3 - Between utilitarianism and perfectionism: L. T. Hobhouse

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter hopes to show that Hobhouse's new liberalism was unquestionably good-promoting but not good-aggregating. Hence, it was quintessentially consequentialist through and through. I will also contend, somewhat more controversially, that his new liberalism was unconventionally utilitarian; at least it was as unconventionally utilitarian as Mill's consequentialism was. Like Mill, who influenced him extensively, Hobhouse equated good with happiness though not with pleasure. And like Green, who influenced his thinking in equal degree, he theorized happiness in terms of self-realization, making his consequentialism perfectionist as least as much as Mill's if not as much as Green's. Though plainly consequentialist and perfectionist, if not obviously utilitarian in any more conventional sense, Hobhouse's new liberalism was equally firmly committed to strong moral rights and the flourishing of individuality. His new liberalism, then, was as robustly juridical and as authentically liberal as it was fundamentally consequentialist and perfectionist. And because it was perfectionist like Green's new liberalism, I prefer to take Hobhouse up after discussing Green. Although Ritchie follows Green chronologically rather than Hobhouse, Ritchie was not a perfectionist and was therefore more of a conventional utilitarian like Hobson. For this reason, and also because Ritchie and Hobson were less preoccupied with moral theory than either Green or Hobhouse, I discuss Ritchie and Hobson subsequently.

In sum, consequentialist practical reasoning infused Hobhouse's new liberalism as much as, or even more than, it infused Green's.