DeLong Smackdown Watch

Professionally administered by Brian Weatherson:

Thoughts Arguments and Rants: Happiness is a Warm Book: Brad DeLong has two posts up defending Richard Layard's defence of Benthamism against criticism from Fontana Labs and Will Wilkinson. I think Brad is misinterpreting Bentham, so while his defence might be a defence of something interesting (say, preference utilitarianism) it isn't much of a defence of Bentham....

The problem with interpreting [Bentham] is that "advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness" do not really come to the same thing. At the very least, it is clear that advantage and pleasure do not come to the same thing, and which (if either) of these good and happiness are is part of what's at dispute. But for interpreting Bentham, it's very important to realise that he did view them as the same thing....

What matters for [Brad] is "what people would choose for themselves", i.e. preferences, and preference satisfaction isn't a kind of experience. If people choose different kinds of experiences, or even things that do't maximise their own chances for good experiences (as when people take life-endangering jobs so as to provide goods for their children) they are getting what they choose, but not maximising utility as Bentham saw it. In principle my preferences can be satisfied by things that happen after I die, even if I don't get any extra experiences after I die, in which case we certainly couldn't identify preference satisfaction with any kind of experience.

As I said, I don't want to get into the pros or cons of the moral view Brad is espousing here. I just want to make an historical point, that it's a mistake to think Bentham viewed preferences rather than experiences as the core of utilitarianism. It was a great advance over Bentham (I think) when later philosophers made this move.

Touche.

Comments

[tante aime]

I was coding a what-if rollup sheet today, figuring how with the remaining corporate budget we have, and some repeat variables to play with, how to find the algorithm that solves for keeping most employees in their jobs, as opposed to maximizing profits, or "productivity", that delicious non sequitor. It's all about burn rate.

[For those following the meltdown journal, we are at the door-slamming stage, meetings that "you aren't invited", accountants running down the halls with trails of paper printouts, scowling executives racing towards June 30th. Somewhere between 1/3 & 2/3 of employees to terminate.]

And in a dream, like that last film sequence in Raising Arizona, I saw a great spreadsheet in the sky before me, a gigantic what-if rollup of the invasion of Iraq. Only instead of maximizing the number of employees retained, it had been refined to a rather oily razor-faced edge.

$4,025,000,000,000 worth of oil profits out of Iraq.

Now, US oil companies could have spent their own money to buy Iraqi oil from some Russian or Syrian middleman, but that's only a small portion of the profits, after you deduct for shipping, refining, storage, distribution and retail and that administrative production overhead.

No, the best way, the most "advantageous, pleasurable, good, or happiest" way to crunch this number was a good old fashioned GWII. And since oil companies don't pay taxes, a free war, and since they have absolutely no intention of paying for that war out of their profits, that $4,025,000,000,000 directly to the bottom line.
Completely vertically integrated $'s, cradle to grave.

For what it's worth, you can buy a lot of Senators for $4,025,000,000,000. Probably all of them, voting 100-0.

[len Zimmerman]

Ben Franklin thought happiness was the result of doing good, or at least what one thinks and feels is the right thing to do. For me happiness is a state in which I am at peace with myself. The result of what I do, think, feel, and say being in agreement with each other. And that may be what Aristotle was talking about when he said to be happy be virtuous.

Salom, Shalom, Peace.

[Giles Robertson]

Congratulations on your intellectual honesty.

[Tim Scanlon]

The question of how "well being" should be understood is really several different questions. As a result, there is a tendency for people debating the question to talk past one another, and this tendency is to some extent represented in this thread.

One way that the question of well being might be understood is: what, at the most basic level, should an individual want his or her life to be like? Preference satisfaction is not a very plausible basic answer to this question, because in many (I would say most) cases people (rightly) prefer things because they believe them to have other properties, such as being pleasant, or worth doing for other reasons. They do not seek these things simply because they prefer them.

On the other hand, the question might be: How should the quality of individuals' lives be assessed by policy makers, as a basis for governmental decisions? Here preference satisfaction is a much more plausible answer, based on the ethical principle that governments should defer to individuals' own assessments of what is good for them.

There are lively debates about the proper answers to both of these questions. Nozick's experience machine is a contribution to the first debate: Should individuals take the quality of their experience as the sole determinant of the quality of their lives, or should they take other factors into account, such as whether our pleasure comes from true beliefs about what we are actually doing, and whether these things are in fact worth doing? Sen's work on capabilities is a contribution to the second debate: Given factors such as the adaptability of preferences, shouldn't governmental policy be judged on some basis other than facts about what people happen to prefer?

I won't argue here for my own answers to these questions. My point is just that they are different, and that this difference needs to be taken into account in order to understand what we are disagreeing about.

[eyelessgame]

May I suggest "meta-satisfaction"? Satisfaction derived in the now from anticipation of future satisfactory experience, whether your own or others'.

I can be made "content", even when performing miserable or dangerous tasks, by the anticipation of happy consequences of these miserable tasks, whether the perceived possible future happy consequences apply to myself or to others, in some circumstances even if the possibility of success (future happiness) is remote. Of course, the rationality of this contentedness depends a lot on one's understanding of statistics and ability to gauge risk, and/or one's commitment to causes that transcend oneself, etc...

I have no idea what Bentham said. I'm terribly remiss in even commenting on a thread discussing philosophers I've never heard of. But I certainly agree with what you say in your previous post -- watch people's choices carefully; it will reveal what they care about, or will reveal that they're not possessed of both full information and the full faculties of a rational adult.

[candersen]

Pardon the offtopicness but this has been on my mind. what do you guys think about the fec trying to regulate blog disclosure and such? I think it's valuable to know if blogs get money but this isn't the way to do it. what if an independent company offered an official seal that told about constributions or endorsements? solves the problem w/o the government. y'all thoughts?

[FD]

I think Professor DeLong is right. Here are my two cents (worth probably an ha'penny).

http://www.farcicaldilettante.com/2005/06/hedonism-happiness-preference-and.html