Yes, Bentham Got It Pretty Much Right

The philosophical sharks are circling the swimming Richard Layard. Their dorsal fins make a sinister pattern as they cut through the waves. The top philosophical predators close in on the naive utilitarian:

Fontana Labs:

Unfogged: It would be more fun to disagree, but I'm afraid Will Wilkinson's negative evaluation of Richard Layard's Happiness is correct. This is not a good book. The results from economics and psychology are interesting (if reported elsewhere), but Layard really botches just about every philosophical discussion he attempts. On the other hand, there's some novelty in the sentiment You know who got it pretty much right? Jeremy Bentham. So props for that.

And Will Wilkinson:

Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle: Value Monism & Public Reason: More Layard Flogging: I think I need to stop arguing with Layard about utilitarianism because he's really just too philosophically inept to take all that seriously. The chapter at the middle of Happiness defending the principle of utility as the sole standard for judging right action and public policy is just laughably dumb. If I was still TA-ing ethical theory classes, and Layard turned this in, he'd get a solid 'B':

Why should we take the greatest happiness as the goal for society? Why not some other goal--or indeed many? What about health, autonomy, accomplishment or freedom? The problem with many goals is that they often conflict, and then we have to balance them against each other. So we naturally look for one ultimate goal that enables us to judge other goals by how they contribute to it. Happiness is that ultimate goal because, unlike all other goals, it is self-evidently good.

How is it that health, autonomy, accomplishment, and freedom are not self-evidently good? Layard will want to insist that we only want these other things for the sake of happiness. But that is just so much table pounding, and it is false. I am, in fact, willing to sacrifice some measure of happiness to ensure my autonomy, or to accomplish something of great value. I would, in fact, be willing to face suffering and death if that was required to preserve my freedom. And it's pretty easy to point out that happiness is instrumental to other values. I want happiness because I will be motivated to accomplish great things if I am happy. I am more likely to be benevolent and kind if I am happy. I am more likely to have a meaningful, successful intimate relationship. I will live longer if I am happy, and it is good to live. Etc. If we are going to admit that it makes sense to talk about things being self-evidently good, then happiness surely is one of those things. And so are all the other goods Layard mentions. He gets nowhere....

Individual moral intelligence involves weighing competing values and making judgments about their ordering according to standards that vary with context, relationship, social role, and more. It is hard to be a good person because it is hard to make out all the morally relevant characteristics of one's situation, and it is hard to know how to trade values against each other, and to be modest but resolute in the face of complexity--not because it is hard to be motivated to maximize something ridiculous like net aggregate utility....

Will no one save him?! I will!

The response--against which Wilkinson has no defense except to issue squidlike clouds of obfuscating ink--would be that Wilkinson believes that if he were to sacrifice his freedom for his happiness, that if he were to do so he would then look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life, and that he would be unhappy. If Wilkinson says otherwise--that he would look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life and be happy, but that he would still regret what he had done and wish he had done otherwise--Wilkinson is simply saying, "Baa baa buff." He would be demonstrating that he does not understand the rules of conversation using the English language.

Happiness--utility--plays a very special role in Bentham's philosophy. It is defined to be that which is maximized by the choices of a rational and reasonable person with enough time for reflection and sufficient information about the situation. To say "I would rather be unhappy and free than happy and a slave, and thus I have refuted Bentham" is to miss the point entirely.

At its core utilitarianism is two commands:

1. Respect people's choices--those made with enough information, after sufficient deliberation, when they are in possession of their faculties. You want to know what is good for someone? Watch the choices that he or she makes. Watch them carefully.

2. A good society is one in which as much of what people would choose for themselves--with enough information, after sufficient deliberation, when they are in possession of their faculties--is attained, taking care that when there is a tradeoff between one person's preferences and another's, each one counts equally.

Those seem to be obvious and unexceptionable foundations for morality. Thus: You know who got it pretty much right? Jeremy Bentham.

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UPDATE: Wilkinson wants to dig himself deeper into his hole:

Will Wilkinson / The Fly Bottle: DeLong Shot: DeLong's argument... is that the following proposition [is incoherent]: "(a) Happiness without freedom is not worth having".

...Well, if 'worth having' in English means 'conducive to pleasure' it sure does. But that's not what 'worth having' means in English. That's what it means in Benthamese, the vulgar dialect of the morally insensate (economists, Asperger's cases, etc.) 'Worth having' in English means something like' valuable' or 'good,' and there is surpassingly little evidence to be gleaned from the semantic practice of competent English speakers that 'valuable' and 'good' are synonymous with 'pleasurable' or 'happy making'...

I would say my argument is that sentences like: "I would be happy to sacrifice my freedom for material comfort--but I won't do so, because I think freedom is more important than material comfort," are incoherent.

And my argument is true: such sentences are incoherent. In English, at least.

It is interesting to note Wilkinson's admission that he knows perfectly well that to Layard vocabulary "happiness," "utility," "worthwhile," "valuable," and "good" are more-or-less synonymous, and that his critique is based on a misreading of Layard, on his forcing a narrow meaning of "happiness" into the place of Layard's broad meaning...

Comments

[Anno-nymous]

"If Wilkinson says otherwise--that he would look back on the choices he made and look ahead to his future life and be happy, but that he would still regret what he had done and wish he had done otherwise--Wilkinson is simply saying, "Baa baa buff." He would be demonstrating that he does not understand the rules of conversation using the English language.
Happiness--utility--plays a very special role in Bentham's philosophy. It is defined to be that which is maximized by the choices of a rational and reasonable person with enough time for reflection and sufficient information about the situation."

It sounds to me that Bentham is the one who doesn't understand the rules of conversation with the English language here. You can't just define a *feeling* to be some external outcome. I don't think you can actually define any preexisting words, according to the rules of conversation with the English language.

I'm not just trying to make a silly point here. There is something I know to be happiness, something I feel. It is certainly true that it isn't the only thing I try to maximize. Defining happiness as that which is maximized makes the philosophical statement tautologically true, but irrelevant to the real-world concept of happiness.

[matt]

Hmmm,
Brian Weatherson makes much this point above, I think, but these two claims are quite clearly not the "core" of utilitarianism, at least not in anything like its classical forms. Maybe it's a decendent of it, but it's certainly not the core of either traditional nor Millian utilitarianism- for both Millian and Benthamite (and probably Sedgwickian) utilitarianism these claims would both be instrumental ones- they would be suggestions about how we can best achieve the core claims- but they are just suggestions about means on either a Millian or a Benthamite view- If respecting people's choices didn't best promote utility (and certainly there are cases where it doesn't- think of kids) than one shouldn't do it. So, it can't be the "core" of utilitarianism. We also would need some sort of story as to why respecting people's choices is what we should do- Mill and Benthan think they have a story about happiness or utility, but that's clearly not the same thing as respecting choices or the like. If we think that respecting choices is of independent worth, we'll need a story about that, but that story is very unlikely to be one that is recognisably utilitarian. So, while I reserve judgment as to the worth of the view Brad is putting forward, it's certainly not a traditional utilitarian one in either Bentham or Mill's sense.

[kevin quinn]

Brad: how would you handle the phenomenon of commitment, which Sen argues, perusausively I think(in "Rational Fools")ought to be understood as *counter-preferential choice*? Is virtue its own reward, as your consequentialism would seem to imply?

[eyelessgame]

At the risk of being just a bit pedantic, could we define our terms here? Surely there are long-term and short-term sorts of happiness, the happiness of the moment, the happiness of retrospect and the meta-happiness of investment in future happiness; the happiness (or lack thereof) of certainty or uncertainty about future happiness, the happiness that derives from benefit to others, etc.

Surely one would consider another to be making poor choices if he considered only his momentary personal happiness, without regard for consequential (future) happiness. There's a large element of predictive power implied in that simple word, at least the way you imply Bentham uses it.

I'm sure I'm not covering any ground that hasn't been tread on a million times before. It just seems always to come up that in philosophical discussions people keep using the same words in different ways, and finding thereby easy foundations for argument when they're not in conceptual reality disagreeing as much as they think they are.

But perhaps this makes them happy.

[FD]

I agree with Brad and the last posted comment. Here are my two cents.

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