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 Utility Monster and the Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility
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Del curso dictado por Yale University
Moral Foundations of Politics
1128 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
Okay.
So let's just think a little bit about the psychology of all of this.
And I put on the, on the slide here the notion of a
a utility monster just so we can get a grip on what we really are assuming here.
Suppose there's someone with a, a huge capacity to enjoy things,
what would Bentham say we should do for that person?
>> Give him all our stuff.
>> Give him all our stuff?
So if he could enjoy things more than we could.
Yeah.
Now that might sound like a philosopher's example, but you know,
you could imagine drawing a diagram where the more you gave him, the happier he got.
Well, perhaps a little bit artificial, but consider
people with different capacities for pleasure someone with a great capacity for
pleasure versus a normal person, that's the sort of utility monster problem.
You might think that's artificial, but what about depressed people?
Suppose I had $5 and I, I could give it to you or I could give it to her and
I happen to know that you're, you're a really depressed person and
if I give it to you, you'll say something like only $5, why didn't you give me $10?
Whereas if I give it to her, she's going to say, great, thank you so much, right?
>> [LAUGH].
>> Well, I should give it to her because we want to maximize the utility in
the society and the fact that, that you're such a sourpuss,
means that there's no point in giving you the $5, right?
So off we take, if we take this thinking a little bit further,
one of the criticisms that sometimes made of utilitarianism is that,
well, why should we help handicapped people?
It may cost a huge amount of society's resources to,
to help a handicapped person that you know, maybe it'll make
them a bit happier but that, those resources, had they
not been spent on handicapped people could have made many more people much happier.
And in the limiting case, it may seem to imply that we
shouldn't keep handicapped people alive at all from the standpoint of utilitarianism,
and you, you should start to now be making some connections to the problem.
Why do you think I might say that?
Well, let's suppose the Germans derived more utility from
exterminating the Jews, then the Jews lose from being exterminated.
The Germans are, the Nazis are a race of kind of utility monsters.
So you, if you start to think about it, you can see there's this
connection between utilitarianism and eugenics and this idea
that as critics of utilitarianism would later put it, that classical
utilitarianism doesn't take seriously the differences among people, right?
If, if using one benefits another
more than the harm to the first one there's no reason within the logic
of utilitarianism to tell you not to do it, okay?
And so in this sense, it is this is when the,
the chickens start to come home to roost with the consequentialism, right?
So most people will want to embrace utilitarian thinking up to a point,
but when you start to see now, when you play this out that perhaps they,
they reach, there will reach a point for almost everyone where, as I said,
they're going to want to jump off the train that Bentham's still driving, right?
Of course when we, when we think about utilitarianism, generally speaking,
there's a different assumption about human beings and
that's what we call Diminishing Marginal Utilities, almost a mirror image.
The, the picture I drew of the Utility Monster was that the more
you gave the Utility Monster, the more utility you got whereas the standard
assumption is, I put here if you think about a person who doesn't have a car,
and there's a possibility of giving them a nice Porsche if you give them one Porsche,
their utility will go up a huge amount.
The next Porsche, it'll go up a little bit more, but
once we get to the fifth or the sixth Porsche, what will happen?
>> It is going to drop?
>> It's going to flat line.
>> It's going to flat line, you, you're saying it's going to drop, you,
you actually, you, you, get sick of worrying about all your Porsches?
>> [LAUGH] Well, he doesn't, there is a threshold, there is a limit of pleasure.
>> Okay, so you could say they're just going to become too much trouble and
it would actually drop, right?
You're saying it'll flat line, you just won't get anymore utility.
So the truth is actually somewhere in between.
At least the truth about what we typically assume is somewhere in between what
the two of you just said because generally speaking a,
a utilitarian thinker would say well, it may be true that at some point Porsches,
if you've enough of just become a liability and
your utility starts to go down.
But the assumption would be well then, you would sell them and
buy something else that give you utility.
So it's not that it would actually go down in that sense, but
it would get flatter and flatter towards infinity, but
it would never get completely flat, so it wouldn't quite flatline.
Imagine this curve getting flatter and flatter and flatter,
not actually becoming totally flat until you reach infinity because even when you
have 5000 Porches, you can still sell all the 5000 to somebody and
then use the money to get something else.
Maybe at that point, it would be hard for
you to find something that you truly want, but the notion is it gets flatter and
flatter towards infinity, but doesn't quite get there.
This is one of the assumptions about utilitarianism,
which is I would say universally accepted,
the notion of diminishing marginal utility we'll see that Bentham believed it.
Every 18th Century economist believed it,
every 19th Century economist believed it, every modern economist believes it.
There's probably no other analytical principle that is so
widely shared as the notion of the diminishing marginal utility of all
good things and this is the notion that I've just been through here.
Any given good, the more you get, the more units of that good you get,
the less new utility you'll get from each new unit of that good.
So that's the notion of diminishing marginal utility.
You always get a little bit on the margin, but
a little bit less than the previous time.
You can't do any economics without it.
Those of you who know what an indifference curve is in economics, and
I'll explain that next week, but those of you who know will know
that the reason indifference curves are shaped the way they are,
is because they incorporate the idea of diminishing marginal utility.
They're built into the structure of indifference curves in economics,
you can't do any economics without them.
So that raises the question,
is the principle of diminishing marginal utility true?
Think about drinking a beer, and a second beer, and a third beer, and a fourth beer.
What's going to happen?
>> You're going to start getting drunk.
>> [LAUGH] >> And then what's going to happen?
>> You're going to fall down the stairs.
>> Yeah, that's right.
And so eventually it's actually going to look something like that, isn't it?
Likewise, taking aspirin.
You know, you're going to fall off the bottom of the chart.
So we can question the idea of diminishing marginal utility, but an,
an, any modern economist and any modern utilitarian thinker would say two things
there, one I've already said that we, we're assuming that you,
you start to after a certain amount of beer, you, you will stop drinking beer,
and you'll sell the rest of your beer for something else that gives you utility,
maybe at that point some aspirins, right, right?
[LAUGH] so this is, you'll substitute out something else,
and you know, that raises a further question is whether there's
diminishing marginal utility of money, which we'll talk about more soon, right.
But the other thing that they would say is well, obviously,
it's true that some of the time,
the Principle of Diminishing Marginal Utility doesn't hold, but it holds
more of the time than any other assumption we could make about human behavior.
So we're going to be more right more of the time if
we assume this to be the case than if we assume anything else.
So, we're going to finish up with Bentham next time, but while we're doing that,
the question in, in preparation for doing that, what, the question I'd like you to
think about is, if all of this is right, if Bentham's theory is correct, and
people are deterministically driven to seek pleasure and avoid pain and.
They can't, they have no choice in the matter and their behavior is,
is not alterable in this respect why would we need government at all?
What possible use could there be in having government?
We'll start with that next time.
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