Justifying utilitarianism

Will Wilkinson, who dislikes Richard Layard’s Happiness as much as I do, has a thought-provoking post about the basis of our judgments of morality and social policy.

Layard seems to think that utilitarianism can be justified by neuroscience. He claims that it shows that there is such a thing as objective utility, which can be measured by studying electrical activity in the brain. This seems to provide a scientific basis for utilitarianism.

Will replies that this ain’t necessarily so. He cites this pdf as evidence that “a virtue-theoretic approach best captures what's going on in the brain. Moral judgment and motivation is not in all (most?) cases driven by judgments of utility.”

This, in turn, says Will, has a fascinating implication – there are “possible conflicts between social policy that is designed to maximize expected social utility and the affective/motivational systems that actually drive behavior.”

I’m sympathetic to Will’s conclusion. But I think he’s overlooking some steps in the debate, namely.

1. Does neuroscience matter? To base any morality – utilitarian or not – upon neuroscience requires us to make the Humean leap, from statements about “is” to statements about “ought”. Can we do this? If so how? We can’t just ignore the question.

What’s more, the object of utilitarianism is not necessarily happiness at an instant of time. It would be absurdly difficult – logically impossible? - to maximize this. A more feasible objective for social policy is happiness over a lifetime. Here’s John Stuart Mill on Utilitarianism:

The ultimate end…is an existence (my emphasis) exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments.

2. Why do our intuitions matter? Will is obviously right that utilitarianism can conflict with our intuitions – a point recognized by utilitarians ever since Mill. But so what? To utilitarians such as R.M Hare, this merely shows the inadequacy of intuitions. He wrote (pdf):

The intuitive level of moral thinking certainly exists and is (humanly speaking) an essential part of the whole structure; but however well equipped we are with these relatively simple, prima facie, intuitive principles or dispositions, we are bound to find ourselves in situations in which they conflict and in which, therefore, some other, non-intuitive, kind of thinking is called for.

You don’t have to be a utilitarian to sympathize here. In many activities – science, music, sport – we make progress only by repressing or retraining our instincts. Why should ethical thinking be different?

3. If the proper ethical basis of social policy - whatever it should be - conflicts with commonsense morality, what’s to be done? Can we avoid using what Henry Sidgwick called “esoteric morality”? Should we?

Obviously, there are more questions than answers here. For me, the bottom line is that there seems to be an enormous gulf between the rigour of moral thinking which is required to justify public morality and social policy on the one hand, and the actual thinking that occurs on the other.

Comments

[Rob]

On 1: No, it doesn't, but only tangentially because of the is-ought problem (which isn't Humean: Hume goes directly from facts about our motivations to conclusions about morality, so he can't be endorsing the claim that you can't go from an is to an ought). More important is the claim that whilst all mental events are identical with some physical event, they are not identical under their description as mental events, which means, if true, which I think it is, that no description of a physical event - like some neurological event - could also be an accurate description of a mental event - like being happy. The idea is owed to Donald Davidson, if you're interested.

On 2: pointing to conflict between intuitions won't help the utilitarian get round the problem that utilitarianism violates several rather important intuitions, unless they can show that that conflict is in principle insoluble in the absence of roughly utilitarian principles. For good holist reasons, I think moral philosophy is the gradual revision of our ethical thinking on the basis of that ethical thinking. If this is true, utilitarianism and any other ethical theory which runs seriously counter to deeply held parts of our ethical thinking is false, simply because it has misconstrued what moral philosophy is about.

On 3: This depends on your answer to 2. If, like Bernard Williams, you think that the fact that a morality would have to be administered in secret is a serious point against it, you think that basically because you think the intuitive idea that people should be able to understand morality, that moral reasons are really reasons for all. If, like Sigdwick, you don't think government house utilitarianism is a problem, you think that's the case at least partly because you don't think our moral intuitions matter (conclusively).

I continue to be baffled that any utilitarians exist, frankly. The only morally decent utilitarian around is Mill, and he's only a utilitarian because he believes some bizarre empirical premises.

[dearieme]

"The ultimate end…is an existence (my emphasis) exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments." Why does Mill assume that one can optimise two different objective functions at the same time?

[James]

I don't think neuroscience should determine the validity of a set of ethics. Neuroscience studies our animal parts, and animals don't require ethics to survive (one can argue that humans don't necessarily do either.)

My Ethics professor felt that utilitarianism was a copout for a true ethical system. But I always had the problem that, if that were the case, where do the ethics for say, a Platonic system (or its subsequent derivatives) spring from? Any other ethical systems point to or allude to some higher order or being. It's still a problem I have with Ethics in general, and being an (attempted) rational agnostic. I won't think about it any more, now, though.

I'll get me coat...