Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction

"In contrast with the last two approaches to life we’ve been discussing, the theory of utilitarianism is, to some degree, impersonal. Its main focus is not self-cultivation. It’s about maximising happiness—or preference satisfaction in some versions—for the greatest number of people (or sometimes the greatest aggregate happiness). Now, Robert Wright’s book suggests that by making the individual better, through losing some attachment to self and self-interest, you make the world better and I think there’s a similar argument in Massimo Pigliucci’s book. Utilitarianism is a philosophical approach that is very much concerned with making the world better, but not necessarily by self-development of the individual—and potentially at the expense of that. It’s about producing the best overall effects that you can. It’s a philosophical approach with a long history, but it’s particularly associated with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the 19th century, and following on from them, Henry Sidgwick, who is less well-known, generally. He was a very brilliant thinker, though a philosopher’s philosopher; the other two crossed over into the wider reading public. Then, in the late 20th and early 21st century, utilitarianism has been particularly associated with Peter Singer and other thinkers who have emphasised the application of this style of thinking to issues in the contemporary world—such as how we treat non-human animals. Many animals are capable of levels of suffering that we could reduce, but how do we balance that with how useful they are for food, clothing, all kinds of other things? Similarly, how do we deal with the distribution of goods across the world? How do we, individually, contribute to the overall balance of happiness over unhappiness in the world? The effective altruism movement has grown out of utilitarian thinking. This is grounded in the idea that if you’re sincere about making the world better, you should do the best that you possibly can in terms of producing outcomes. As a highly educated person, you could go to Africa as a teacher and you might think that’s the best thing you could do. But, actually, if you went to work on Wall Street, or in the City of London, and earned lots of money and then distributed that in highly rational ways, you could produce a much better effect. You might be able to buy huge amounts of prophylactic medicines to stop children getting worms, or amoebic dysentery, or mosquito nets that reduce the risk of malaria, and then, by those actions, produce a much better outcome than if you’d become a teacher. I don’t think that it’s the best system, no. I think there should be an element in our thinking where we analyse outcomes. But, at the extreme level, utilitarians would forego concerns about those immediately in front of them, who are in need, when there are needier people further afield. The needier people further afield should get our full attention first. That seems very rational. But I have a question about what kind of a person you would be—some kind of calculating machine that loses something essential to humanity; something that I value even if it doesn’t happen to produce identifiably better outcomes. There are issues about what kind of people we might become if that’s all we’re concerned with. I worry about that. But, if you’re talking about the distribution of scarce resources generally, utilitarian thinking does seem to be a good way to go about things, at least in broad terms. But if you were a completely rigorous utilitarian, you’d think, ‘I shouldn’t be swayed by the individual sufferer in front of me who I happen to know when there are things that I could do impersonally at a distance for much more needy complete strangers.’ There’s an opportunity cost when you give your time to console your sad millionaire friend, because you could have been generating income, which could then have been used impersonally to transform the lives of people who are ill, or starving, or would otherwise be on the brink of death. Small amounts of money from the wealthy West could have a huge impact in the developing world, so, as a rational utilitarian, I shouldn’t stop and help with that individual, because I could have earned so much money in the next hour that I could have saved perhaps ten strangers’ lives. That’s the kind of thing that Peter Singer does. I think it’s fair to say he targets multi millionaires with what some might call the propaganda of effective altruism. It’s a very rigorous and somewhat austere way of thinking. He has, for example, criticised philanthropists for donating to art museums rather than to people in need in the developing world. I’m biased as I wrote the VSI on Free Speech , but I do agree it’s an excellent series—and the books live up to their series name in terms of being very short. It’s surprising how much ground a good writer can cover in about 35,000 words or so. This book is quite brilliantly done. It’s a very concise book, but it’s intelligible and precise in the way it describes the varieties of utilitarianism. It’s very readable and it covers a lot of ground. It covers what you would cover in a university undergraduate course on utilitarianism, but you can read and take it in in four or five hours or so. Because Peter Singer is a co-author, it has a certain authority in its description of thinkers and positions. It’s got a bias, obviously, because it’s written by people who are extremely sympathetic to utilitarianism. But when, for instance, the book discusses Henry Sidgwick—a very difficult writer to read—I feel confident that Peter Singer, who’s immersed himself in Sidgwick’s writing and is part of the ongoing debates that Sidgwick started, is portraying Sidgwick in a way that will save me from having to plough through pages and pages of very densely written prose or, at the very least, give me a map so that when I go to Sidgwick I have an angle on his writing. Generally, this is the best introduction to utilitarianism that I’ve seen, with the possible exception of a very old book, which was Utilitarianism: For and Against , by J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, which was presented as a debate between two sides, and benefited greatly from that . Yes. Once you’re committed to utilitarian principles, there may be a lot of counter-intuitive conclusions that you draw logically from them, and many of them do come right up against social mores and the way things have been done. If you go back to Jeremy Bentham, he was writing about homosexuality from a utilitarian perspective, and argued, ‘Well, look, it maximises pleasure, why is this a crime? There’s no real reason for it being a crime.’ This is at a time when an act of male homosexuality was a very serious offence. Now, he didn’t publish that in his lifetime, but his utilitarian thinking allowed him that clarity of thought. Whether people will come to see some forms of incest in the same light as homosexuality is an interesting question. The fact that it’s counter-intuitive doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. There might, however, be other social reasons why you might want your morality to coincide with taboo feelings that are very widely shared. Maybe because the consequences of contraception failing would be potentially far more serious than in non-sibling accidental pregnancies—there could be a consequentialist or utilitarian account of why there should be a law against incest, even where the risk of pregnancy is very low. I’ve really struggled this year narrowing my choices down to five books. There are more that I would have liked to include if the format had allowed. Bryan van Norden’s Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto hasn’t been published in the UK yet, though I have read parts of it in draft. Van Norden argues that Western philosophy has been systematically biased against non-Western philosophy and that there is no excuse for present day philosophers to carry on the post-Enlightenment tradition of ignoring or denigrating the other. This is a lively polemic informed by Van Norden’s deep knowledge of ancient Chinese philosophy. It should ruffle a few feathers in university philosophy departments. Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny has only just been published in the UK, so I haven’t had time to read it as closely as I’d have liked, though it is clearly excellent. It’s a closely-argued book about misogyny, particularly in public life, focusing on the ways that women who choose not to conform to patterns of male dominance continue to be treated, contrasting that with what she calls ‘himpathy’, an inappropriate level of sympathy often shown towards male perpetrators of violence or abuse. For Manne, misogyny is best understood not so much in terms of the psychology of individuals, but rather through the social environments that control women’s behaviour. Three other books that could easily have made it on to my list are Tom Chatfield’s Critical Thinking , a post-Kahneman textbook for better thinking, Carrie Jenkins’s What Love Is and What it Could Be , which is a critical analysis of some forms of romantic love, and David Papineau’s Knowing The Score: How Sport Teaches us About Philosophy (and Philosophy About Sport) , written by a first-rate philosopher who is passionate about many sports, both as a fan and a player."