Problems of utilitarianism I: Defining “utility”
So far we have largely discussed metaethical questions. These are, like most philosophical questions, fundamentally theoretical: they have to do with what we should think.
But morality is practical; it has to do centrally with what we should do. And Hare's work provides a natural transition from purely metaethical questions to moral questions and the application of metaethical theory to them. For Hare is not only a metaethical prescriptivist but also someone who has the substantive moral view that is called “utilitarianism.” Indeed, he argues that, if you firsta) consider what maxims you are willing to universalize, and then
b) make sure they meet the conditions
i) that we treat everybody equally and
ii) that we take into account the consequences of our actions for sentient beings,
you will find that you are drawn to accept utilitarian principles. Hare's metaethics thus leads him to his first-order moral principles.
Utilitarianism is composed of two basic claims. One is called “consequentialism”: this is the view that an act should be assessed purely by its consequences. Its opposite is moral absolutism, for absolutists hold that certain kinds of acts are wrong and right, whatever the consequences. (Absolutism is also often called “deontology.”) Consequentialism does not yield substantial moral principles, however, until it says both which consequences you should consider and how they should affect your actions.
The first utilitarians, nineteenth-century British philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, believed that the consequences you should consider were simply the happiness or unhappiness that your actions would cause.
They thought you should seek to maximize the amount of happiness, which means they were hedonists—hence their famous slogan “The greatest happiness of the greatest number.” They thought we should act in such a way that as many people as possible were as happy as possible.This certainly looks like a very generous-hearted principle. But this form of utilitarianism immediately has to answer a question. Suppose you have the choice between making some people a little happy or a few people very happy. Which should you choose? In order to answer this question we need to be able to have some sort of way of measuring happiness. The measure the utilitarians suggested they called “utility”—hence the name of their view. They held that it made sense to say such things as
U: Sarah would get twice as much utility as James from eating this bar of chocolate.
Because of this, they felt they could answer the problem. All you had to do was to add up the amount of utility each person affected would get from each of the actions you were able to perform, and choose the action that created the most utility.
It soon emerged, however, that this view of utility faced a number of very difficult problems. First of all, is it really clear that we know what it means to say that James gets half the amount of utility that Sarah gets? We may sometimes have a sense that one person is happier than another; but
a) we do not know how to tell in general which of any two people is happier, and
b) we certainly do not normally think, even when we do know who is happier, that it makes sense to suppose that the difference in their happiness can be measured precisely.
Because of their interest in measuring utility, the utilitarians made important contributions to economics.
For classical economics sought to explain how economies worked by supposing that every individual was trying to maximize his or her own utility. Indeed, the problem of measuring utility has been central to economics ever since the utilitarians. Since “happiness” is a rather vague notion, economists have tried to make the idea of utility rather more precise, and they have done this essentially by defining utility as a measure of the satisfaction of your desires. Roughly speaking, what they suggested was that the stronger your desires, the more utility you got from their satisfaction. If you wanted coffee twice as much as you wanted tea, then you got twice as much utility from a cup of coffee as from a cup of tea.If we remind ourselves of the discussions of the first chapter, we shall see why it is a very challenging problem to develop a scientific theory of utility. Such a theory must allow us to measure desires precisely enough to make it possible to apply the utilitarian principle that you should seek to maximize human utility. The reason why this is a challenging problem, of course, is that utility is a mental state that has all the epistemological problems that come under the heading of the problem of other minds.
Because of this, economists attempted to find first behaviorist and, later, functionalist accounts of utility. (In fact, Ramsey, who invented functionalism about mental states, also made important contributions to the foundations of economics, for just this reason.) But it turned out to be very difficult—some would say impossible— to find a functionalist account of utility that made sense of claims such as U. You could give a functionalist account of desire and belief that made sense of the idea of Sarah wanting, say, coffee twice as much as she wanted tea, though such measurements only made sense given some rather arbitrary-looking assumptions. But you could not develop a theory that made sense of Sarah wanting coffee twice as much as James did.
This problem of the interpersonal comparison of utility is very important to the philosophy of economics and to utilitarian morality, but it requires a good deal of technical apparatus to discuss it. Suffice it to say here that unless interpersonal comparisons of utility are possible, utilitarianism cannot be applied.
5.10