When do governments deserve our allegiance, and when should they be denied it? This course explores the main answers that have been given to this question in the modern West. We start with a survey of the major political theories of the Enlightenment: Utilitarianism, Marxism, and the social contract tradition. In each case, we begin with a look at classical formulations, locating them in historical context, but then shift to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today. Next, we turn to the rejection of Enlightenment political thinking, again exploring both classical and contemporary formulations. The last part of the course deals with the nature of, and justifications for, democratic politics, and their relations to Enlightenment and Anti-Enlightenment political thinking. In addition to exploring theoretical differences among the various authors discussed, considerable attention is devoted to the practical implications of their competing arguments. To this end, we discuss a variety of concrete problems, including debates about economic inequality, affirmative action and the distribution of health care, the limits of state power in the regulation of speech and religion, and difficulties raised by the emerging threat of global environmental decay.
The Theory of Classical Utilitarianism
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
1173 calificaciones
De la lección
Utilitarianism: Classical and Neoclassical
Classical and neoclassical utilitarianism are examined in this module starting with the historical context. Professor Shapiro then shifts to the contemporary debates as they relate to politics today.
Conoce a los instructores
Ian ShapiroSterling Professor of Political Science and Henry R. Luce Director
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
What I'm going to do for the rest of today's session and
the next session is walk us through the bits and
pieces of this argument and see how it fits together.
And I'm going to do this initially by focusing on five dimensions of what he
had to say.
And by highlighting them,
what we'll be able to do is first drill down into the theory itself, and secondly
give us some dimensions along which we can compare it to other theories later.
So, the first dimension that I'm gonna focus on is that it's a comprehensive and
a deterministic system.
What do you think I might mean by a comprehensive system?
>> All encompassing?
>> All encompassing.
I think that's right.
He thinks and explains everything, but
can you think of something that he might not be able to explain?
What would be a counter example?
>> Religious affiliation behavior.
>> Religious motivation.
Yeah.
Well actually, he thought about that, and he said, come on.
Don't be silly.
Think about it.
What's religion?
It's about heaven and hell.
What is heaven and hell?
Heaven and hell are speaking to the idea that we want perpetual happiness.
Hell is always portrayed in the Bible as gnashing teeth, perpetual pain, suffering.
What could be a better illustration of what I'm talking about?
Anything else you think he might not be able to explain?
>> How to explain self-sacrifice?
>> Self-sacrifice?
Okay, what we might call altruistic motivation.
The parent who says, I couldn't live with myself if I didn't lay down my life for
my child in this circumstance.
Or somebody who gives money away to charity.
Why would they be doing this?
Can you think of what Bentham might say about that?
>> He would probably look at the result that the action has produced.
And basically, he would say that
this action ultimately leads to increase of happiness for the other.
>> Right. So he would have to say the altruistic
parent who lays down their life for their child in some life or
death situation wouldn't be able to live with themselves if they didn't.
And what is that if you say,
I couldn't have lived with myself if I let my child die?
What you're really saying is, the pain would be too great.
Bentham would say, there you go.
Right?
Likewise, if I sat on all this wealth and
didn't give it away in charitable contributions to the third world,
all you're revealing is that you are somebody who gets
happiness from doing things like that.
What else might you think about?
>> Well, what also comes to mind are the people who enjoy suffering.
For instance, masochists.
How to explain them.
>> Okay.
So how would we think about a masochist?
>> Well, the masochist is deriving pleasure from their own pain.
>> Mm-hm.
>> So it's completely explainable.
>> I think that's what he'd say.
Whatever turns you on.
>> That's right.
>> Yeah, right?
What about sadism?
People who enjoy beating up other people?
>> I think that's the same thing.
They're getting pleasure from inflicting pain on someone else.
>> Exactly.
So, this is what we mean by a comprehensive theory.
There's nothing it can't explain.
We could spend the next hour trying to come up with examples,
and Bentham would always have a story to tell about why this in fact
was pleasure maximizing for you in the last analysis.
And we'll come back to whether that's a reason to believe it or not later, but
certainly Bentham thought this was beyond question.
So, thinking about some of our discussion earlier in the course.
He thinks this is almost like something for which there's a theorem.
It just cannot be the case that it's not true.
Systems that question it deal in darkness instead of light, as he put it.
Okay, so we know what we mean by comprehensive.
Now I said it's also a deterministic system.
What do you think I might mean by that?
>> Probably there is no exception to the rule and that a person
basically cannot have a choice?
>> Okay, so that's exactly what he means.
He means that you are governed by these two imperatives to seek pleasure and
avoid pain, and you don't have any choice in the matter.
What do you think about that?
>> It's problematic.
[LAUGH] >> Why is it problematic?
>> Because it's opening the gray zone, whether or
not you have individual rights to your own will.
>> Exactly, it seems like it flies in the face
of the Enlightenment commitment to the importance of individual freedom.
So that's right.
It's an important tension there, and
we will see that Bentham thinks he has an answer to that.
But I'm gonna put that off to one side for the moment, but it's exactly the right
thing to worry about from the point of view of classical utilitarianism.
Okay, second.
It's a naturalistic theory.
Any idea what I might mean by a naturalistic theory?
>> Well when you say that,
it's confusing because Bentham was the one who refutes Locke's theory of natural law.
>> Right. So he's not a natural law theorist, and
that's an important distinction to make.
It's a naturalistic theory.
By naturalistic, I'm giving you a clue here.
What, who, Danny you know who this is?
>> That's Darwin.
>> That's Darwin, exactly.
But interestingly, and this is one of the reasons he's such a remarkable figure,
is that writing seven decades before Darwin,
Bentham comes up with a theory that he thinks is essential
to the physiological survival of the human beings as a species.
So he wants to say that utilitarianism has a natural, biological basis.
The physical sources of pain and pleasure are the groundwork, he says,
for the political, moral, and religious.
They're included in it.
We are bound by the principle,
to the principle by the natural constitution of the human frame, he says.
If we ignored it the human species couldn't continue in existence for
almost any time at all.
We would simply stop existing.
So he thinks that not only does this seem to have the force of a kind of
mathematical theorem in that it's impossible to doubt.
But secondly, it's impossible even to imagine the human species existing
if people were not governed by pleasure seeking and pain avoidance.
That's what he means by naturalistic theory,
well what I mean by a naturalistic theory in characterizing Bentham.
Okay.
Two more terms here that we need to explain that I think are gonna be useful
in understanding.
I say here it's an egoistic theory but not a subjectivist one.
And I put those two together because most egoistic theories, we'll explain what
they are in a minute, are also subjectivist, but Bentham's isn't.
So that's why I want to highlight that.
But, what do you think I might mean by egoistic?
>> That it's turned towards this individual self gain, self utility.
>> Yes, exactly right. That it's all about the individual ego,
the individual self interest.
People.
Utilitarianism operates at the level of each individual human being's psychology.
It's not group psychology.
It's individual psychology.
So when we don't think of the,
we will later think of the utility of the society as a whole.
But the building blocks are the utilities or
disutilities, happiness or unhappiness of each individual.
People are influenced by utility through basically sticks and carrots.
If you can find a way to improve their utility, give them an incentive to do
something that will improve their utility, they'll do it.
Or if you punish them, they'll not do it.
That's all it is.
So that's what I mean by egoistic.
But I said it's egoistic but not subjectivist.
Why am I bothering to point this out?
What do we mean when we say something is a subjectivist view?
>> Well, that it can operate differently, and people have different reasons for
acting differently, they can think different things.
>> So their own beliefs about why they're doing something are important, right?
And as I said, it's unusual for
egoistic theories not to be subjectivists, because people say
it's my own judgement about why I'm doing what I'm doing that matters.
But Bentham wants to say, egoism is valid regardless of
whether people understand it, whether they perceive it as motivating their actions,
or whatever they think about it.
And he says here, in this remarkable passage, it is with the anatomy of
the human mind, as it is with the anatomy and physiology of the human body.
The rare case is not of a person's being unconversant,
but with his being conversant with it.
So he's saying look, if you have a stomach ache,
you might have a theory about why you have a stomach ache.
But most people are probably wrong about why they have a stomach ache.
Or, so if you have some pain in your liver, you'll know you have a pain.
You won't really know what's causing it.
You won't have any idea.
Well, it's just the same with your motivation, right?
Very different.
Compare that with Locke.
Remember when we were talking about Locke's argument, and he said that there's
no earthly authority that can tell you that you're wrong about what you think.
The individual is sovereign for Locke, your judgment.
You have what 20th century philosopher, Gilbert Rowe,
once referred to as privileged access to the ghost in the machine.
This sort of idea that what's inside of your soul, your mind,
your motivation, really is known only to you.
Bentham says clap trap.
Most of the time, we have no idea why we're doing what we're doing.
We're driven by these forces and
that's all there is to it, these deterministic forces.
So that's what I mean by, on the one hand,
it's an egoistic theory that focuses on our self interest.
On the other hand,
he's not saying that your judgment about why you do things should be privileged.
There's no reason to think it should be.
His scientific theory is gonna tell you why you do things.
Okay, the fourth thing I want to say is that,
this is a radically consequentialist doctrine.
What do you think I might have in mind when I say consequentialist?
>> That it's about this marginal utility that-
>> Yeah, what else comes to mind?
What comes to mind with you when I say consequentialist?
>> Well if you're a consequentialist,
you're only really concerned with the ends.
>> Results, the ends, the consequences.
That's all that matters when we're talking about a consequentialist theory.
Somebody once said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
So Bentham rules out things like a moral sense, things like natural law,
as we've already noted, the rule of right,
any sort of motivation other than the consequentialist one he's talking about,
he calls it dangerous nonsense, nonsense on stilts.
All theories of natural law, all theories of natural right, it just,
sweep it all away.
Throw it in the trash can.
It's pre-scientific muddled thinking of human beings until I,
Jeremy Bentham came along.
That's really how he thought about it.
So it's a radically consequentialist doctrine.
We only evaluate actions by reference to their consequences for
promoting pleasure and avoiding pain.
In this remarkable passage here,
when you think about when he was writing, he says, unlike the English,
the French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason
a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor.
It may one day come to be recognized that the number of legs,
the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum are reasons
equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to their same fate.
So he's talking here about animals.
What else is there that should trace the insuperable line?
Is it the faculty of reason and perhaps the faculty of discourse?
But a full-grown horse or a dog is beyond comparison more rational,
as well as a more conversable animal than an infant of a day or
a week or even a month-old?
But suppose the case were otherwise.
What would it avail?
The question is not can they reason?
Nor, can they talk?
But can they suffer?
So minimizing pain, this is in a speculative vein, in a very racist world.
He says, well, and even for non-whites?
And then he says, for other creatures?
Why should we think even if nations,
maybe it's the world, maybe even the entire universe?
So, as I said there's nothing that Bentham ever shrinks from in
trying to formulate this theory.
But utilitarianism notice can't just be about minimizing suffering.
One famous philosopher, Karl Popper, had the idea
that because there are many difficulties, which we'll talk about later in measuring
pleasure, that we should have a more minimalist view of utilitarianism and
say it should just be about minimizing suffering in the world.
Can you guess why?
This is a tough one.
You might not get it.
Why that's problematic?
>> Well if you're just concerned with minimizing suffering, does that leave
a giant possibility or just a lack of possibility for any pleasure at all?
>> Well, that's certainly one objection that could be made.
The decisive one was made by a philosopher called by the name of J.J.
Smart, in a one page article that made his career.
He pointed out that if that were the case, if all we wanted to do was minimize
suffering in the universe even, or certainly on the planet Earth.
If we could painlessly annihilate the human race tomorrow, we should do it,
because of the future suffering in the world that was gonna be experienced.
>> There would be no reason for any species capable of suffering
to live at all and if they could be painlessly done away with.
So, utilitarianism cannot just be about minimizing suffering.
It has to be some kind of cost, benefit calculation about the ratio
of suffering to non-suffering and whether it's worth it.
And Bentham saw that and he talks here about,
he's perfectly okay with the idea that animals can be used in
experiments to produce something that's beneficial for
humans, say as in medical experiments.
But not that gratuitous infliction of suffering on animals just for
the hell of it.
So you can see that Bentham is making this calculus and it's okay for
him to make this calculus, because Bentham had no doubt
that we could make interpersonal comparisons of utility.
What I'm gonna call ICUs for short.
He had no doubt that we can compare the suffering of one creature or
the happiness of one creature with the happiness or
suffering of another creature and say, which outweighs the other.
So interpersonal judgements of utility, interpersonal comparisons
of utility are fine with respect to classical utilitarianism.
So that's his consequentialist doctrine that allows
the computation of the relative merits
of different ways of doing things by figuring out how much pleasure they cause,
how much pain they cause people to suffer and then you just do the arithmetic.
And he truly believed that it was gonna be possible to figure out every question
of public policy in this way.
If you actually plow through that long book,
the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation that I
read you the first paragraph of, a lot of it is he's just trying to do that.
For instance, he tries to figure out the exact right level of
punishment to deter people from crime.
It's this kind of thing.
As you get so much suffering from being punished for so long, you get so
much benefit from committing the crime.
So we just have to calibrate it to deter people.
And he thought everything could be reduced to that and you just get this giant
consequential scheme that you could then run around and apply to the world.
And he believed in this with such intensity that for
instance, he would write constitutions for countries.
And then he would go to the country with the constitution and he would be just so
upset when they weren't interested in having his constitution,
which he thought it was based on his scientific consequentialist principles.
Closely that connected to that and something we should just pay
a little bit of attention to is that he thought utility was quantifiable.
He thought that,
he called them the four circumstances that determine pain and pleasure.
He thought intensity.
How intense the pleasure or pain is?
The duration of the pain and pleasure?
How certain or uncertain it was?
We might think of this as how likely it is to occur?
And finally, what he called propinquity or remoteness?
That might be a little confusing to you, but
this is the notion that anyone who has taken Econ 101 will know.
It's that we tend to discount utility into the future.
So if I say to you, you can have a dollar today or
a dollar five days from now, which are you going to want?
>> Today?
>> Yeah, that's the notion that today,
a dollar five days from now is worth less to you than a dollar is today.
So we discount things into the future.
So and he's sure that with the possible exception of intensity,
the rest certainly can all be measured.
And he thinks maybe he's a little unsure, Bentham wasn't unsure of himself often,
but he was a little unsure about measuring intensity.
But he figured he would be able to do it and he thought of this as Cardinal Scale.
So we could actually,
you can almost imagine sort of standard international utiles.
Lumps of pleasure and pain that we can ascribe to
different actions and we can add them and subtract them and
do math to figure out how to get them to work.
And we can do it not only within people, but as I said,
he's happy to have comparisons across people.
And so that's basically what it comes down to.
He says, a measure of government may be said to be comfortable to or
dictated by the principle utility when it increases utility
in the society or unacceptable when it decreases.
So you've got your pleasure versus pain calculus, it's just that simple.
So that's the basic doctrine and
hugely influential and hugely problematic.
And we're gonna start to dig into to some of the problems with it in a minute, but
I wanna just show you graphically here, if you want for those who like diagrams.
If you imagine a point on a diagram like this one,
where I marked as the status quo there.
If you imagine a 45 degree line down to the x-axis,
anything in the green shaded area, anything north
of the line would increase the utility of those two
person society consisting of A and B in that picture.
Because it would increase the total amount of happiness.
So Bentham's principle for
governing society is maximize the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
What I call the possibility frontier, just
takes note of the fact that there's a finite amount of possible happiness.
Once you get onto the frontier, you can't increase it anymore.
But anything in that green area would increase both people's utility
would increase the total happiness of the greatest number and
it's perfectly acceptable from the point of view of Bentham's happiness principle.
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