On utilitarianism being self-defeating

"[Consider] what the attractions of the utilitarian outlook are for moral thought. I think that there are four major ones: this is not to deny that these are, in ways worth exploring, related to one another. First, it is non-transcendental, and makes no appeal outside human life, in particular not to religious considerations...

Second, its basic good, happiness, seems minimally problematical: however much people differ, surely they at least all want to be happy, and aiming at as much happiness as possible must surely, whatever else gives way, be a reasonable aim... utilitarianism is a minimum commitment morality, in this as in other respects: given merely the minimum requirements for being in the moral world, a willingness to consider other people's wants as well as one's own, utilitarianism can get going on this spot. A much more interesting question is whether the 'indisputable' aim of happiness can in fact be made to serve utilitarian purposes. We have already seen some reason, in the previous section, for doubting whether happiness must be seen as the aim of human life at all; but even waiving those questions, it is far from clear that any sense in which it is (more or less) indisputably such an end, is also a sense in which utilitarianism can be made to work on it. This is a central issue: we shall be in a better position to consider it when we have looked at the third and fourth attractions of utilitarianism.

Its third attraction is that moral issues can, in principle, be determined by empirical calculation of consequences. Moral thought becomes empirical, and on questions of public policy, a matter of social science. This has always been found by many one of the most gratifying features of utilitarianism. It is not that the calculations are thought to be easy, or even practically possible in many cases; the charm lies rather in this, that the nature of the difficulty is at least quite unmysterious. All moral obscurity becomes a matter of technical limitations.

Fourth, utilitarianism provides a common currency of moral thought: the different concerns of different parties, and the different sorts of claims acting on one party, can all be cashed (in principle) in terms of happiness. This provision, importantly, has the consequence that a certain kind of conflict, well-known to some other moral outlooks, is impossible — the conflict, that is to say, of two claims which are both valid and irreconcilable... many people can recognize the thought that a certain course of action is, indeed, the best thing to do on the whole in the circumstances, but that doing it involves doing something wrong. This is a thought which for utilitarianism must, I think, ultimately be incoherent...

[The utilitarian] is concerned with efficiency: the generation of conflicts is a sign of inefficiency in a value system, and utilitarianism has a general device for eliminating or solving them. But some might wonder whether such efficiency was an indisputable aim. One can certainly reduce conflict, and make life simpler, by cutting down the range of claims one is prepared to consider; but in certain cases, that might seem not so much a triumph for rationality, as a cowardly evasion, a refusal to see what is there to be seen (we may ask here, once more, whether defused subjectivism really leaves everything where it was).

So even the attractiveness of utilitarianism's fourth attraction may be importantly disputed. Other difficulties crowd in when one considers what it presupposes. For we are going to be able to use the Greatest Happiness Principle as the common measure of all and everybody's claims, only if the 'happiness' involved is in some sense comparable and in some sense additive. Only if we can compare the happiness involved for different people and over different outcomes, and also put them together into some kind of General Happiness, can we make the thing work. At a technical level these problems have been the concern of such subjects as welfare economics and preference theory, which have laboured within very artificial assumptions and with only moderate success to deal with them for economic theory. Here we are concerned with more general difficulties. If the 'happiness' involved is to be such as to allow utilitarianism to deliver on its third and fourth promises, can it also be the indisputable aim which was promised in the second?

The answer to that seems to be just 'no'. Bentham offered an account of happiness, namely as pleasure and the absence of pain, which was supposed very clearly to deliver on all the promises at once; but even if it had satisfied (as of course it did not) the conditions of being calculable, comparable, and additive, it failed the condition of being an indisputable objective: the more it looked like the sort of pleasure that could conceivably be dealt with in those quasi-arithmetical terms, the less it looked like something that any rational man must evidently be aiming at — as Mill came, if uneasily, to see. If, on the other hand, the conception of happiness is made generous enough to include anything that might reasonably be aimed at as a satisfying life or ingredient of a life — then it less and less looks like something which could fit in with the third and fourth conditions. Apart from anything else, there is the difficulty that many things which people actually include in the content of a happy life are things which essentially involve other values, such as integrity, for instance, or spontaneity, or freedom, or love, or artistic self-expression; and not only can they not be treated in the way that the third and fourth conditions require of utilitarianism's 'happiness', but there seems, in the case of some of them at least, an actual contradiction in thinking of them as something that could be so treated.

This is the first general difficulty, then, with utilitarianism. Its 'happiness' has to satisfy certain conditions, if the point of utilitarianism is to be retained; and the condition, that it should be indisputably an aim of human aspiration, conflicts with the other conditions which it must satisfy if it is to be treated as utilitarianism requires it to be treated. Faced with this general difficulty, one way in which utilitarianism tends to react is to dispute the values involved in the more intractable conceptions of happiness, as irrational, perhaps, or as hangovers of a past age. Such arguments may involve some interesting points on the way, but their strategy is shamelessly circular: utilitarian rationality is made the test of what counts as happiness, in order to remove that sort of happiness which constitutes an objection to utilitarianism. All that is needed to counter this at the theoretical level is a suitable unwillingness to be bullied.

The problem, however, is not confined to the theoretical level: it occurs drastically at the social level, and an unwillingness to be bullied may here be inadequate, or hard to enforce. In cases of planning, conservation, welfare, and social decisions of all kinds, a set of values which are, at least notionally, quantified in terms of resources, are confronted by values which are not quantifiable in terms of resources: such as the value of preserving an ancient part of a town, or of contriving dignity as well as comfort for patients in a geriatric unit. Again and again defenders of such values are faced with the dilemma, of either refusing to quantify the value in question, in which case it disappears from the sum altogether, or else of trying to attach some quantity to it, in which case they misrepresent what they are about and also usually lose the argument, since the quantified value is not enough to tip the scale. In such matters, it is not that utilitarians are committed to thinking that these other values do not matter; nor are they confined to thinking valuable those things which can presently be handled by cost-benefit analysis. They are perhaps not even bound to think that every social value should eventually be handleable by something like cost-benefit analysis: they might say that they were not committed to the view that the common currency of happiness is money. But they are committed to something which in practice has those implications: that there are no ultimately incommensurable values. Nor is it an accidental feature of the utilitarian outlook that the presumption is in favour of the monetarily quantifiable, and the other values are forced into the apologetic dilemma we have just met. It is not an accident, because (for one thing) utilitarianism is unsurprisingly the value system for a society in which economic values are supreme; and also, at the theoretical level, because quantification in money is the only obvious form of what utilitarianism insists upon, the commensurability of value...

Any actual utilitarian calculation will take place under conditions of considerable uncertainty and very partial information, so that its results are likely to be unreliable. Moreover, the business of calculation itself takes time; and the disposition to calculate in each case has psychological features which may as a matter of fact impede things which are utilitarianly desirable, such as resolute action. These things being so, it is suggested that better consequences may follow from the practice, not of agents calculating each action, but of their subscribing to certain rules which they apply usually without calculation to particular cases; it is the adoption of these rules which is assessed by appeal to the Greatest Happiness Principle, and not the choice of particular actions.

The same idea is invoked to explain the other fact which otherwise presents a difficulty, that we can easily construct cases — for instance where the conviction of an innocent man is necessary and sufficient to avoid great harms — in which the utilitarian result seems to conflict with what many would regard as the morally right answer: as in this case with justice, so promise-keeping and truth-telling are found to present difficulties under the act-utilitarian interpretation. The rule-utilitarian can, it is hoped, dissolve these difficulties by claiming that all that has to be shown is that the rules or practices of justice, promise-keeping or truth-telling possess positive utility over the alternatives...

Either [the utilitarian] cannot go far enough to solve the second difficulty, or else he has to go so far that he (and everyone else) ceases to be a utilitarian...

One feature of much modern utilitarian theory is that it is surprisingly conformist. Bentham and Mill regarded the Greatest Happiness Principle as an instrument of criticism, and thought that by appeal to it they could show that many Victorian moral beliefs were mistaken and irrational, as indeed they were. But, except for the well-established areas of sexual and penal reform, themselves inherited from Bentham and Mill, modern utilitarian theorists tend to spend more effort in reconciling utilitarianism with existing moral beliefs than in rejecting those beliefs on the strength of utilitarianism. One recent writer, for instance, has taken great and honest pains to show that public executions could not, as might seem, be justified on utilitarian grounds. He is left with some frank doubts; but these are doubts about the application and formulation of utilitarianism, and not, as they surely should be, doubts about whether public executions might not be reintroduced. This is an absurd case. But more generally all the many human qualities which are valued and yet resist utilitarian treatment, such as an unaccommodating passion for justice; certain sorts of courage; spontaneity; a disposition to resist such things as useful experiments on senile patients or the use of napalm on some people to secure (as it is supposed) the happiness of more people, often elicit from utilitarian theorists attempts to accommodate utilitarianism to those values rather than condemnation of such values as irrational legacies of a pre-utilitarian era. This is no doubt a tribute to the decency and imagination of those utilitarians but not to their consistency or their utilitarianism.

Rule-utilitarianism, as the enterprise of trying to hold on to something distinctively utilitarian, while knocking the rougher edges off it, seems to me a failure. This middle ground is not logically habitable...

One disturbing effect of people being active and conscious utilitarians is that it tends to debase the moral currency: a Gresham's Law operates, by which the bad acts of bad men elicit from better men acts which, in better circumstances, would also be bad. There is a simple reason for this: a utilitarian must always be justified in doing the least bad thing which is necessary to prevent the worst thing that would otherwise happen in the circumstances (including, of course, the worst thing that someone else may do) — and what he is thus justified in doing may often be something which, taken in itself, is fairly nasty. The preemptive act is built in to utilitarian conceptions, and certain notions of negative responsibility (that you are as responsible for what you fail to prevent, as much as for what you do) are by the same token characteristic of it. This being so, it is empirically probable that an escalation of preemptive activity may be expected; and the total consequences of this, by utilitarian standards themselves, will be worse than if it had never started.

The utilitarian who is immersed in the system, however, cannot do anything about this; he must think in terms of actual consequences, and nothing in the realm of actual consequences (at least, nothing helpful) will now be effected by some gesture of principle — there is no way in which, from where he is, he can lead a dash to morally higher ground. Stepping back in reflection, however, he can consider how utilitarian aims might have been better realized than they have been in a world of utilitarians interspersed with villains. No doubt they would have been if there had been no villains — but that, certainly, is Utopian. What looks more hopeful is a state of affairs in which enough people are resistant to continuing the rot: resistant, for instance, by there being a range of things that they cannot consider doing, or bring themselves to do, or put up with being done, whatever other people do or may do. There is a limit to their preemptive activities. Enough people, enough of the time, it seems, have to be prepared to stick at doing various things, whatever the consequences may be. That means that enough people, enough of the time, do not have to think as utilitarians; they have, quite definitely, to think as non-utilitarians. Nor will it do for them to preserve at the back of their mind the utilitarian rationale in coexistence with the required moral bloody-mindedness. For they have to be able to resist utilitarian temptation in the most difficult circumstances, when much obvious harm will follow from resisting it, and for that their non-utilitarianism has to be very deeply engrained.

Some utilitarians have reached, if not quite for these reasons, something rather like this conclusion, and have thought that what it showed was that the truth of utilitarianism could be known to a responsible élite, but should not be too widely spread among the masses...

If all this is true, then the world which the reflective utilitarian must finally settle on as most likely to yield the outcomes he wants, is a world in which the Gresham's Law is defeated because enough people enough of the time are deeply disposed against thinking in a utilitarian fashion. It is not possible that this disposition should coexist with believing in utilitarianism; nor is it acceptable or socially possible that most should have this disposition while others, the utilitarian élite, should believe in utilitarianism. All that is left is that the world which would satisfy the utilitarian's aspirations would be a world from which belief in utilitarianism as an overall moral doctrine was totally absent, except perhaps as a minor and ineffective eccentricity.

So, if utilitarianism is true, and some fairly plausible empirical propositions are also true, then it is better that people should not believe in utilitarianism. If, on the other hand, it is false, then it is certainly better that people should not believe in it. So, either way, it is better that people should not believe in it."

--- Morality: An Introduction to Ethics / Bernard Williams