Part II A Reexamination of Contemporary Utilitarianism

Transcription

1 Part II A Reexamination of Contemporary Utilitarianism In Part II of this book, we will turn to contemporary moral philosophers by this I mean twentieth-century philosophers who have reconstructed modern versions of utilitarianism and reexamine their claims from the viewpoint of Sidgwick s ethics. The following four points will be addressed, as it is commonly believed that these are the main problems Sidgwick left unsolved and that contemporary utilitarians developed new arguments to resolve those problems. (1) Self-evidence of the intuitive fundamental principles Sidgwick presented the Principles of Justice, Rational Self-Love and Rational Benevolence as self-evident principles that serve as the foundation of ethics. According to him, these three principles are apprehended by sophisticated philosophical intuition. However, some people may think it is implausible for us to intuitively apprehend the Principle of Justice, which is that we should not make different ethical judgments about two individuals without any reason, or the Principle of Self-Love, that is, that we ought to equally treat people s goods at different times according to their magnitude. They may also doubt Sidgwick s claim that we can ascertain the self-evidence of such intuitions by confirming that every reflective individual would admit their truth and by observing that such intuitions are also found in our commonsense. R. M. Hare, who was quite critical of the validity of intuitions to which we might adhere erroneously, attempted to develop a contemporary version of utilitarianism without appealing to moral intuitions. To construct his ethical theory, he tried to start with two minimum bases logic, which we all have in common, and facts, which we can readily observe. We will examine Hare s derivation of utilitarianism in Chapter 8 of this book.

2 156 Sidgwick and Contemporary Utilitarianism (2) Criticism of hedonism Some critics might also question the validity of Sidgwick s proof of ethical hedonism. His strategy was to narrow the candidates for the ultimate good down to one by appealing to his own reflective intuition, and to conclude that pleasure is the most plausible candidate for what is intrinsically desirable. However, this was not a decisive argument. This conclusion was only reached by counting on Sidgwick s own intuition and observation. Of course, Sidgwick made due efforts to confirm the validity of his proof by appealing to other individual s intuition and to people s commonsense. Nevertheless, Sidgwick himself admitted that we cannot reach a complete consensus to approve ethical hedonism. After all, the claim that pleasure is the sole ultimate good stays within the realm of hypothesis. Thus Sidgwick finally appealed to the argument that we cannot find any other theory that can systematically guide our practical decisions. This means that, if we can find a theory of the ultimate good which will provide a more systematic guide than hedonism and which will be universally agreed upon, we may well adopt it in place of hedonism. Contemporary utilitarians, such as R. M. Hare, claim that there exists such a theory. According to him, it is not pleasure or happiness but desire- or preference-satisfaction that is to be regarded as the ultimate end of moral actions, or the ultimate good in the area of ethics that deals with what one ought to do. We will examine Hare s preference-satisfaction theory in Chapter 9 of this book. (3) Is the sum total maximization principle established? Furthermore, there is a question of whether the utilitarian principle of maximizing the sum total of people s good has actually been established. Some critics doubt the possibility of comparing the size of different goods in a way that the concept of the sum total of goods makes full sense. If we accept the Principles of Self-love and Benevolence and agree that we ought to equally treat different individuals goods according to their magnitude, how do we judge that a person s good and another s good are of equal weight? Sidgwick, who adopts ethical hedonism, claims that the amount of good is to be measured in terms of the greatness of pleasure it produces. He then maintains that the magnitude of pleasure is to be expressed by the strength of desire that one would potentially have at the time of experiencing that pleasure, on the condition that one exclusively considers that feeling. If we admit

3 A Reexamination of Contemporary Utilitarianism 157 his claim, it will follow that my present preference can only determine the amount of pleasure that I feel at present. The amount of my future pleasure can be determined only by my preference at that moment, and the amount of someone else s pleasure can be determined only by his preference at the time of his feeling it. Then, who on earth can compare the amount of my present pleasure with that of someone else s pleasure? On what grounds can we say that they are of equal weight? To avoid this problem, Sidgwick posits a hypothesis that the desirability of pleasure can be known to the individual experiencing it as having a certain definite value, and that to some extent this value can be known to others at different times. We can deny this hypothesis, however. If we deny it, we cannot put equal weight on the various pleasures of different individuals at different times according to their size, and thus we cannot form the concept of the sum total of people s pleasures. This kind of problem would arise even if we do not adopt hedonism. To make an ethical judgment in which we must consider the various goods of different individuals from an impartial point of view, we must confront the question of who is comparing my present good and someone else s good and how we should weigh them. This problem of interpersonal comparison is usually considered to threaten the utilitarian idea of the aggregation of people s good. Chapter 10 of this book will deal with this and other related problems. Some arguments presented by Kenneth J. Arrow and John C. Harsanyi will be mainly considered there. (4) Reconciliation between egoism and utilitarianism The final difficulty we have to face is the dualism of practical reason, namely the problem of the incompatibility between egoism and utilitarianism. According to Sidgwick, a person who simultaneously adheres to egoism and to utilitarianism must fall into a conflict, because these methods of reasoning will sometimes give him mutually exclusive dictates in a particular situation. In such a conflict, he cannot find a wellfounded answer as to what he ought to do. This incompatibility between egoism and utilitarianism is disruptive not only because it causes a conflict in one s own mind but also because it could make ethical discussions futile. If we are about to make a practical decision on a certain social issue, and if the egoistic method and utilitarian method dictate conflicting actions, those who adhere to egoism can choose to endorse selfish actions by not taking a universal viewpoint. Thus, when egoism and utilitarianism give different answers to a particular ethical issue, people s opinions can be divided irreconcilably.

4 158 Sidgwick and Contemporary Utilitarianism Furthermore, this problem colors the alleged self-evidence of the two intuitive principles that have been offered as the theoretical basis of egoism and utilitarianism. The possibility that egoism and utilitarianism may give contradictory guides for actions indicates that the Principle of Rational Self-Love applied to one individual and the Principle of Rational Benevolence applied to people in general can give conflicting dictates about what ought to be done in a particular situation. This does not mean that the Principles of Self-Love and Benevolence directly clash they do not logically contradict each other, and, in fact, utilitarianism is composed of both of these principles. Still, these two intuitive principles certainly cause practical conflict when applied to a particular situation. Therefore one may well doubt whether these two principles fulfill one of the necessary conditions for self-evident and significant propositions that Sidgwick had presented, that is, the condition of consistency (see of the present book). If not, then one or the other or both of these principles of Self-Love and Benevolence would turn out to be false as self-evident and significant intuitive principles. This would cause a fatal flaw in Sidgwick s whole ethical framework. 1 Even if we deny this possible clash between these two intuitive principles, to leave practical conflicts caused by the egoistic and utilitarian methods would be against the fundamental postulate of ethics, which states that so far as two methods conflict, one or other of them must be modified or rejected (see of the present book). By admitting the conflict between the two methods, we are compelled to admit that our reasoning in deciding what ought to be done cannot be completely consistent and free of conflict, and that ethics cannot be fully systematized. In fact, when he had to leave this problem of practical dualism unsolved, Sidgwick felt he had finally failed to completely systematize ethics, so he concluded the first edition of The Methods of Ethics with the term failure (ME1 p. 473). At the end of the seventh edition he still made an equivocal remark about the overall consistency of ethics, suggesting that to abandon the hypothesis that ethics can become systematic and consistent would be to open the door to a universal skepticism of every phenomenon in the universe (ME7 p. 509). If we regard this dualism as a failure of ethics itself, or as causing skepticism about ethics, we may well suspect the theoretical validity of utilitarianism, which we have been trying to establish. We must somehow solve this problem of dualism and seek a way to prove the supremacy of utilitarian ethical

5 A Reexamination of Contemporary Utilitarianism 159 theory, which Sidgwick personally upheld. Richard B. Brandt also dealt with this problem. He tried to show that what we would all support as a social moral system, that is, a regulatory system that should be widely accepted to control the acts of each member of a society, is utilitarianism. Chapter 11 of this book will examine Brandt s attempt.