Against utilitarianism. I notice this morning that Brad DeLong has joined an argument about utilitarianism, sparked by Richard Layard's defence of the Benthamite calculus in his book Happiness. (Disclaimer: I haven't read the book myself, and thus can offer no opinion about it. And I barely know Bentham from a hole in the ground.) DeLong takes a Layard critic, Will Wilkinson, to task in a couple of posts, with what I have to say are unimpressive results.

DeLong quotes Wilkinson to the effect that

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. ...

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.

DeLong claims to "save" Layard with this response, against which, he says, "Wilkinson has no defense except to issue squidlike clouds of obfuscating ink":

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.

"Baa baa buff," indeed. I find this remarkable, and kind of sad: does DeLong really not understand regret, or believe that it has an ethical meaning? What rules of English conversation does it violate to say, "I'm happy, but I bought my happiness at too high a price"? More to the point, what rules of story does it violate? To say, "I'm happy, but I'm a lesser person than I might have been because of the bargains I made"? There's a whole world of moral narrative that DeLong's defense of utilitarianism seems to foreclose, including the narratives of a passel of novels that (I would bet) DeLong himself may have read and enjoyed. (And if he hasn't already, I'd be glad to turn him on to, say, Middlemarch, a novel dedicated to exploring just the ethical position that DeLong dismisses out of hand here as incoherent. I'd say George Eliot has a somewhat wider moral imagination than friend Brad.)

Part of the problem here is that the argument is joined at the wrong level (which is an incoherence Wilkinson introduced, not Brad). "Utility" has always struck me as a philosophical chimera, rather like the supposed unitary faculty of "intelligence" measured by intelligence tests. It's the merely nominal product, in other words, of a project of circular definition: as "intelligence" only exists as an artifact of testing, "utility" simply boils down to that thing, whatever it is, that's produced by all the utility-producing decisions people make. Positing such a thing may have some heuristic benefit in economics, but it seems self-evident that in any larger scope "utility" is an entirely contentless concept. But to the extent that there's something genuinely being talked about when we talk about "utility," surely it's only present at the level of social aggregates—where utilitarianism offers a language for rationalizing the choices that are made by, and for, large groups of people. For all the reasons that Wilkinson articulates in the last paragraph of the excerpt above, it should be obvious (and Brad's response makes it obvious) that a reductive account of human choice is useless, worse than useless, as a way of addressing individual moral existence.

Put it another way: we don't make choices, except for ethically trivial ones, based on a calculus of utilities. We rarely know enough to make such a calculus in the case of serious things, even if it were otherwise possible. We conduct our ethical lives largely by telling ourselves competing stories, and trying to pick the best one—with the definition of "best" itself contingent on just what stories we're telling at any given juncture. That kind of "calculus" isn't reducible even in principle to a single, linear axis of measurement.

As to whether utilitarianism does us any good at the social level: that I'm unsure about. My instinct is that it doesn't, but I want to think more about why I have that instinct. On the other hand, I'm sure that Brad's "obvious and unexceptionable" utilitarian formulation of the principle of the good society, which concludes his post, is neither:

• 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.
• 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.

I don't know that I could boil down my recipe for the good society into two talking points, but I'm sure that if I did it wouldn't look like this. This only sounds good so long as you don't think about it for more than ten seconds. The highlighted piece is one of those qualifications that hide so much as to make the assertion they qualify all but meaningless. We are bound to maximize the equal opportunity for people to attain what they choose for themselves, provided the choice meets Brad's criteria for rationality. Well, who gets to say what constitutes "enough" information, "sufficient" deliberation, not to mention who is and isn't in possession of their faculties? The devil's in the details, after all. (I won't even touch Brad's happy assumption that "tradeoffs" in competing preferences are simply and uncontroversially to be managed.) And beyond that: how much of anyone's good, or any society's, is comprised within this carefully narrowed sphere of supposedly rational decision-making? We are instinctual creatures, who vaunt our knowledge beyond what we actually possess of it, who know the world only at a distance, through forms of mediation, and who act differently (often worse) in masses than we do as individuals—all things the great storytellers and the great moral philosophers understand, and take as constraints on their projects. All things utilitarianism, in pursuit of its blinkered notion of a science of ethical decision, has to ignore if its calculus is to get anywhere. We are not rational actors, not even primarily rational actors, not at least as utilitarianism understands rationality. That seems to me as significant a practical objection to the utilitarian idea as there can be.

posted by michael  4:08:15 PM  
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