by Phil Parvin
Critics of utilitarianism like Robert Nozick, for example, have argued that there is more to life (and to morality) than the pursuit of pleasure and that, if we were to subordinate all of our various emotions and motivations to what gives us most pleasure, we would end up living not a moral life but a life of shallow hedonism, blown one way and another by casual whims and passing fads; a life that most people would reject if given the choice.
Case study: Nozick’s ‘experience machine’
Robert Nozick, in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia published in 1974, argues strongly against utilitarianism, and in particular the idea that morality is all about maximizing pleasure. In doing so, he describes a thought experiment which has become very influential in debates about morality and ethics. Nozick asks us to imagine that scientists have created an ‘experience machine’. The experience machine is a machine that you can be connected to which, through drugs and electrical stimulation of the nervous system, gives you any experience you want. When you are hooked up to the experience machine, you experience only what the machine tells you to experience. You do not realize that you are attached to the machine and that the experience is not real. As far as you are concerned, you really are a pop star, or a racing car driver, or irresistible to others, or whatever it is that you have programmed in.
Nozick asks us to imagine that we are given the opportunity to be hooked up to the experience machine for the rest of our lives, with the experience machine programmed to maximize our pleasure. If pleasure is the ultimate goal, then we all should jump at the chance. However, Nozick predicts that most people will not want such a life. He argues that most of us find the idea of such a life abhorrent, unpleasant and empty. If this is the case, then pleasure cannot be the ultimate value, and the premise of pleasure-based utilitarianism is undermined.
The main point of the example, for Nozick, is that it suggests that pleasure in and of itself is not the most important thing in life. Rather, we want to feel in control of our lives. We do not want to spend our days comatose on pleasure-giving drugs, we want to experience the world in all its complexity. We want to be free to make our own choices and mistakes, even if in doing so we end up experiencing less pleasure than we would if someone just gave us a pill, or hooked us up to a machine. Utilitarianism, he argues, ignores the desire of human beings to autonomously create their own lives rather than have lives or experiences given to them by someone else. It ignores the moral value of autonomy.
UTILITY AS PREFERENCE-SATISFACTION
Utility as pleasure is utility understood as some sort of mental state. If utility is the same thing as pleasure, then utility is maximized when the mental experience of pleasure is maximized. An alternative understanding of utility identifies it instead with preference-satisfaction. According to this alternative account, your utility is maximized when as many of your preferences as possible are satisfied, regardless of whether or not they bring you pleasure. If you want to be an artist, we maximize your utility by enabling you to be an artist, even if life as an artist turns out to be painful and unpleasant.
Utilitarianism, then, becomes the view that the morally correct thing to do is the thing which satisfies as many preferences as possible. Although this definition is removed from our base pleasures, it still leaves utility as a highly subjective concept. The correct thing to do will be that which maximizes preference-satisfaction, regardless of what those preferences are. You might have preferences which harm others, such as the preference to create computer viruses or sell illegal drugs, or you might have preferences which are bad for you. Some of your preferences might be based on false beliefs, such as the preference to smoke before its harmful effects on health were known, or the preference to stay in a relationship when you don’t know that your partner is having an affair. Finally, some preferences may be socially constructed or influenced.
If utility is to be based on preference-satisfaction, then, we will have to decide what to do about these sorts of preferences. It seems clear that a person’s utility is not maximized if we satisfy those preferences that are based on false information. At the very least, people need full information if their preferences are to reflect their utility. But what about those preferences to do harm to oneself which are based on sound knowledge, or preferences to harm others?
MILL AND THE HIGHER PLEASURES
John Stuart Mill uses both objective and subjective notions of utility. Mill wants to undermine the Benthamite idea that there can be no distinction between different types of pleasures. Mill rejects the idea that utility depends merely on some sort of mental state, or experience of pleasure, and argues instead that there can be higher forms of utility that do not depend on the immediate experience of pleasure. Mill terms this immediate experience of pleasure ‘contentment’, and he contrasts it with what he calls higher pleasure. Another way of putting the distinction is between higher and lower pleasures.
‘Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification… It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be supposed to depend on quantity alone.’
John Stuart Mill, ‘Utilitarianism’ [1863], in John Gray (ed.), On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.138.
Mill is therefore interested in maximizing higher pleasure rather than lower pleasure. However, he does not define higher pleasures on entirely subjective grounds. If everyone in society liked football, for example, it would not follow that football is a higher pleasure, superior to more intellectual pursuits. Instead, Mill attempts to give a definite answer to the contingent and subjective question of what it is that most people prefer. ‘It is an unquestionable fact’, Mill writes, ‘that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties’ (Mill [1863] 1991: p. 139). The famous example that Mill gives of this point is that: ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides’ (Mill [1863] 1991: p. 140). The idea, then, is that intellectual pursuits could actually be better than football because they use higher faculties, and that, if many people think otherwise, that is only because they have not properly experienced those pursuits.
There are numerous problems with Mill’s view. For example, it seems very elitist to assume people like football more than intellectual activities only because they have made a mistake. But the main point is that Mill offers an alternative to utility understood as merely a subjective concept, and yet at the same time attempts to connect utility to people’s actual preferences – albeit people who exist only hypothetically.
Spotlight: John Stuart Mill
James Mill, John Stuart Mill’s father, was a passionate defender of utilitarianism. When John was born, his father educated him rigorously from an early age with the direct assistance of Jeremy Bentham, with the aim of creating a genius child who would champion the cause of utilitarianism after Bentham and his father were dead. He was kept away from other children, taught Greek at the age of three, and by five had read many classic texts including the works of Herodotus and Plato. By the age of ten, John had read Plato and Demosthenes in Greek and Latin, and at twelve, he had begun to tackle Aristotle’s logic in the ancient Greek. John wrote poetry in his spare time and, at around ten years old, decided to write a continuation of Homer’s Iliad. Given all this, it is perhaps no coincidence that Mill ended up not only a champion of utilitarianism, but also of what he called
the ‘higher pleasures’.
Act-utilitarianism
The most basic form of utilitarianism is known as act-utilitarianism. Act-utilitarianism is the idea that the morally correct thing to do in any situation is the precise act which will bring about the best consequences in that particular situation. In other words, we should base our actions on precise judgements about the likely consequences of acting in various ways in each individual case. So, when the would-be murderer knocks on your door and asks if you have seen his intended victim, you calculate that greater utility will be brought about if you say ‘no’, even if that is a lie. It follows that the morally right thing to do in that circumstance, according to act-utilitarianism, would be to tell the lie. There is no special moral reason to tell the truth. You are obliged to do so only if doing so maximizes utility.
What could be wrong with such a view?
UTILITARIAN CALCULATIONS ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE
The first problem with act-utilitarianism is a practical one. Many philosophers have pointed out that there is in fact no way of measuring utility. Even if we have decided on a particular definition of utility, still we will face the problem of comparing the utility of different people, and we have no way of doing so. Imagine, for example, that you are a government transport minister considering whether to build a new road through a village. The local residents of the village are strongly against the road, fearing that it will bring in traffic, noise and pollution. It will harm the residents’ utility. Motorists who do not live in the village are, in general, in favour of the road, because it will provide a quicker route through the area. There are more motorists who live outside the village than there are residents of the village. However, each villager feels much more strongly against the road than each motorist feels in favour of the road, because it will affect each villager every day and whenever they are at home, whereas it will only affect motorists on those occasions when they use the road. If you are to make your decision on act-utilitarian grounds, what should you choose? How can you possibly measure the extreme disutility of the residents against the moderate utility of the motorists? How will you know which outweighs the other?
‘The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.’
John Stuart Mill, ‘Utilitarianism’, [1863] in John Gray (ed.), On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 137.
UTILITARIANISM ALLOWS EVIL
We said earlier that one of the supposed attractions of utilitarianism is that it is an ethical theory based on what people actually do want, not on abstract ideas about what is supposedly good for people. As well as one of its strengths, this is also one of its weaknesses. We mentioned the possibility that some people could have preferences which harm other people, and act-utilitarianism is particularly prone to this objection. If the majority within a society will gain great utility from torturing a small minority, act-utilitarianism has nothing to say against the torture. If morality is based on utility, there can be no utility that is immoral. Torture would not be immoral if it maximized utility. Evil preferences, then, are given just as much weight as any others. Our moral intuitions, on the other hand, often give the opposite result – that an evil act is made more evil if someone gets pleasure from it. One of the objections to fox hunting in Britain is that it involves killing animals for sport, getting pleasure out of hunting. Opponents of hunting do not see the pleasure involved as lessening the evil, but as increasing it.
UTILITARIANISM DISREGARDS SPECIAL COMMITMENTS AND RELATIONSHIPS
Act-utilitarianism requires that we count the utility of each person equally, and that we do the thing that maximizes overall utility, regardless of precisely who is affected. What this means is that act-utilitarianism does not allow people to give preferential treatment to those people with whom they have a special relationship. People do not act morally if they base their actions on special commitments.
A famous example along these lines asks you to imagine that a building is on fire, and that there are two people caught in upstairs rooms. You have a ladder (and are the only person at the scene), but there will only be time to rescue one of the people before the building collapses. One person is someone who is of great use and utility to a great many people – perhaps a scientist on the verge of discovering a cure for cancer. The other person is your mother, who is very dear to you but who is of no special importance to society as a whole. If you are acting on act-utilitarian grounds, you will have to rescue the scientist and leave your mother to die. Indeed, you will be acting immorally if you rescue your mother, for you will not be bringing about the greatest utility.
Many opponents of utilitarianism have argued that this conclusion is absurd. Many argue that it cannot possibly be immoral to rescue your mother, given your relationship to her. Others argue still further that it would be immoral not to rescue your mother, given your relationship. Thomas Nagel argues in a version of this example that, if you even have to think about which person to rescue, you have already acted immorally as regards your mother. Special relationships, on this argument, should override utility-maximization. And if that is the case, act-utilitarianism cannot provide an adequate account of ethical individual or political action.
Act-utilitarianism does not only override special relationships based on love and family. It also undermines special relationships based on contract or agreement. If you agree to pay someone to paint your house, for example, but then (once they have finished the job) calculate that you would bring about greater general utility by giving the money to charity, then act-utilitarianism would require you to do so, and to deny it to the painter. The fact that you promised the money to him does factor in to the equation, in that you have to take into account the disutility caused by breaking the promise. But the promise is in no way an overriding reason to give him the money. But this surely violates our intuitions about the importance of promises, and also that it suggests that a world in which everyone is an act-utilitarian will be a very unstable, insecure, unpleasant one to live in. People could not count on being paid for jobs, or on having promises carried out, or on being told the truth, or on being rescued from burning buildings by their children. Again, we might find that an act-utilitarian world actually reduced utility, paradoxically. This fact has led to utilitarians proposing alternative forms of the theory.
Rule-utilitarianism
Most utilitarians, in response to the kinds of criticisms we have considered so far, have abandoned the idea of act-utilitarianism. In other words, they have abandoned the idea that individual people should make utilitarian calculations about individual acts. Instead, they have argued that utilitarian calculations should not apply to specific acts but to the rules which regulate society. These rule-utilitarians hold that individuals should act in such a way as to follow those rules which will best maximize utility in society, taken as a whole and over the long term.
The idea behind rule-utilitarianism is not to consider each act individually, and not to judge a rule by its counter-examples or one-off incidences. Instead, we look at the bigger picture. If we do, rule-utilitarians argue, we will find that it maximizes utility if we obey moral rules such as ‘always keep your promises’ and ‘always tell the truth’. We will live in a better society if these sorts of rules are followed. It follows, then, that we can retain our commitment to these sorts of moral rules and still be utilitarians. All that we need to do is to shift our perspective from the immediate and short-term to the longer-term, overall picture.
Rule-utilitarianism does seem to overcome many of the problems with act-utilitarianism. It can take account of the criticism that act-utilitarianism does not allow us to give special weight to personal relationships or commitments because it could be argued
that utility is maximized if we follow a rule that tells us to give special weight to those relationships and obligations. However, it does so by dropping the appealing elements of act-utilitarianism or consequentialism that we started with – namely, responsiveness to particular contexts and circumstances. If we are supposed to follow the rules in all situations, we will have to tell the truth to the would-be murderer and let him carry out the attack. Rather than stick to the rule in this case, it seems more sensible to take account of the disutility that will result from this particular act – that is, to return to act-utilitarianism. But if we return to act-utilitarianism in this instance, why not in every other instance where the rule gives us an answer that reduces utility?
Conclusion
Utilitarianism has received a great deal of scholarly attention, and was the dominant normative approach within political philosophy until the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971. Many variants of utilitarianism have been proposed, each giving a different answer to the questions we have raised in this chapter and posing many others. In the next chapter, we will discuss Rawls’s influential critique of utilitarianism and his defence of a liberal alternative.
Key ideas
Utility: That value or property which utilitarian thinkers believe should be maximized, most commonly happiness, pleasure or the satisfaction of preferences.
Consequentialism: An approach to moral and political philosophy which understands actions to be morally right or wrong on the grounds of whether these actions have good or bad consequences. Consequentialist theories tend to be rooted in a particular conception of the good (such as utility or pleasure or happiness) and evaluate actions according to the extent to which they bring about, or impede, the realization of the good.