There's a debate...

Posted by Paul

...abrewing about utilitarianism as a moral theory in general, and in particular Bentham's version of it. In order to keep making daily headway on my dissertation, I must resort to constrainted comment.

As for the historical point about what Bentham thought, see Brian Weatherson's reply to Brad DeLong's characterization. Brian's response is right on the mark, and usefully points out that Bentham believed that the supreme moral principle directs moral agents to maximize instances of a certain sort of experience, namely pleasure (and the absence of pain). Brian hits the nail on the head: for Bentham “advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness” amount to the same thing.

Brad, however, attempts to defend Bentham with the following:

Happiness--utility--plays a very special role in Bentham's philosophy. It is defined to be that which is maximized by the choices of a rational and reasonable person with enough time for reflection and sufficient information about the situation.
...
A good society is one in which as much of what people would choose for themselves--with enough information, after sufficient deliberation, when they are in possession of their faculties--is attained, taking care that when there is a tradeoff between one person's preferences and another's, each one counts equally.

Those seem to be obvious and unexceptionable foundations for morality.

As Brian points out, the difficulty is to render more determinate what would "maximized by the choices of a rational and reasonable person with enough time for reflection and sufficient information about the situation." Bentham believed that would be pleasure and the absence of pain. But many of us do not live our lives according to those ideals only. For while we do act in ways responsive to our prospects for pleasure and pain, we also act (e.g.) so as to respect others' autonomy, or so as to do that which is challenging and hard and not necessarily pleasant. These are ways of acting that seem eminently rational and reasonable, and which are often the content of informed preferences, but which do not seem easily accounted for by Bentham's specific version of utilitarianism. Indeed, it is not clear that rational behavior would seek the maximization of anything in particular, let alone the maximization of a contentless mental state like pleasure.

So while DeLong may well be pointing to "obvious and unexceptionable foundations for morality" by invoking what fully rational and informed agents would choose, it takes substantive moral argument to fill in the gap between that particular characterization of morality's foundations, on the one hand, and Bentham's utilitarianism on the other. This is precisely the sort of substantive argument that Rawls attempted to give in A Theory of Justice [1], which Brad has elsewhere described as an "absurd [attempt] to try to base all political obligation on one's being a supposed party to a contract that one never even made." To be sure, it is not easy to see exactly how Rawls hopes to move from the nature of rational choice to the nature of morality. (See here some discussion.) But for a guy who defends Bentham's view of moral theory as part of theory of rational choice, Brad appears ill-situated to criticize Rawls for pursing virtually the same argumentative avenue. Perhaps this little debate about Bentham will spur Brad to recant his claim that all Rawls's arguments had going for them was merely that they were "less sloppy, more careful, and informed by a much less niggardly will than those of Robert "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" Nozick." If he doesn't, I pledge charitably to assume that he, unlike his idealized utilitarian agents, is not possessed of "enough time for reflection and sufficient information about the situation."

[1] I of course don't mean that Rawls wanted to end up at Benthamite principles. They simply both wanted to use the theory of rational choice to derive ultimate principles of (political) morality.

Posted by Paul at June 23, 2005 07:16 PM