, it’s quite comforting to rely on a mish-mash of vague precepts, gut feelings, internalised legal principles, and one or two not-too-costly Uncompromising Principles. Certainty about the things we can’t ignore, a licence to neglect those we can. There is a lot in this it relates to wearestrangemonkey’s remark and the odd mentions of things like hierarchy and the defence of slavery, too. But there’s really no excuse for it. The less ‘applied’, media-friendly utilitarian philosophers (Fred Feldman being an obvious example) are concerned that we don’t become overwhelmed by the complexities of the causal web we find ourselves in, nor hold ourselves to genuinely unrealistic standards, nor over-indulge in self-loathing after we fail to be maximally good utilitarians. Just to mention again the crucial, radical and very often overlooked internal/external distinction (cf. epistemology), between ethical deliberation and the judging of past conduct: the point of utilitarianism is to decide how to act, not how to dole out opprobrium. Unless you’re a Blame Utilitarian, I suppose.

So, you’re basically saying utilitarians muddle through like anyone else then, without access to the full consequences of actions?

Yes, of course, ZM. As someone pointed out above, knowing “the full consequences of actions” is utterly impossible.

William: Eloquent, as always. But consequentialists don’t have a theory. Consequentialism is an anti-theory, a demystification of the idea of moral theory. As a kind of radical pragmatism, it tries to show that theory, unlike poetry, makes nothing happen; that we’re on our own, and have always been on our own, though we haven’t always known it.

BTW: it wasn’t quite accurate to say that Mill favored a literacy requirement. He favored, as Matt said, an education premium. But again, no one was more zealous for universal education than Mill.

Good night.

Would a “good” utilitarian be a happy utilitarian? Or something else? I thought utilitarianism didn’t so much have an idea of the good as such?

@dsquared Fair to point out that JS Mill was among the strongest critics of English policy regarding the Irish Famine

“Rawls is that he is really just offering a variant on utilitarianism, based on a more general theory of choice under uncertainty ….”

Really? Of course there are consequentialist elements in Rawls (there are in any sane theory) but I think what we’re seeing from you in those remarks, John, is the propensity of economists to translate other theories into their own idiom. Translation accomplished, such theories may either be assimilated or “refuted”. Such translations may or may not resemble the original in vital respects, caveat emptor, etc.

Donald Johnson 118-
what sort of madmen actually sit around and talk about whether or not it’d be a good idea to kill children with disabilities?
It’s hard to tell there in the midst of all that irony, but if you’re serious, probably every successful nomadic people that ever lived, not so much talked about it, as did it. Plus the Greeks. Plus a lot of other settled, civilized cultures.
In the extreme you have odd superstitious tribal practices like the killing of one of a pair of twins. But the baseline is/was too much drag on a way of life that can’t carry the extra weight and survive, or thinks it can’t.
The severely handicapped aren’t all being cared for even now anyway. The ones that are dying just aren’t making headlines. But the general attitude is certainly that it’s inhumane to even consider eugenic practice, and it is, now, when we have so much surplus material and time.
Our contemporary attitudes toward the permanently infirm, as a whole class rather than as individual freaks, seem to be pretty anomalous, and have a lot more to do with ease and availability of compensatory care and technologies than moral enlightenment.
It wasn’t til way deep in the Industrial Revolution that society could pride itself on caring for someone like John Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, as a moral act of compassion, as opposed to revering him as a monster/god/oracle etc. Or leaving him out to die.
And of course the lower end of that society exhibited him as an object of cathartic degradation before his rescue.

As I said in Ingrid’s Economics and Morality thread, I’ve been reading Pareto to try to work out what he said about his efficiency principle equation. So far I haven’t come across it. But I have read him somewhat on utility – specifically “the final degree of utility of instrumental goods of various orders”, relating to someone called Menger’s idea of there being various orders of goods. Now, I don’t endorse Pareto, or follow his equations, but his writing is better than I’d expected (and quite frequently amusing).

Pareto: “Tis fact is true, and in some circumstances it is very useful to keep it in mind in order to dismantle many of the sophisms that dog the science of economics, but it cannot be denied that by following that path, when we really wish to know those final degrees of utility, we are led into a very prickly jungle, so thick with difficulties that we can no longer extricate ourselves.
Let us suppose we have to investigate the utility of sheet iron produced in England. That sheet iron will be bought by a ship builder. The ship will be acquired by a ship owner. A trader will charter the ship and load her with cotton. That cotton will be spun in Manchester, the yarn will be taken to Italy and used to make some fabric, which to cut a long story short, will end up in the hands of the consumer.
The degree if utility if that sheet iron is nothing but the degree of utility of that fabric and other similar direct consumption objects that will be procured by means of the ship!
It can be understood how, when they see themselves being pushed into such a thick jungle, many resist and reject theories of Pure Economics. In our opinion, it is necessary to study diligently all that is reasonable in their objections and treasure it, and it is not beneficial to reject them haughtily as contrary to our theory; for a theory that cannot bow to practice is not only useless, but also noxious.”

Unfortunately it goes on for a bit and concludes with therefore: free competition!

Many above would be helped by the distinction between a decision procedure and a criterion of rightness. Does your objection target utilitarianism as a direct comprehensive decision procedure in some situation? Then it is likely an objection that there are several plausible utilitarian replies to.

For example, the question Mao Cheng Ji #138 asks could be answered like so: it has good consequences if people internalize the traffic rules to such a depth that we hesitage to override them in a situation where the only benefit from override would be a very small time saving. That is the reason that justifies why we have a systems and social norms in place that function to produce the right depth of internalization of that rule. But it would be awful if people saw traffic rules as absolute. If you can prevent serious injury by breaking a traffic rule, without thereby running a big risk of even worse injuries, then you should break the rule. There is no objection with real bite against utilitarianism as a criterion fo rightness in any of that. However, any non-consequentialist has a lot to answer in relation to such cases: why is it ever allowed to override a supposedly non-consequentialistically justified rule? What explains exactly where the “override line” is drawn? Give a plausible answer to that *without* falling back on consequentialism. Start with that small task and keep at it for a few years and you may have dug yourself a hole so deep that you can publish it as a book called “Intricate Ethics”.

” think what we’re seeing from you in those remarks, John, is the propensity of economists to translate other theories into their own idiom”

Probably right, but maybe more like a transposition (in the chess sense) than translation. To spell this out, I can do an optimization exercise for an ex ante representative individual with generalized EU preferences (the way Harsanyi does with EU to derive utilitarianism) and come up with the same ranking of institutions as Rawls proposes. So, from a consequentialist viewpoint, Rawls is the same as a generalized utilitarian.

Does it matter that Rawls reaches this conclusion from a different starting point, or that he represents it differently, and if so, to whom does it matter? As a consequentialist, I’d say no, but perhaps I’m begging the question.

“And the logic you described is actually anti-utilitarian.”

…I mean, it’s still small-u utilitarian, but it’s anti-Utilitarian, which is what we are talking about here (thanks to the Albert Jay guy in the OP): expediency vs. taste and manners.

CB: But Rawls does actually frame the diff principle in that way: that people under uncertainty would – or should – choose maximin rather than ‘maxi-mean’. This is his big departure from classical-style maximising utilitarianism, really (though I think the extended ‘OP’ metaphor tends to mislead, suggesting that ATOJ is, in some fundamentally anti-utilitarian way, contractualist – I do not suggest you are thus misled.)

But Rawls’s actual argument constructs a basic framework for the laws of a putatively just regime (utilitarian judges and officials would not of course just be instructed to maximise utility), using basic human goods as the foundation of a detailed consequentialist justification for all the features of the theory, such as the priority of liberty. This is not much different from Mill.

Along the way we get a convincing utilitarian reconciliation of fairness in constructed law with the existence of realistic ‘utility monsters’: expensive tastes are largely learned, so not to be indulged as real needs. Can’t recall if explicit, but there’s an obvious strategic/incentive rationale there, just as there is for punishment under utilitarianism. Similarly, envy gets discussed, not entirely satisfactorily – R after all being a fairly conventional kind of econ. liberal, but the idea that other-regarding preferences are akin to double-counting and not to be accounted for is there, and IIRC goes back to Mill. Generally, all of Rawls’s arguments for his chosen system are based on promoting the human good in a way that’s pretty much utilitarian. (I’m inclined to agree with geo at least as far as to say that utilitarianism – of one flavour or another – is really just what falls out once we accept that there aren’t any fundamental, specific absolute duties which would conflict with utilitarianism, and yet we should be impartial and concerned to promote the good and avoid the bad.)

Found a handy short summary of R’s arguments against U-ism, here: http://pages.pomona.edu/~mjg14747/033-2006/RawlsUtilitarianism.shtml which seems roughly accurate AFAIR. All the arguments, which aren’t too compelling anyway, seem to rest on the idea of a social system of rules whose content rather than justification is utilitarian.

If so, then that oversight can provide an explanation of why Rawls thought he was overturning utilitarianism when in fact he may not have been really. There are also utilitarian reasons to adopt maximin positions with respect to the distribution of rival goods, e.g. diminishing marginal utility. It’s at least open to us to speculate that R had these kind of considerations, many of which can be intuitively grasped, in the back of his mind, but it doesn’t really matter much if we’re considering how well he did at rejecting utilitarianism, rather than whether he was embracing it (which he clearly wasn’t).

js. – Williams’ arguments hve always seemed pretty weak – I can’r even remember the details, and my books are not at hand. I don’t rate Williams really. IIRC, it was a combination of ‘we have limitations and form affections, etc’- which is fine and a utilitarian will take those into account, and enjoin us to do so – and being squeamish – even rather priggish – about getting one’s hands dirty when in extremis.

Well, maybe I don’t recall correctly on Williams, then – I’ve got that Smart /Williams thing somewhere, but not handy at present. I just remember a lot of gubbins about integrity and motivation which (I do recall concluding) any reasonably sophisticated utilitarian would take into account anyway so far as it wasn’t just preciosity (which it partly was). But probably my dim recollections should be put aside at this point – over to you to explain.

The Rawls stuff – it requires that the social regime be justifiable to each person individually, by meeting her own (suitably pruned) interests – but what he actualy delivers doesn’t do that in any real way (certainly not in any real way that constrasts with a utilitarian-designed system), does it. Even the worst off is only assured that there could not have been a better worst-off position – that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be better off under another system. In other words, it doesn’t address the particular individual, only the structural features of the situation.

geo: Rawls was an opponent of utilitarianism, but his account was not meant to “justify morality.” He also went so far as to claim that his view had no metaphysical content at all. That is, he agreed with you that “we are on our own.”

In any case, the notion that we are on our own is of course a metaphysics, a claim about what really is. It should be scrutinized like any other metaphysics.

Donald Johnson@118: Peter Singer didn’t just bring up the topic of killing disabled infants out of sheer whimsy. If you look at his writings (say, Practical Ethics) he’s looking at the more general topic of euthanasia and how it is already a topic of debate. Starting out with “easy” topics such as when an adult is perfectly capable of expressing their desire to die or when a child is going to die soon either way and we just want to make their death more painless, he then generalizes “well, what if an infant won’t die right away but will still live a life which is significantly less enjoyable than the average one?” and then comes to his more controversial conclusion.

In general, Peter Singer’s writings are very much focused on issues which are already active topics of non-academic discussion. He doesn’t just run around looking for what moral norms he can use utilitarianism to tear down.

Mao Cheng Ji @146: “This sounds to me like a trick … if in the scenario I described you stop, then you’re not a (pure) utilitarian”

If you by “pure utilitarian” mean someone who always uses a direct comprehensive utilitarian decision procedure then you are right and every utilitarian would agree with you on that. This brings us back to the distinction between decision procedures and a criterion of rightness.

Most contemporary utilitarians, by my counting, accept the theory as a criterion of rightness and many would see no trouble in agreeing that we as a means need various other decision procedures, rules, norms, habits, institutions, virtues, technologies etcetera in practical decision making but that that set of tools should be repeatedly assessed and modified with an eye to the criterion of optimific outcomes. So the utilitarian and the non-consequentialist alike want rules to play some part in their ethical system. The utilitarian however have a systematic way of arguing for which rules and how and why they should be revised and traded-off against each other. That is a very attractive and powerful feature in an ethical theory.

js./San Clark – had a quick look at what looks like pretty close notes on Williams – http://www2.drury.edu/cpanza/williams.pdf

And – assuming it’s accurate enough (Williams is not philosophically heavy going, after all) it’s essentially as I remembered, including the bit where he gets all precious about getting dirty hands in extremis. I won’t go through the whole thing, but I did notice that he seems to advert both to the doing/allowing distinction and the novus actus principle as artificial consequence-limiting principles. And it’s very clear in this case that this move is based on the external, evaluative aspect of morality and not on ethical decision from the standpoint of the agent; the very confusion I refer to above. In particular,this seems to get him into a horrible and entirely avoidable mess where the (agent-) evaluation- but not decision- relevant issue of remorse/regret/reluctance and the nature of the actor’s own moral code as seen from ‘outside’…

In general,Williams argues, it seems, against Blame Utilitarianism, but not Act Utilitarianism. Not that act utilitarianism is the general standard for beings like us, but in a hard case with time to think, it does apply I think (unlike, in the absence of any emergency etc., the case of the red light, something designed to assist epistemically-limited agents in the avoidance of hidden hazards). Even then, assessment of conseuqences must so far as feasible be all-things-considered: the effects of setting a bad example, having nightmares, incremental formation of bad habits etc are all consequences. Even ‘will I be blamed’ comes into it – but not ‘I will be blameworthy’ as the primary issue from which the ethical decision is derivative. That is backwards. I could go on but lack time, and the flow of discussion doesn’t quite merit doing so at this point anyway.

Anyway, besides that massive foul-up, Williams’s arguments are not so much anti-utilitarian as anti-oversimplified or perverse utilitarianism, and his arguments about what is valuable to people really end up being utilitarian themselves (though he gets the weightings wrong in the Jim example, IMO).

js. – It seems to me that once you concede that consequences matter, you will end up having to allow all consequences to matter (again from the actor’s perspective). This is of course a schematic overview rather than an argument – that argument could be had Then the issue of maximisation/aggregation of consequences, in order to choose the best/least bad course of action, is pretty much forced upon you.

I agree with geo that utilitarianism is all we’ve got and is quite good enough. (I disagree with his take on the value and availability of theories, which strikes me as overly romantic and not even necessarily required by pragmatism to the extent he’s going with it.) Unfortunately, what we too often end up with is plain acceptance of existing institutions as is, justified by assumption that the existing institutions were formed by utilitarian(-like) considerations in the past, and by assumption that present critique based utilitarian(-like) considerations can modify those institutions for the future. I don’t see how Rawls fits in there, but presumably he has a position on it.

I don’t have a lot to add to the technical debates here, but I’m surprised (since I often disagree) to find myself largely agreeing with SebastianH upthread.

I’d refine it to say that the reason utilitarian is unpopular with a “general audience” is that too many “public utilitarians” (for whatever that means, analogy is “public intellectuals”) do slippery things either with their axioms, or with their assumed utility functions. That leaves people with an instinctive distrust.

On Singer, he is intentionally a provocative presence – and as someone else said – that’s perhaps what “public philosophers” are for in part.

I haven’t read that much of his stuff but my impression is that a big part of his provocation is the elevation of a certain kind of consistency to be the ultimate virtue. The trouble with this on technical grounds is that utility functions are not invariant. The trouble on “normal living” grounds is that we tend to live lives of overlapping/competing axioms. Public philosophers like Singer don’t like that, but they rarely engage with it, as it distracts from the purity of their “gotchas.” (As dsquared notes – their addiction to the gotcha seems very similar to that of many economists – and seems to stem from similar misunderstandings about utility functions and competing axioms.)

In these discussions, I think it’s worth _something_ to remember that, at an important time, the utilitarians were strong opponents of slavery

Although conversely, with the exception of Mill, an awful lot of people who got it right over slavery got it wrong over Ireland. (Carlyle’s infamous “Occasional Discourse” actually makes a lot of this – at one point in that extraordinary and disgusting document, he actually argues that one of the bad things about emancipation is that it would reduce the slaves to the condition of Irishmen, I am not joking).

The trouble with utiliarianism is not so much that it’s a technocratic system (although it always does have tendencies that way, particularly when combined with an excessive admiration of scientists, technocrats, planners or economists), but that it’s a way of turning factual mistakes into moral mistakes. The fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Washington Consensus provided ample examples of people who really should have thought to themselves “Gosh, it’s a shame that my scheme for the betterment of mankind appears to be impossible to get a democratic polity to agree to, guess that means I’ll have to settle for second best because interfering in other peoples’ political self determination is wrong”.

“The Age of Chivalry is Gone” (as ironically described by Ariosto in 1515 or so)

Oh gran bontà dei cavalieri antiqui!
Eran rivali, eran di fe’ diversi,
e si sentian degli aspri colpi iniqui
per tutta la persona anco dolersi;
e pur tra selve oscure e calli obliqui
insieme van, senza sospetto aversi.

Translation:
O the great goodness of the knights of yore!
Rivals in love, one Christian and one Saracen,
Still smarting with sore wounds from their late duel,
And aching in each limb with bodily pain,
Through the dark woods and treacherous winding ways,
They unsuspecting rode on the same horse. — Orlando Furioso: I: 22 (1516-32)

[The rivals, Rinaldo and Ferrau (a muslim) ride off together on the same horse in pursuit of the fleeing pagan Chinese maiden, Angelica, daughter of the King of Cathay, whom they both love.]

@matt But, if people are/should be expected utility maximizers, the same construction gives you utilitarianism. So, it’s not the construction, it’s the assumption about choice under uncertainty

dsquared @164: “Gosh, it’s a shame that my scheme for the betterment of mankind appears to be impossible to get a democratic polity to agree to, guess that means I’ll have to settle for second best because interfering in other peoples’ political self determination is wrong”.

There’s a fairly straightforward utilitarian rebuttal to this argument: “Interfering in people’s self-determination almost always produces a bad result, for obvious reasons. You may have to override their life-decisions in cases where they would be endangering others — eg, if they refused to be vaccinated against a lethal and extremely contagious virus, which might thereby gain a foothold and devastate an entire community, and even then only if there was an overwhelming consensus of scientists to that effect. But schemes for the betterment of mankind are too speculative and uncertain to justify that kind of interference.” Whatever you think of this argument, it is unquestionably utilitarian. (As is every other moral argument, whether or not its proponents recognize that.)

And Daniel, I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, but do you actually believe the champions of the Washington Consensus (or Soviet imperialism, for that matter) gave a rat’s *ss about the betterment of mankind? Your phrasing gave that impression.

@johnQ “his argument for doing so is the claim that this is a sensible way to choose in any situation of uncertainty”

Without doing a lot of archaeology, I’d be hard pressed to claim that Rawls *never* said this, but I’m sure that his argument doesn’t rest on this general claim, rather his claim is that maximin is the rational strategy wrt to the protection of certain core interests under the assumptions of the OP. Clearly, adopting maximin in any situation of uncertainly leads to crazy results.

@Chris It may not be what Rawls actually meant (if we can ever find out this kind of thing) but my interpretation is a fairly standard one. For example, the SEP article on the Original Position states “Describing the parties’ choice as a rational choice subject to the reasonable constraints imposed by the original position allows Rawls to invoke the theory of rational choice and decision under conditions of uncertainty.”

There’s also a lot of emphasis on the absence of well-defined probabilities, which is hard to make sense of unless you think of this as a choice under uncertainty, in which case it seems reasonable to talk about generalized EU theories designed precisely to cover the case where probabilities aren’t well defined. These lead to a “maxmin EU” solution, as in the work of Gilboa and Schmeidler.

dsquared: I meant the people who ordered it up, not the people who worked out the details. There were also probably quite a few Soviet Communist intellectuals who believed in what they were doing, but as Brezhnev remarked (speaking, I suspect, on behalf of the Politburo) when queried about the invasion of Czechoslovakia: “Don’t talk to me about socialism. What we have, we keep!” This is probably closer to the spirit in which Bob Rubin and the Business Roundtable approached NAFTA than is the dewey-eyed idealism of gentle spirits like Brad.

To follow up on this, a standard utilitarian position with log utility and plausible estimates of the “deadweight loss” from redistribution typically concludes that the top marginal rate of taxation should be around 80 per cent, since the marginal utility of extra consumption for the rich is effectively zero

Piketty and Saez don’t spell out their analysis here, but they do give the number

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/1percent-pay-tax-rate-80percent

I had that impression, too – though I can’t trace it to any actual source, so this is not much confirmation – it may not even be entirely independent of your impression, given previous discussions here. I do have access to all my books and articles now so might have a poke around for evidence.

But I’m fairly sure that 1. R at least tries not to commit himself to any specific implementation of his principles in ATOJ, 2. he basically intends a capitalist market setup, 3. he doesn’t really envisage tax rates at that kind of level, 4. he holds the familiar (distinctly odd, to me) view that high tax rates should be expected to cause people to work less (or entrepreneurialise less). My being ‘fairly sure’ isn’t much help, I realise – I’ll report back if I get round to checking, and maybe at least mentioning these will spur input from someone who has better info.

Matt’s has popped up on refreshing the page – I’ll post this anyway fwliw.

I’m fairly sure that many years ago, whether in college or afterward, I had the strong impression from lectures and reading that Rawls’ argument supports, what John Quiggin described as liberal Democratic party positions in the US sense, Ted Kennedy positions, no decrease in redistribution and probably an increase. The emphasis on liberty in various posts here at CT (and in this New York Review essay by Stuart Hampshire) are nowhere in any of the anthologized extracts from Rawls in any of the books I have.

If that’s not a “welfare state” or “welfare capitalism,” that seems to be quibbling about names to me. I don’t see how the debate between Rawls and Nozick (or Rawls and Sandel) has the significance it’s supposed to have if that’s not the case. I don’t see how Rorty’s apparent agreement with Rawls could be possible if that’s not the case. (On the other hand, Rorty has surprised me before; he seemed to agree with Oakeshott and never mentions Oakeshott is a conservative.) I have a couple things here I can check, but one is Rorty and I’m not sure how helpful they’ll be.

js.
Is all the jargon simply saying the type of thing that Pareto wrote when he wrote “when we want to know those final degrees of utility, we are led into a very prickly jungle” ?

I have a number of fiends who – influenced by Peter Singer – claim o be utilitarians. Singer says people like my friends ought to give 5-10% of their income to sufferers in developing countries. None of them do it. When pressed as to why they do not there are a range of responses.
One says, with a smile “Oh, I’m just a bad utilitarian!” He appears to feel no guilt or shame at this admission.
One says, “I can’t trust those charities to properly distribute my money, so I spend it on my kids, where I can be sure it’s raising their happiness.”
Another (who, in domestic politics, is left-progressive), says “Here (with developing countries) we just have to stand back and let capitalism’s invisible hand do its work.”
My points?
Utilitarianism is an “ethic” without real motivational grip on individuals (though it is a lovely language for power).
And it provides a seemingly endless array of self-justifications for whatever a person wants to do. or not to do, anyway.

Utilitarianism is an “ethic” without real motivational grip on individuals

Well, it can’t be much worse in that regard than the Sermon on the Mount.

” First, the two principles of justice taken together are supposed to ensure a fair distribution of a multiplicity of what Rawls calls basic goods, several of which are (in the relevant sense) incommensurate with each other so they cannot be reduced to one measure of “utility” that can be maximized, minimized, etc., with respect to an individual or an aggregate.”

I’ve never seen this asserted of Rawls (not that this proves anything) , but it’s obvious, to me at least, that the Difference principle can’t work in the presence of incommensurable primary goods, and moreover that the whole setup of the veil of ignorance is useless. If I can’t rank the position of two individuals, I can’t possibly compare social institutions. If health and wealth are incommensurable, is it good or bad to take money from the healthy poor and use it to give medical treatment to the unhealthy rich?

Matt’s points @181 etc are indeed from Justice As Fairness, ’01. There’s also a revised ed of ATOJ from ’99 in existence, I see. Not forgetting Political Liberalism 93/96. I was only going on the 1st ed of ATOJ, which I have in fact read all of quite closely albeit years ago, along with related articles and some of the commentary and criticism then extant and subsequently some skimming through PL ’96.

There have certainly been substantial changes since the 72 edition, and indeed betweeen 99 and 01, which can account for differences in perceptions of ‘the’ argument, without anyone having to argue against things they have made up.

Still, much of the revision since 72 seems to have been in response to diverse criticism. Good, if it [1]refines and improves the theory (analogy: homing in on value of a physical constant), but not if it’s [2] more a case of patching it up with an increasingly Byzantine accretion of ad hoc arguments at the expense of coherence, plausibility etc. (analogy: epicycles). Even worse would be [3] nominal repudiation of positions which haven’t actually been eliminated (analogy: I’m not being racist, but…) – sometimes, supposed ‘clarifications’ have this character. Over 30 years, I’d expect a fair bit of the first, probably some of the 2nd, and possibly a few subtle forms of the 3rd, and from what I’ve seen so far I think that may be borne out to some extent.

Rawls’s opinions on the institutional implementation of the basic structure have certainly developed in what seems a fairly congenial way, though I don’t know what his property-owning democracy is, and his retention of the difference principle seems to suggest that he still has in mind the need for inequality as a condition for improving the lot of the worst off. That’s at least suggestive of the trickle down/rising tide/Laffer type of market-incentive argument. Still, all the things Matt mentions are indeed in JaF. I suppose that supersedes previous versions for the purpose of deciding what Rawls thought, from a biographical pov.

The matter’s complicated by the fact that R didn’t quite finish working the material up for publication as JaF, though the material was basically complete AFAICT, and this affected mainly parts IV and V, the latter not being all that relevant, I don’t think.

Another point regarding reconstructive interpretation. Rawls’s argumentation (even within a single version) is complex and sprawling, and tends to appeal to a range of considerations for collateral support, without actually relying on them. In some cases these come across as so much verbiage. One example is his specification of the notion of free and equal citizens as some kind of overarching principle. How does this relate to the OP set-up? What does it mean? What are its implications? We never (I don’t think) get a clear idea. That’s fine as a report of Rawls’s own informal concerns, or as an added plausibility-confirming bonus, but too much of that and trying to actually analyse and argue about the system becomes intractable. If there are a load of obiter dicta all over the place, and these are apt to be drawn on in rebuttal of criticisms or of unwelcome interpretations, then the thing beomces a take-it-or-leave it account (series of disparate accounts) of Rawls’s personal vision. That’s not really acceptable. Such inessential elements should, for analytical purposes, be excised so far as possible, and certainly shoudn’t be relied on for rebuttal. Otherwise Rawls can effectively disarm any criticism or interpretation by mere dictat. But saying it don’t make it so. This of course applies all the more if the dictat appears not to cohere with the rest of R’s vision.

Also – recall that the basic liberties have priority only under favourable circumstances: this doesn’t suggest a ‘though the heavens fall’ approach that seems to be suggested by bringing in the Priority of the Right as a fundamental principle. Under unfavourable circs, trade-offs between the liberties and, say, prosperity are in fact to be contemplated after all.

“He distinguishes it from the liberties by appeal to the notion of the Right, but it’s unclear how this is supposed to fit into he OP setup. If the agent behind the veil is going to bring in ‘what is right’, doesn’t this undermine the very idea of choice under uncertainty? Without this incongruous appeal to the right, there seems to reason to exclude the basic liberties from the ambit of the utilitarian good – Mill, e.g. certainly wouldn’t do so.”

The agents in the OP do not appeal to a notion of the right. Rather, the constraints of what would count as right are built into the structure of the OP. No real human being has ever been nor will ever be in the OP. (And of course, very few human beings are merely rational utility maximizers.) It’s a thought experiment.

Okay, this review by Peter Singer of Nozick’s book in the same journal as Hampshire’s, of Rawls, better matches what I remember hearing. Singer says that “Nonutilitarians not wishing to accept the conclusion that coercive redistribution of wealth is a serious violation of rights urgently require an alternative theory of rights,” A Theory of Justice being an attempt to provide such a theory. On the other hand, Singer concedes that the flaws Nozick finds really are in Rawls’s argument (though that doesn’t change the fact of what Rawls’s argument truly is, of course).

This paragraph in Singer’s review

Rawls attempted to solve this problem by arguing that if people in what he calls “the original position”—a hypothetical state of nature in which, to ensure impartial decision-making, people are assumed to be ignorant of their own talents and socio-economic status—were to choose the fundamental principles of justice to be followed in a newly formed society, one of the principles they would choose would be that inequalities are allowable only in so far as they improve the position of the worst-off group in the society.

meshes with my earlier impression that the original position is a device to encourage the rich to think of themselves as possibly being in the shoes of the poor.

Since I’m teaching it this week, I’ll add that Peter Railton’s ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality’ is both an excellent statement of a Williams-type critique, and an appealing utilitarian answer.

I haven’t followed this whole thread, but istm that discussions of Rawls here often ignore his argument about moral psychology in the third part of TOJ (I refer to the ’71 ed., b/c that’s the one on my shelf). The argument doesn’t directly come into the argument for the two principles earlier in the book, but it clearly mattered to him, otherwise why would he have spent a couple of hundred pages on it? Conceivably one might dismiss a lot of this part of TOJ as “verbiage” (cf. T. Wilkinson @192) but I think that might be a mistake.

To oversimplify considerably, istm R. argues inter alia in that last part that while actually “existing moral feelings” are often “irrational” or “capricious” (TOJ, 1st ed., 489,490), most humans have a sometimes inchoate but ‘natural’ sense of justice, i.e. a desire to act justly (in accord with reasonable moral conceptions and not always or purely from v. narrow self-interest and expediency), and that one merit of a ‘well-ordered society’ is that it nurtures this desire and allows it to find expression and/or to have an effect. I’m looking specifically at a passage on pp.489-90 of TOJ (1st ed.) which ends with the statement that “one of the virtues of a well-ordered society [i.e. one based on the principles chosen in the OP] is that…its members suffer much less from the burdens of oppressive conscience.” Or in other words (as I read it), one of the virtues of a well-ordered society is that it gives fuller scope to “the better angels of our nature” and brings individual consciences more into alignment with social outcomes (or vice versa).

R. clearly wanted to maintain that, while only a ‘thin theory of the good’ came into play in the orig. position, the outcome of the orig. position turned out to be fully consonant with significant aspects of human psychology and moral development. Whether the argument is entirely successful, and exactly how it relates to the preceding discussion here, I’m not sure, but thought I’d mention it anyway. (I also don’t really know whether or how much this line of argument dropped away in his later work.)

The various qualifications discussed above make Rawls more appealing than a simple advocate of the Difference Principle leading to maxmin, but they also dull the critique of utilitarianism. Instead of replacing the simple rule of maximizing utility with an alternative, more soundly based, rule derived from the OP, we have the dogmatism of a simple rule being opposed by a complex and flexible alternative drawing on both OP arguments and actual social conditions.

It’s certainly reasonable to criticise the early utilitarians for dogmatism, but JS Mill did that job, and no one since has done it better.

Why do so many people hate utilitarianism so much?

Why did the Athenians insist that Socrates drink the hemlock? You’re really not supposed to ask too many questions.

The answers that utilitarians give — or that social contract theorists or Kantians or anyone else — run out of road pretty fast, but they drive into territory, where some powerful people would prefer questions not be asked, let alone answers discussed in ways that suggest the answers could matter.

The thing about utilitarianism, and social contract theory, is that they came to life in the decay and collapse of feudalism. Their enemies are not each other; they are just the right and left flank of the same humanistic argument: individual human welfare matters, and is the proper ground of a conception of “good”: man is the measure of all things, as the Enlightenment insisted, the study of society is the study of human nature, etc., etc. Their respective insistence that individual humans matter, their subjective experience and material circumstances matter, their autonomy matters, was and is opposed (and not by each other — the whole “let’s you and him fight” meme might be instigated in ill-will toward both).

What’s remarkable to me is that any philosopher would think that anyone would care, let alone that everyone should care, either about the questions or the answers. Why try to build a foundation for consensus, if that, indeed, is the goal? Why do the utilitarians insist on an untenable arithmetic of good? Why do social contract theorists insist on an impossible original position? Forcing even the possibility of agreement in detail seems to run the ship onto the rocks, so why do it? If philosophy has good questions, but no answers, why not stop with the questions, and punt.

The impossibility of definite answers combined with claims to universal appeal leaves the whole enterprise open to subversion by cynics and hypocrites. What else can we make of Nozick or the Washington Consensus? Whatever framework of rhetoric you build can be used to cleverly dress up the druthers of power as a public good, and both silence and stupid are surprisingly effective arguments

Why isn’t, say, the business of rational choice under uncertainty or the calculating on consequences more socially realistic — not the gamble of a representative avatar, but strategic competition in social or political processes?

But Rawls position implies that something close to the 80 per cent rate should apply not just to top earners but across the board, combined with a universal basic income.

For what it’s worth, John, when Rawls does discuss tax policy he suggests that he favors a consumption tax rather than an income tax, as well as a heavy tax on bequests. Is that a good idea? I have no opinion on it. Rawls, of course, wasn’t an expert on tax policy, so it would be odd to take him as a guide as to what to do. But I think you’re really just stabbing in the dark here. It’s always a bit annoying to tell people to go do their homework, but really, if you’re going to talk about Rawls, don’t you think you should read some of him (or, a very good guide, like Freeman’s book _Rawls_)? It’s really clear that you’re unfamiliar with the position and working of a very rough grasp.

“For what it’s worth, John, when Rawls does discuss tax policy he suggests that he favors a consumption tax rather than an income tax, as well as a heavy tax on bequests. Is that a good idea? I have no opinion on it.”

I would have thought that anything less than 100 per cent taxation of bequests would be inconsistent with the Difference principle. Standard theory says consumption taxes fall on labor not capital, which is why they are generally favored by rightwing economists and not by the left. So, I’m left with the feeling I started with that Rawls’ policy preferences were a long way to the right of what (my understanding of) his theoretical position would imply, and probably to the right of what you would get from the standard utilitarian position with utility equal to log(income).

As you say, I’m not a Rawls scholar (though I have read Theory of Justice). I entered the thread because someone asked how utilitarians responded to Rawls critique. As I understand it, the central element of Rawls critique of utilitarianism is the use of maximin in the OP to derive the difference principle. I say, and no one so far seems to have denied, that all this gets you is a generalized form of utilitarianism.

Obviously, there’s lots more in Rawls than this. But then Rawls was a lot more than a critic of utilitarianism. So, it would be helpful if you could spell out what you see as Rawls’ central criticism of utilitarianism.

ZM@210:
The article (written in the late 50s, I think) that you’re quoting from does not support your inference that he “seems to not be in favour of redistribution of wealth.” It’s an early statement that was more fully worked out in ‘A Theory of Justice’ and subsequent books, but the passage you’ve quoted contains the two principles that he later elaborated on. The second one, the difference principle, might require (quite a lot) of redistribution, esp. when combined w/ other considerations he later mentions. What he favors “in the actual world” is the implementation of the principles he thinks would be chosen in the hypothetical original position, though the details of that implementation weren’t always spelled out in detail. (Though they were spelled out to some extent.)

Btw articles on R. continue to appear, no doubt; I don’t follow most of the relevant journals, but it happens there’s a piece on R. in the Feb. ’13 APSR.

John- my claims were about the (as far as I can tell, completely unsupported) claims about what tax rates Rawls would like, and the (clearly wrong) view that he argued for generic 1970’s US welfare state capitalism. (On bequests, he says we should use the system that best meets the two principles, and doesn’t pretend to be a tax expert, as far as I can tell.) On the broader issue of Rawls vs. Utilitarianism, I don’t think you’ve responded at all plausibly to the remarks made by Chris, and generally seemed confused on the issues. You might read Samuel Scheffler’s article “Rawls and Utilitarianism” in the Cambridge Companion to Rawls. You might also look at the discussion in the chapters on the two principles of justice in Freeman’s book _Rawls_, though the discussion there is less completely focused on utilitarianism.

As I understand it, the central element of Rawls critique of utilitarianism is the use of maximin in the OP to derive the difference principle.

This isn’t actually Rawls’ critique of utilitarianism at all. Probably the most succinct statement of Rawls’ (philosophical) critique of utilitarianism is found in his early paper, “Justice as Fairness” (published in the mid-50’s, I think, tho maybe somewhat later, and not to be confused with the posthumously published monograph Matt referenced earlier). This is the bit I mentioned way up above @60; it doesn’t have anything to do with the DP, maximin, etc.

You can read the latter as an alternative to a certain sort of utilitarian proposal the distribution of (a certain class of) social goods, but it’s not the “Rawlsian critique of utilitarianism.”

Fwiw, the articles at SEP By Leif Wenar on Rawls and by Samuel Freeman on “Original Position” are both clear that the argument for the difference principle is not an application of maximin.

John – forgot to add: even were it comparing like with like, isn’t the idea that the Rawlsian (implied) critique is only a variant or refinement of maximising utilitarianism anyway, and not a criticism at all?

More interestingly, that reminds me I meant to ask – I think you suggest that maximin amounts to a ‘generalisation’ of maximean. Is it possible, without going to too much trouble, to convey the intuition behind this in natural language? (I’m assuming you qualify as having done your homework on this topic).

LFC @213
Thank you, but I am unsure. He still seems like perhaps he is not all that in favour of redistribution to me.

I can’t get access to the full article, but the start of this article (it seems reputable enough?) seems to note a perceived conflict between Rawls’ ideas and equality in the distribution of wealth – although perhaps Rawls later sorted this out clearly?

Economic Equality: Rawls versus Utilitarianism. Ball, Stephen W. Economics & Philosophy; Jul1986, Vol. 2 Issue 2, p225-244, 20p

“The alleged egalitarian impact of Rawls’ theory is crucial again in normative ethics where Rawls is thought to have developed a major counter theory to utilitarianism, one of the most popular criticisms of which has been its alleged inadequacy in in handling questions of distributive justice.
Utilitarians can argue however, as Brandt recently has, that the diminishing marginal utility of money, along with ignorance of income-welfare curves (???), would require a utility maximising distribution to be substantially egalitarian. The challenge is therefore on Rawls to show that his theory yields an ethically preferable degree of equality.”

” I think you suggest that maximin amounts to a ‘generalisation’ of maximean. Is it possible, without going to too much trouble, to convey the intuition behind this in natural language”

I hope so. Suppose you are making a choice under uncertainty, between lotteries based on (say) a roulette wheel. For all lotteries, higher numbers give better prizes, and prizes are in dollars. The simplest procedure is to assume all numbers are equally likely and to pick the prize with the highest expected value. But that might imply a few big prizes and lots that are zero or (if the rules permit it) negative. You can generalise this in (at least two ways) to favor less risky/more equal distributions of prizes.

First, you can look at utility rather than money. This typically means imputing less value to increases in prizes that are already large. Of particular relevance in this context, you can attribute arbitrarily large negative utility to prizes that fail to meet some basic requirement (eg minimal living standard). That gives you expected utility.

Second, you can put more weight on the outcomes for the lower numbers than the higher ones (this can be done whether or not you have well-defined probabilities). This is called rank-dependent utility and is the source of what fame I have in the econ profession. The extreme case is putting all the weight on the lowest outcome, which is maximin. So maximin is a special case of the general class of rank-dependent maximean.

Now replace numbered prizes with allocations to individuals, and you have a model of social choice. Within generalized utilitarianism, you can get egalitarian outcomes in two ways.

First, if there’s large negative utility attached to outcomes below some minimum, and the maximum utility of good outcomes is bounded, then any allocation in which someone gets less than the minimum will be ruled out, regardless of what’s happening to those better off.

Second, if (nearly) all the weight is placed on those at the bottom of the distribution, then improvements for those at the top will be allowed only if they also improve (or don’t worsen) the position of those at the bottom.

As represented among economists, Rawls uses the second of these to get the Difference Principle. From the discussion here, it seems clear that he also invokes the first. And, clearly there’s more that I’ve missed. So, I’ll do some more reading and maybe come back.

#189 consumatopia.

You misunderstand. My point is that none of my friends are trying to be better utilitarians. They are trying to be kinder, to be a good parent, to be more respectful of others rights, and so on, but not better utilitarians. This is the point. People say they are utilitarians but hardly anyone seems to then set out to be a better, even the best, utilitarian they can. And if a friend says that is what they are doing, and really tries to do it, then watch out!

@ZM

1) The passage quoted by Matt @182 from ‘Justice as Fairness: A Restatement’ suggests R. is very concerned about dispersing concentrated ownership of wealth, not least b.c of its deleterious impact on politics:

…the background institutions of property-owning democracy [R’s preferred setup] work to disperse the ownership of wealth and capital, and thus to prevent a small part of society from controlling the economy, and indirectly political life.

2) As has been pointed out in previous threads here, there are a number of constraints on income/wealth inequality in R’s theory, of which the difference principle is only one. The theory does end up being quite egalitarian.

3) The article whose beginning you quote @223 frames the issue in a way I find less than illuminating. The implication of the opening graphs of Ball’s article is that R’s beef w utilitarianism is that it yields insufficiently egalitarian results. I don’t think that is R’s difference w utilitarianism. (See “Justice as Fairness” (per js.@226) or some of the early sections of ‘A Theory of Justice’ where he lays out in a general way the differences between his approach and utilitarianism.) These issues are batted back and forth in the earlier part of the thread (which I’ve now looked at, albeit somewhat quickly).

LFC,

Well I’m not that knowledgable on Rawls, but I think he is making an argument similar to Pareto except without the utilitarianism (maybe not quite as in favour of laissez-faire style laws – does he go into details about the various state/NGO interventions needed to maintain “property-owning democracy” in a particular text or passage?) which kind of contributes to show its values/premises that are most important to the direction of someone’s logic. Re: arguing that Mill implicitly agreed with him is the same sort of wishful thinking that has geo argue that all forms of ethics/moral are utilitarian – in my opinion it’s a way of trying to elide difference.

“…the background institutions of property-owning democracy [R’s preferred setup] work to disperse the ownership of wealth and capital, and thus to prevent a small part of society from controlling the economy, and indirectly political life.”

But other people can choose other set-ups to disperse and share wealth/power – like having lots of councils, or collectives, or feuding barons and so forth. The fact that Rawls chooses property-owning democracy (with what sort of government structure, what sort of laws?) gives a specific type of character to his work (of which I am largely unfamiliar so I stand to be corrected).

PS – Actually, I think that’s what Mill does reply in Chapter III of Utilitarianism.

edit fail, sorry, trying patience, must do better

Tim, sadly for me I have my copy of A Briefer Restatement to hand. If I did not, it would not be easy to decode your latest screed (actually, it still isn’t easy). The casual reader won’t understand that “these conditions” in the bit you excerpt refers not to the OP in general terms but to a list of three very specific conditions mentioned on the previous page (sec 28.2). This isn’t entirely without importance for this thread, since, for example, the third condition there identified makes it clear that the argument from maximin does not support the DP (since it fails to choose DP over other, sufficientarian, principles).

John – OK, thanks (‘the prize with the highest expected value’ should be ‘the lottery…’ etc., I take it.) So the lottery you choose becomes the distribution, each number a person, and the prize their allocation. Conceptualising it as a lottery, as in the OP, is what provides the aggregation method. And the idea is not that maxmin is a generalisation of ‘maximean’, but that rank-dependent EU is, since both maximean and maximin are special cases of it.

I’m not sure what role the uncertainty plays (this is uncertainty about the probs within the lotteries, e.g. whether they are fair, right?), since as you suggest the default is just to use the principle of indifference and partition the probability equally, which is I take it what you do. Actually, I suppose this might reflect the fact that it’s possible to attach differing importance to different people’s allocations – the princ. of indifference being the impartial option?

Chris – yes, it’s not very clear. Neither is Rawls, though I at least have the excuse that my exposition is highly compressed (no doubt this doesn’t excuse all its faults). It’s hard to provide fully-elaborated argument briefly, and I’m a bit self-conscious about posting big slabs from the restatement, for example. If there were some way of satisfying myself that it’s acceptable to do so, and to provide arguments in full, I would. Maybe I will, then.

the nit-picking academic cottage industry of “what Rawls really said/meant” well, I at least have been concerned to distinguish the Rawlsian philosophical position from (a) what Rawls happens to think and (b) the unsupported/insupportable assurances he gives about what it implies, what it does or doesn’t depend on, etc. (And the discussion of how it relates to utilitarianism isn’t really just “for it’s own sake” in the sense of having no further consequences – this topic came up because Rawls’s work was rgarded as including a criticism of utilitarianism (and in the restatement, he frames the whole thing as a battle between Rawlsianism and a (caricatured) utilitarianism.

But if the conversation is to be had (well, since it is being had, in any case), then just saying ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about; it’s far too much trouble to explain; read x, y and z and interpret it as I have’ is not very constructive. I often refrain from making that kind of irritable comment, and just stay away.

I do have the restatement (got it from the Chinese internet), and the section about minimax really does seem quite poor; I’ll try to show what I mean when I get a chance. I’m really not all that hostile to Rawls, nor trying to start a fight or show off or something; but someone is wrong not just on the internet but in the canonical literature of Western political philosophy, and I cannot stand by idly in those circumstances. If the tone is a bit ranty, that’s mildly regrettable, but arises mostly from the need for brevity combined with the fact that caveats, qualifications and general emollients generally get disregarded anyway. And probably a mildly antisocial lack of concern about that kind of nicety.

I may have a couple more brief things to say in response to certain things above, but I need more time to consider them.

In the meantime I’d like to comment briefly on Chris B. @238, particularly this statement:

Not everything has been inaccurate, but much of it will be impossible to process for someone who has not already read a great deal. Anyone who doesn’t know about Rawls will learn little of value.

It seems to me there are routinely quite a number of posts at CT where the reader who doesn’t already know about the topic “will learn little of value.” Take John Quiggin’s posts on economic theory. I gave only the briefest attention (like about two mins.) to his recent thread on “the macroeconomic foundations of microeconomics” b/c I figured, almost certainly correctly, that I didn’t know enough in advance about the substance to get much out of it. Does that mean JQ should stop putting up such posts? Well, no, b/c there are clearly some in the readership who can get something out of them (and/or who will find it productive or satisfying to argue w/ each other.)

I do sympathize somewhat w CB’s dislike of the Rawls cottage industry and irritation w (what CB views as) inaccurate statements, and no one can object to the suggestion that people read X if they want to find out about X. On the other hand, there is something itself a little irritating in one of the subtexts of his message, namely “go away and don’t come back till you have read A, B and C.” Except in the case of roundtables on specific books that have been announced in advance, I think threads should be open to anyone who wants to participate in them, regardless of what they have or haven’t read, and if the price of that is some unruliness and irritation and some people coming away more confused or whatever than they were to start with etc. (which it will be), so be it.

P.s. FTR, the one time I read the book in advance for one of the book seminars here (Knight & Johnson), it turned out to be quite disappointing b/c, among other things, the authors didn’t bother to participate in the threads (such as they were).

Thanks for the link prasad.

Thanks, Matt (@242), that’s an apparently fair-minded and very informative review of what sounds like a fascinating book. Much to ponder, but a quick reaction: Nagel keeps using terms like “the moral ideal,” “ideal morality,” “the moral point of view,” “a universal system of human rights,” and “the moral conception behind [such] a system” in a way that suggests he means we can arrive at a non-contingent view that every rational being would be compelled to acknowledge as true. This is the root of the pragmatist’s quarrel with him. We believe that contingency is radical, that it “goes all the way down,” as Rorty put it, and that moral progress is achieved not by a priori reasoning but through the moral imagination, that is, by having experiences, in life or art, that expand our sympathies or (as Rorty, again, put it) widen the circle of those who count for us.

The idea that the brains evolved to cooperate or fight is very EP. Brains are plastic. I’m pretty sure you can take one of those new-born Papuans and place him into an environment where he’ll grow up a nasty SOB. It’s all formed by the environment.

Right, the brains are capable, and perhaps societies with pure utilitarian morality did exist. But they didn’t survive. The vikings (or some such) killed them all and took their stuff. We survived. Our morality, our moral intuition has been, so far, among the fittest. Past Performance Does Not Guarantee Future Results, of course.

There are common themes though, like what he’s describing. Stick with the family, with the tribe. Flip the switch but don’t throw the fat guy off the bridge.

TW:
Also – what end state does utilitarianism aim at?

The phrase “end state” was (potentially) misleading, so I’ll retract it.

Tim W “John – OK, thanks (‘the prize with the highest expected value’ should be ‘the lottery…’ etc., I take it.) So the lottery you choose becomes the distribution, each number a person, and the prize their allocation. Conceptualising it as a lottery, as in the OP, is what provides the aggregation method. And the idea is not that maxmin is a generalisation of ‘maximean’, but that rank-dependent EU is, since both maximean and maximin are special cases of it. ”

That’s exactly right, including correction of ‘lottery’ for ‘prize’.

The question of how to handle probabilities is trickier. The simplest case is to assume them equal, but that’s not the only possibility. You can have symmetry, which is obviously what’s wanted for OP/impartial observer exercises, without additivity.

While remaining admittedly ignorant, it seems to me objections to additivity are a constant and central theme in Rawls critique of utilitarianism, from the argument that it “does not take seriously the distinction between persons” to the claim that justice won’t generally maximise a sum of satisfactions”

I’m entirely in agreement with that – the whole point of rank-dependent EU and subsequent generalizations is that they are non-additive. Consequently, I broadly agree with Rawls/generalized EU as against classical utilitarianism/expected utility.

It’s just that I see these as members of the same family. The eagerness to say that one differs radically from the other seems to me to reflect the dislike of utilitarianism that is the subject of the original post.

geo@245
I was just reminded by something I was reading, though, that while Rorty cites those who discuss expansion of our circle of concern in that sense (every time I buy something for my child, I should ask whether it would be better spent on food for the starving in the developing world–for that matter, every time I donate to the local food bank), his examples are more of the nature of bigendians saying, “Maybe those littleendians are people too and ought to be able to sit at our lunch counters and attend our schools, and teach in our schools.”

He doesn’t suggest anywhere–in fact, the contrary–that each individual should ignore intermediate institutions (social and cultural) and consider each action as if s/he had the power to affect anybody in the world.

Last sentence escaped delete button.

prasad @236
I haven’t read ‘The Law of Peoples’ (except maybe small bits), but from what I know about it at second hand I’m inclined to agree w/ you. (I forget whether R. subsequently had some second thoughts about the approach he took there.)

as to this —

The view he ends up with is unstable, and subject to attack from both sides. The cosmopolitan egalitarian can ask why (besides rhetorical/political convenience and the desire to stay relevant) TOJ doesn’t imply vastly stronger obligations across borders or strong rights to cross them. And on the other side someone … can ask why his new arguments [in LOP] don’t work just as well transported back to single societies. That kind of middle position can be justified if you start with a non-universalistic ethic, maybe one with [a] place from the outset for community or patriotism, not if you pretend to be arguing from universal principles.

Yes, pretty much. It’s a weak point in TOJ and why, not too long after TOJ was published, it was being criticized for ignoring questions of global (international) distribution. But R’s basic arguments can be and have been extended in various directions, and that, as you prob. know, has been one direction (i.e., beyond the single-society setting) in which various writers have extended/applied them.

Btw this piece, though cumbersomely titled, looks interesting — Jeffrey E. Green, “Rawls and the Forgotten Figure of the Most Advantaged: In Defense of Reasonable Envy toward the Superrich,” Am Pol Sci Rev (Feb 2013). [Probably gated.]

Skimming Nagel’s review of Greene, it seems he doesn’t actually extend science to social questions (he wouldn’t be the only one to refuse science that right, though I’m not sure what side of the line it leaves psychology on, and I do think Rorty is more accepting of social science but I’m not sure), so it isn’t obvious what “the moral view” and all the other phrases you (geo) mention are supposed to be, at least to me, yet.

Incidentally this review in the Boston Globe of Greene’s book, by a psychologist (which you probably already saw), makes rather different objections.

(Ticking timebomb, already mentioned, is an extreme Dirty Harry case.)

geo, I’m not sure this is the same as what you’re saying, but even knowing more or less that Nagel is a moral realist (which I think you’re saying, that he thinks the idea of moral realism is real, not just an ideal to strive for), I still don’t know what he thinks morality is or how we know what moral truth is. Is it something everyone knows, or something every culture agrees is moral truth? Is it something every philosopher knows? Is it something that can be worked out by anyone who follows rules laid down by philosophers? Is it based on logic, or biology, or some other truths that are just known to be true (somehow)? Or is it something Western philosophy professors happen to believe, but which other people don’t, because they’re just wrong?

Bianca: Honestly, I’m a little mystified too by the idea of moral realism. Nagel is a good writer, and I recommend his books, particularly Mortal Questions, The View from Nowhere, and Mind and Cosmos. There’s also an essay on Nagel by Rorty, in I forget which collection, that (as usual with Rorty, at least for his fans) explains Nagel better than Nagel does, or at any rate conveys his significance better.

I do think, though, despite having wasted much time on them, that questions about the ultimate basis of morality, or whether there is one, don’t matter much. Ditto for questions about the ultimate basis of truth, or whether there is one. Whether we treat one another, and the planet, better, and whether we understand our minds and the universe better, won’t be affected by whatever answers we give to them. I think most people a few centuries hence will look on our philosophical perplexities in much the same way as we look on those of the Scholastics.

There is a local guy who told me, when he discovered I had studied philosophy, with great earnestness, that Kant was “the most evil man who ever lived.” In his lifetime and soon after he was called the happiest, or at least most content man. Where people get these ideas is beyond me, especially when you are a self-described Randian (as this man is) and would seem to subscribe to some form of moral realism. (Although I am rather surprised to find that many – apparently most – people consider Kant not a moral realist, and I think he would be also.)

Speaking of potshots, I thought some of the Scholastics did good work. Nobody who knows the name of Jean Buridan will laugh at him for being a scholastic.

I think that we may well be coming up hard, and quickly, against some epistemic limits on knowledge, so that in centuries to come very little (if any) progress will be made on questions like “what is the source of moral conduct?” I can see people not caring, but perhaps only a segment of society will be able to convince themselves that there is no is-ought question (for example).