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Feeling Utilitarian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Andrew Sneddon
Andrew Sneddon
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa, [email protected]
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Abstract

Michael Stocker and Bernard Williams are recent proponents of the influential objection against utilitarianism that it leads to important forms of alienation. The famous response is that such objections are mistaken. The objections picture agents being motivated by the principle of utility, but, e.g., Peter Railton argues we should see this principle as purely normative – agents can be motivated any way they like and still be ‘objective’ consequentialists. I argue that this type of position is inadequate as a full answer to Stocker and Williams. I trace this failure to his inattention to moral psychology, then show how other remarks made by Mill provide the roots of a better answer to Stocker and Williams.

Type
Articles
Information
Utilitas , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , November 2003 , pp. 330 - 352
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2003

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References

1 Stocker, Michael, ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’, Journal of Philosophy, lxxiii (1976)Google Scholar. Williams, Bernard and Smart, J. J. C., Utilitarianism For and Against, Cambridge, 1973Google Scholar. Stocker directs his argument at modern ethical theories in general, but I shall focus solely on its application to utilitarianism.

2 Indeed, Pettit, Philip (‘The Consequentialist Perspective’, Three Methods of Ethics, ed. Baron, M., Pettit, P., and Slote, M., Oxford, 1997, p. 93)Google Scholar casts opponents of consequentialism as generally claiming that it makes mistakes with regard to moral psychology.

3 Besides Pettit, see Railton, Peter, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, xiii (1984)Google Scholar; Mill, John Stuart, Utilitarianism, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1969Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, x; Brink, David O., ‘Utilitarian Morality and the Personal Point of View’, Journal of Philosophy, lxxxiii (1986)Google Scholar. Besides Railton and Mill, Brink cites Butler, Sidgwick, Moore, and Parflt. See Brink, 421 for references.

4 Cocking, Dean and Oakley, Justin (‘Indirect Consequentialism, Friendship, and the Problem of Alienation’, Ethics, cvi (1995))Google Scholar also claim to disambiguate issues that arise with problems of alienation and the traditional response to them. Although both their paper and the present project emphasize moral psychology, different ambiguities are addressed.

5 Crisp, Roger (‘Utilitarianism and the Life of Virtue’, Philosophical Quarterly, xlii (1992))Google Scholar argues that utilitarianism requires us to develop virtues. The present project can be seen as one way of giving substance to this idea.

6 Inter-personal relationships in general suit Stacker's purpose, but he wisely focuses on this most dramatic example.

7 Stocker, 456. This passage comes from Stacker's introductory discussion of hedonism, hence the indexing of pleasure to oneself. However, he later explicitly ties this problem to utilitarianism – see 458 £. I use this passage as the clearest, most concise presentation of the bind Stocker thinks modern ethical theories put people in.

8 Williams, 97–9. I shall omit the case of Jim as not adding anything important to our present purposes.

9 The editorial adjustments eliminate references to the case of Jim, both substantive and grammatical.

10 Williams does not want this to be done, but it is still a useful objection to explore. His interest is primarily in the normative objection.

11 Williams, 99. Even if having this particular commitment seems likely to increase one's misery rather than happiness, the general point stands – readers are encouraged to think of other commitments.

12 Stocker, 453.

13 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 219.

14 Ibid., p. 224.

15 Ibid., pp. 224 f.

16 Ibid., p. 225.

17 Ibid., p. 206.

18 Railton, 152.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., p. 153.

21 In so far as the significance of Railton's work is the formal distinction between subjective and objective consequentialism, and the use of this distinction to undermine the force of the sorts of objections to utilitarianism that we get from Stocker and Williams, and in so far as this project does not require a completely specified and adequate moral psychology, the fact that Railton's moral psychology is here under-developed is not a criticism. We have good reason to think that Railton would agree that a wide variety of psychological states would be significant to the issues brought up by these examples. At the same time, the impression that Railton's sort of answer definitively answers the concerns brought up by these objections is mistaken. Hence my insistence on the need to make moral psychology central to a consequentialist treatment of these examples is a criticism of such an impression, which I take to be fairly widely shared.

22 Railton, 153.

23 Ibid., 154.

24 Ibid.

25 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 228.

26 Cf. Wilson, Fred, ‘Mill on Psychology and the Moral Sciences’, Cambridge Companion to Mill, ed. Skorupski, John, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 232 f.Google Scholar, on education.

27 Robson, John M., The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill, London, 1968, p. 149Google Scholar.

28 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 230. The external sanctions are hope of favour and fear of displeasure from others (ibid., p. 228).

29 Ibid., pp. 230 f.

30 Other theorists tend to take the more restricted, Millian view of conscience as inflicting pains on us. For example, both Berger, Fred R. (Happiness, Justice, and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Berkeley, 1984, p. 24)Google Scholar and Strasser, Mark (The Moral Philosophy of John Stuart Mill: Toward Modifications of Contemporary Utilitarianism, Wakefield, New Hampshire, 1991, pp. 154–64)Google Scholar follow Mill in casting conscience as a faculty of self-punishment. The various pangs this faculty produces correspond to different sorts of punishment (e.g. Strasser, p. 164: pangs of regret versus pangs of guilt). However, Strasser also recognizes a more productive, structuring aspect of conscience. He notes that this faculty ‘preserves and reinforces’ (ibid.) dispositions, which we can cast as both for action and for reception of information. I am emphasizing this latter dimension of conscience. Robson (p. 122) casts conscience as merely a ‘restraining force’, which prevents us from doing wrong (when it is efficacious). In contrast, he portrays ‘cultivated sentiment’ as a distinct active faculty. The present account takes a subtler view of conscience which resists such sharp divisions between restraint and the production of action. Conscience does restrain, but not merely by reacting, with pains, to entertained thoughts about particular courses of action. Rather, it can structure our experience of the world in the first place, preventing us from entertaining such thoughts at all and encouraging other sorts of thought and experience. This aspect of conscience is poorly captured by speaking of restraint.

31 James, William, ‘The Will To Believe’, Essays in Pragmatism, ed. Castell, Alburey, New York, 1948, p. 89Google Scholar. It should be clear that this view of conscience does not com-promise Mill's anti-intuitionism (cf. Berger, p. 10). No distinct moral sense which apprehends moral truths is here posited. Instead, I am merely developing Mill's ideas about the cultivation of one's nature to suggest that this can take the form of increased sensitivity to ordinary pleasure-producing properties.

32 And other things irrelevant to the present discussion.

33 McDowell, John (‘Virtue and Reason’, Virtue Ethics, ed. Crisp, Roger and Slote, Michael, Oxford, 1997) characterizes the moral outlook as a complex sensitivity (p. 144)Google Scholar. I here use ‘sensibility’ for such a complex sensitivity.

34 It is worth noting how this differs from the moral psychology offered by Philip Pettit (pp. 94–103). Pettit suggests all moral theorists should be committed to the following three psychological facts: (a) People's projects often essentially involve other individuals. (b) People's primitive motivations are often non-moralistic in character, (c) People do not often make decisions in a calculative way. He goes on to suggest that we build consequentialism from psychology up, as it were, such that no values that conflict with these psychological facts are adopted. The present project addresses an aspect of moral psychology that Pettit either leaves implicit or omits. Moreover, the present project suggests more complex interplay between psychology and values than Pettit's ‘restrictive’ method allows for.

35 Robson, p. 145.

36 Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1969Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xviii. 262.

37 Berger, pp. 99 f.

38 Donner, Wendy, ‘Mill's Utilitarianism’, Cambridge Companion to Mill, ed. Skorupski, John, Cambridge, 1998, p. 273Google Scholar. Cf. Mill, : ‘It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it’ (On Liberty, CW, xviii. 123)Google Scholar.

39 Donner, p. 274; The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy, Ithaca, 1991, p. 95Google Scholar.

40 Donner, , The Liberal Self, p. 112Google Scholar.

41 Ibid., p. 93.

42 Ibid., p. 113.

43 The contemporary theorist whose moral psychology this most closely resembles is John McDowell. McDowell characterizes the possession of moral ideas in terms of ‘concerns’, uncodifiable conceptions of, e.g., how the good person should live (pp. 156 f.). Such concerns shape how one sees the world – they constitute our sensibilities. Given that they are uncodifiable, they cannot be consciously deployed in the form of principles in explicit deliberation. He thinks that we get such concerns through our moral up-bringing. Education, a cultural form of shaping one's sensibilities, gives a determinate form to something we are naturally prepared for. Culture gives us our ‘second nature’, an idea McDowell traces to Aristotle. This culturally mediated sensibility shapes not only our receptive capacities – how we see the world – but our motivational propensities as well – how we are prepared to act. Besides ‘Virtue’, see Mind and World, Cambridge, Mass., 1994Google Scholar; ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, ed. Hursthouse, R., Lawrence, G., and Quinn, W., irtues & Reasons: Essays in Honour of Philippa Foot, Oxford, 1995Google Scholar; ‘Deliberation and Moral Development in Aristotle's Ethics’, ed. Engstrom, S. and Whiting, J., Aristotle, Kant, & The Stoics, Cambridge, 1996Google Scholar; ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’, repr. Mind, Value, and Reality, Cambridge, Mass., 1998. McDowell's emphasis on moral reasons suggests one way of interpreting the Millian cultural endowment presented here: Perhaps we are naturally sensitive to happiness and pleasure as goods, but we have to learn to see them as presenting certain courses of action as right. That is, perhaps the development of a utilitarian sensibility transforms the kind of claim on motivation and action presented by aspects of the world to which we are already sensitive.

44 Utilitarianism, CW, x. 231.

45 Railton makes this point also (162).

46 Donner, , The Liberal Self, p. 115Google Scholar.

47 Donner, , ‘Mill on Liberty of Self-Development’, Dialogue, xxvi (1987), 230Google Scholar.

48 Cf. Donner, , The Liberal Self, p. 114Google Scholar, on Mill on the importance of the moral education of children.

49 See the brief discussion in Skorupski, John, John Stuart Mill, London, 1989, pp. 347–54, esp. p. 350Google Scholar, for commentary.

50 Thompson, Dennis F., John Stuart Mill and Representative Government, Princeton, 1976, p. 30Google Scholar.

51 Contra Brink (425), who thinks that since they play no role in motivation, they should be rigid. Also contra Hooker, Brad (Ideal Code, Real World, Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar, who defends rule-consequentialism.

52 This is not the place to suggest even a provisional list of likely subordinate principles to be included, but I can reiterate that many such principles are already familiar. On the impossibility of codifying the point of view of the virtuous agent, see McDowell's ‘Virtue’.

53 Compare Crisp's suggestions in passing (pp. 157 f.) about reflection, moral education, and the development of moral sensitivities.

54 For this view of the virtues, see Frankena, William, Ethics, 2nd edn., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1973, pp. 63–71Google Scholar.

55 For this view of virtue ethics, see Schaller, Walter, ‘Are Virtues No More than Dispositions to Obey Moral Rules?’, Philosophy, xx (1990)Google Scholar. See also McDowell's ‘Virtue’. To take an example from Schaller, perhaps it is impossible to act gratefully without experiencing gratitude, and perhaps this experience is in turn impossible without being sensitive to the efforts of others regarding oneself and the sort of claims such efforts place upon oneself. That is, perhaps one needs a certain sort of character trait to accomplish some sorts of action.

56 For this to be a thoroughly satisfying account of moral psychology, its empirical credentials would have to be established. Not only is this desirable in general with psychological hypotheses, but it would accord well with Mill's own naturalism. This is not the place to pursue such credentials. However, let me suggest that such empirical vindication would not be hard to provide. Perception psychologists have long known that aspects of an agent, including aspects due to experience, contribute in important ways to the determination of perceptual content. See, e.g., ed. Bruner, Jerome and Krech, David, Perception and Personality: A Symposium, New York, 1968Google Scholar. More recently, research in the cognitive sciences on prototype reasoning and gestalt shifts gives a new scientific interpretation to the importance of moral perception. See, e.g., Paul Churchland's ‘The Neural Representation of the Social World’, Andy Clark's ‘Connectionism, Moral Cognition, and Collaborative Problem Solving’, and Peggy DesAutels's ‘Gestalt Shifts in Moral Perception’, all in ed. May, Larry, Friedman, Marilyn, and Clark, Andy, Minds and Morals: Essays on Cognitive Science and Ethics, Cambridge, Mass., 1996Google Scholar.

Versions of this paper were presented at the 2001 meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association (CPA) at Laval University in Quebec City, the 2001 meetings of the Western Canadian Philosophical Association (WCPA) at the University of Regina, the 2002 meetings of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA) in Seattle, and at the Universities of Victoria and Ottawa. Thanks to the audience members at all of these sessions. Special thanks go to Tracy Isaacs, Rob Wilson, Neil Macgill, Scott Woodcock, Colin MacLeod, David Raynor, Martin Montminy, Robert Louden, and Sean McKeever.