Truth
Decaying Society: Utilitarianism and Libertarianism Undermine Human Social Instincts
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee, Contents Updated:
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is the philosophy of the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, formulated by Jeremy bentham (1748-1832). It seems like a great idea and impressed many people in the nineteenth century, J S Mill (1806-1873) being the best known and its most famous exponent after Bentham. However, now it is rejected by many, if not most philosophers, for a mixture of reasons, several to do with inconsistencies in the way Mill explained his conception of it, but also because it seems to legitimize the oppression of minorities as long as the majority are happy. In fact Richard Wollheim has defended Mill against the charges of philosophers like Roger Scruton, by attempting persuasively to show that Mill was not inconsistent but had a pluralistic, nuanced understanding of utilitarianism in which the main principle was supplemented by secondary values which may be subservient to the main principle of utility in different ways, or equal to it. Maybe so, but it renders what seemed an essentially simple way of judging how to act into a multiplex and complicated one. Utilitarianism consequently remains unfashionable.
Bentham’s idea was that happiness was achieved by each of us seeking to maximize our pleasure, and minimize our pain. It was a fact of Nature that could not be gainsaid. In other words, it was a natural instinct that, we would say today, we had developed in the course of evolution. We have evolved in such a way that actions favorable to life are pleasurable, and those harmful to life are unpleasant or painful. We enjoy eating and sex, but dislike being injured or ill. Tyrants can have a harem of 300 courtesans and wives to have sexual delight on demand, but they can inflict pain deliberately by torture on their faithless lovers and their enemies.
So the instincts we have to seek pleasure and avoid pain were the bases for Bentham to formulate his principle of utility, where utility is a quantity to be maximized, in general, happiness. Bentham pointed out that the greatest happiness of those people under consideration—the population of society—sufficed to translate what we ought to do to what we shall do. It was the “right and proper and universally desirable end of human conduct”, because it was prescribed by our natural human instincts. It is what we ought to do and what would be perverse not to do—like breathing, or refusing to jump from a cliff. Our instincts have evolved because they promote our ability to live without harm. We have survived with these instincts because they have been beneficial to us.
Bentham was convinced his principle was sufficient without any secondary principles like conscience and morals, but it turns out that they too are instincts that have evolved for the same reason—they have benefitted us in our struggle for survival, so they are not secondary but are all aspects of the same phenomenon of beneficial adaptations, and help to clarify it. He thought the principle of utility would allow a summation of the factors that favored and opposed happiness, so that it was notionally possible to assess every conceivable course of action, and come up with the one which maximizes the sum of happinesses and pains. Of course, what is notional is imaginary, and no such calculation is possible in practice, another reason why utilitarianism has gone out of fashion.
Individual and Community
It has seemed too fanciful. What has to be maximized is the happiness of the whole community, but that need not coincide with the happiness of any particular person, so when one person is the agent of implementation of the action meant to maximize communal happiness, the way is open to abuse.
Thus, in modern times, a factory owner has it in his power to make his product at home or in an overseas country where he can pay less in wages, maximizing his own happiness via his profits, but destroying his fellow citizen’s lives. If he were paying the foreign workers more than they had before, then he will be improving their happiness, but the overall assessment is far from clear, and will be unacceptable to those workers at home who now suffer the pain of unemployment and loss of quality of life. So, the sum of happiness is impossible to assess, but it is certain that one man already well off will be happier, and it is pretty certain that he has made no calculation of the balance of happiness resulting from his switch, only his own balance.
Yet, this man was originally one of the community he destroyed, and, on the face of it, that community would be justified in pressing its own happiness even if it now meant a revolution and the beheading of the “king” that let it happen, and the robber of their happiness, if he is available, for it is the happiness of their own community that matters to them. That is what happened in primitive human and pre-human groups, and it is the mechanism that enhanced our instincts for bonding like morality.
Nothing changed much in this respect until modern times. Only a few centuries ago, people were hanged in England for what seem today to have been trivial offenses. Now we in civilized societies hesitate to kill our own citizens, even though we have little or no compunction about killing foreigners. Yet it was ruthless selection in the primitive groups that made us moral in the first place. It is the characteristic of Darwinian evolution—the fittest survive and carry their adaptations into the next generation. It is tempting to imagine that a brilliant man arises who can do remarkable things, and these new abilities, thereafter, are passed into the population. That though is what Lamarck proposed, and it is wrong.
The environment weeds out misfits, those who are maladapted. Society is essential to human beings, but it simply does not work when most of the benefits go to only a few, and the rest are left deprived. The majority will then wonder what the advantage is to them of staying in the same society as the greedy ones taking all the social benefits. It is manifestly grossly unfair. Instinctively, they will want out, but, as nowadays there is no “out”, they have no choice but to seek revolution, elimination of the greedy minority, and to try to set up a fairer society. The cycle may have to be repeated as long as greed remains encoded in our genes.
Sin, Toil and Happiness
Mill, Bentham and the utilitarians use happiness as the measure of what it is that people desire, but these days it seems a poor criterion. Happiness and “fun” are too often equated in this era of mass entertainment. People seem to have to have “fun” to be happy. The modern idea of happiness has a whiff of hysteria or ecstasy about it. What people really seek is contentment. Utilitarian happiness is not an active state, but is passive—contentment!
The reader of the Judea-Christian bible cannot find any suggestion of “toil” in paradise. Adam and Eve did not “toil”, they simply reached out and took what they required. They did not need to have fun or take special measures to be happy. Their natural state in this human origins myth was contentment. The Garden of Eden represents the original human, hunter gathering or even ape man group, and the expulsion from it was the emergence of humanity into large group, class divided agricultural society.
A reason was needed for the division of what had been an essentially egalitarian society into rich and poor, and why then the poor had to toil. The ruling classes who lived in palaces invented sin, the punishment for which was “toil”. The original sin was to thieve what was the Lord’s—his fruit—so the toilers in the fields were not allowed to take what was now no longer theirs, though for millennia they had taken whatever they could pick. They could not take their Lord’s fruit even though it was immediately accessible, as it always had been, and they had hungry children to feed. The rich man, though, had a duty to the starving and that was to leave a few gleanings in a corner of his field for the hungry and unemployed. Thus Judaism justified class division and it also warned against trying to alter it by robbery and revolution, though sin never ended and nor did riots and revolutions. The rulers of historical unfair human societies have always been aware of the danger, and have always tried to use the means of propaganda at their disposal to negate it. Religion was the first.
What was difficult was to remove the feeling of discontent that the poor were left with permanently. Again religion assisted by offering the imaginary bosom of Abraham, or a blissful life to come, as the reward for the compliant and obedient toiler. Mortal life was nothing but a vale of tears, but for those who were good—did not complain or react—an eternal life of contentment would follow. Religion helped rob them of the contentment society was meant to give them, and replaced it with an impossible dream. Only possible dreams are worth having.
Sociality Versus Personal Preference
Bentham saw personal happiness as the motive for action, but we have seen that personal motives can be counter to the sociality that has allowed human beings to thrive. It is the summation of contentment over the whole social group that keeps the principle of utility “human”, so to speak, rather than selfish, yet agents are usually individuals. Critics of utilitarianism want to know why any individual would want to make other people happy or content.
Surely, it is because we are bound by our social instincts, by our sense of compassion, kindness, and benevolence towards others, and inevitably in a group by our being all in the same boat. We have succeeded against bigger and stronger predators and in hunting bigger and stronger prey, and against the vicissitudes of the natural world—fire, flood, drought, famine, pestilence, earthquakes, and so on—by being able to pull together, to co-operate to overcome the odds seemingly stacked against us. Bentham and Mill saw that empathy was centrally important to motivate us to help others rather than to exploit each other, as modern economic theory demands.
The solitary selfish pursuit of happiness rarely succeeds. The instinct to be benevolent allows us to transfer from self to others, but that too is reinforced by an instinct to seek social approval, another bonding instinct humans have that we pass on by educating our children to do it, that is, reinforce culturally. Kindness and generosity is culturally approved in healthy human societies, giving individuals a direct personal motive to promote the happiness and contentment of others. They approve it socially—praise and admire you for it!
Happiness was seen by the utilitarians as a sort of sum of pleasure and pain, pleasure being positive and pain negative components of it. So, happiness could be increased by removing pain, and Mill saw harm as another criterion to be considered in the happiness sum. People could pursue their own pleasure as long as others were not harmed. The instinct for compassion includes concern for those who suffer harm, and harm ought not to need close definition because instincts are feelings, and those who cannot feel emotionally are lacking an essential part of their humanity—they cannot be fully human. They are psychopaths and sociopaths.
If some normal person has just enough income to live on, and ten percent is taken from them, any other human being should feel deep sympathy, for this person is being condemned to a slow death by starvation. Yet there can be no similar sympathy for someone who is rich, having a thousand times more income than they need to support their life, and has ten percent of it taken from them, or even 80 percent. They still have far more than they need. And if, by doing this to the rich man society was able to feed hundreds more who would otherwise have starved, then that will vastly increase contentment without harming anyone. Any fully human being, with all their human instincts intact, would rather do this than see hundreds dying in misery. If the rich man refused to do it, condemning all these people to death, they have a right to conclude that this rich man is not human, and removal of his money for the public good is justified.
The one who loses some excess wealth may feel harmed in this exercise, but unless the public decide to kill him as inhuman, all he has lost is the miser’s pleasure of counting his money. Despite losing even most of their riches, they still have more than sufficient to survive on, and more than the rest at that. Had they done it voluntarily, they would have enjoyed immense public approval, but compelled by society to do it—such as by taxation—some utilitarians may still describe it as harm, a mental or psychological harm, maybe, but only one or a few suffer it for the good of the many, and are not put into any physical danger. Right wing libertarians certainly would.
The hurt of losing part of a fortune in the public interest may be an imaginary rather than a material harm, but other forms of harm seem equally imaginary. Many Asian families are troubled by the sense of a loss of “honor” when, say, a daughter refuses a prearranged marriage. They have sometimes, even in the west, killed or sought to kill such a girl—their own flesh and blood—rather than suffer the dishonor. They feel they are disapproved by their peers. Disapproval, we saw, is an instinct which curbs unfairness in a social group, so the feeling has arisen from the usual reason of reinforcing human social bonding. But now, in the days of advanced legal systems, meant to settle social disputes equitably, this extreme code of honor is out of date. It arose before there were laws. Disapproval of dishonorable acts, though, remains quite proper. It reinforces morality by condemning those who aim to take an unfair share of social produce, thieves, bankers, and other exploiters.
Freedom—Positive or Negative?
The principle of utility was linked by Mill with his extended ideas of personal liberty (On Liberty), so admired by right wing libertarians. Yet all of the social ramifications and implications noted here are widely ignored by such people. The very idea of maximizing happiness implies the whole population, it is social not merely individual. The various evolutionary constraints and adaptations that have brought us from solitariness to sociality, of necessity, influence the activities of the individuals that constitute society, and who might therefore consider the maximization of contentment worth pursuing in that society.
Mill wanted the least possible constraints on freedom—these days taken, by the right, to be virtually no constraints at all for privileged classes of people, while the constraints on lesser people they consider essential because of their lack of civilization. But human society is held together by common constraints that can be broken only at the risk of its destruction. The continual removal of constraints is what the west takes to be extending freedom, more precisely negative freedom because it is “freedom from” constraints. But what about the constraints that are necessary because they are the stitching that holds society together, and in the right shape. They cannot be removed if human society is to exist at all. Such constraints are positive—such a positive constraint is positive freedom, albeit what doctrinaire libertarians call the opposite of freedom!
If we continue to follow these so called libertarians, as we have been doing, we shall be free of all constraints, free of positive freedom, and we shall see society’s stitches fall apart, and society with them. We are beginning to see it now. Society has to be a balance of freedoms. Positive freedom has to be cultivated in a decent society—it is benevolence, kindness, and love of others, leading to security and contentment. Now this is precisely the aim of the morality taught by the Christian incarnated God, Christ—we must love others. It means being kind and merciful. This God commanded Christians to do this—it was not an option. So Christianity, at its base, emphasizes sociality, and necessarily limits the freedom of individuals.
The extreme freedom the west tries to pursue is a pipe dream for right wing libertarians. No one can be absolutely free and remain human. Individuation is limited by the social requirement that it ought not make people unhappy or discontent. Mills’s objective of the “free development of the individual” is not, and cannot be, an unrestricted development. So, if that is what is meant by “free” here, it is impossible—it implies lawlessness and amorality, indeed inhumanity. We can only be free subject to our freedom being consistent with other people’s, as Kant also believed (Critique of Pure Reason).
The supposed unlimited extension of individuation by greater and greater personal freedom ignores society, and particularly that society is more than the sum of the people comprising it. Society has a right to punish those who refuse to conform with positive freedoms because they demand negative freedom—freedom from all constraint on them. An individual might have habits but cannot have a culture. Culture is a social thing, passed down through the generations, and the culture individuals are brought up in makes them who they are. Negative freedom taken to the extreme puts the individual beyond social constraint all together, and therefore beyond society and acculturation. The factors that make us human have been left behind as unnecessary restrictions, and what is left is the parent of a beast.
Whatever form our ancestors took before they socialized, they were beasts, and they will be beasts again when they disparage society to the extent that is collapses. So, to consider maximizing freedom without any regard to the necessary restrictions required for us to be human, namely social restrictions, is an error. We have to seek out the limits of personal freedom within the benefits of our evolved social instincts, the instincts that distinguish us from solitary beasts. Without society we are free only to be beasts.
