Ive got what I would call a pure bred utilitarianist, he refers to John Stuart Mills every other breath (relinquishing some of his crediablity, because he can’t think for himself so he just reitterates Mills) But as you guys know, well Mills has Utilitarianism pretty solid, so help me with this wanna be know-it-all.
Are you trying to get some rebuttals to Mills or utilitarianism. If its for the latter, I’d start with Aristotle and his Nichomachean Ethics to try and establish proof of a universal good. If you can do that, then your friend’s utilitarianism goes up in a poof of smoke.
If it’s the former you are trying to rebut, maybe some more specifics about which theory you are going to go into. Millsian utilitarianism is different from Bentham’s and there’s a lot of stuff to Mills’ thought. So I might be able to help if you gave me a bit more details as to your friend’s arguments.
I think you will have an impossible time convinving your friend. There isn’t anything explicitly wrong with utilitarianism: it is a remarkably efficient method of valuating situations— except that you do need some guidelines as to what would constitute a viable “end.” You might want to try tackling him not on the grounds of utilitarianism itself, but why any particular end is “good.”
Also, not being familiar with Mills exclusively, are we talking rule based or act based utilitiatianism? (that is, do the ends justify the means, or do the ends of following rules justify the rules?)
My understanding is that Mills was arguing that the act itself isn’t what is judged to be good or bad, but the principle behind the act. Bentham is the one who believed that the act itself is judged.
One of my favourite arguments against utilitarianism generally is this: on a strictly consequentialist view (meaning counting hedons or utils or whatever unit of happiness you want), it’s morally right for the U.S. government to take homeless people off the street voluntarily, and give them all the drugs and alcohol they want until they die of an overdose, which should be pretty quick.
The benefits of my little scheme:
[list=1]
[li] Homelessness is radically reduced, making property and business owners happy.[/li][li] Homeless people get several months or years of drug-induced bliss, rather than several years or decades of miserable street life.[/li][li] The cost of the drugs and facilities would be cheaper than welfare and handout programs.[/li][/list=1]
See, I think that would only be a rebuttal to Bentham’s brand of utilitarianism, which is essentially rather hedonistic.
Mill’s brand would need you to examine the reasons behind what you are doing in order to see if the act is good. And, of course, that still doesn’t change Mills’ argument that there isn’t a universal good. In hansel’s homeless rebuttal, I would simply counter by saying that “sure, I think it’s a bad idea, but not everyone would agree. And who’s to say?”
Well I agree with utilitarianism in certain forms, I think it is a useful means or ideaology to help determine or levy moral judgement on certain aspects of society. With this I mean the aspect of promoting the general welfare and natural born rights. Though I understand you can throw a thousand arguments to who can decide what the general welfare is?and which if any rights are considered natural born rights. What of conflicting natural born rights and so on.
However, I want to attack Mills. I mean what is this “principle” of utility? Is it simply the general welfare of a society must always come first and it need come through the maximization of pleasure over pain. This keeping the individual happy and forming a better society.
And how is this principle supposed to be the most fundamental of moral standards? This principle seems to lack reality.
TO Neurotic: But Mill’s desires the promotion of the general welfare. And this does or would make society all together more desirable and healthy. Just as Darwin’s theory of the herd and weak that fall to the strong. I didn’t say “let’s go get those damn homeless” Im just applying MY understanding of Mill’s utilitarianism.
This is how utilitarianism can become a circular argument, IMO. Let’s say we make a law that shoplifting brings a penalty of torture. So much fewer people shoplift, and that is the greatest benefit to the most people. But is it of the greatest benefit to society to have such a rule? I hope not. Is this a circular argument?
Try my favorite objection: unrecognized offenses against innocent persons.
Is it okay to steal a dollar from everyone in american who has a net worth of more than one million dollars? This would net you several hundred thousand dollars (high utility for you), and can’t realistically be said to have any consequences if just one person does it (low or zero consequence for victims). However, a rule-based utilitarianism would rule that out, since if everyone went around stealing dollars from the rich, there would be noticeable consequences. So example two…
Is it okay to sneak into someone’s home, taking great care not to leave any evidence, and take nude pictures of them? Without ever publishing them or sharing them with others? High utility for you (assuming you’re a perv… er, ignore that value judgment), no consequences for them. And if everyone went around secretly taking nude pictures of others, and no one realizing that they were also the subject of similar photographs? It sounds like a Woody Allen movie, but aside from that, no negative consequences.
If those strategies don’t work, just start rolling your eyes and calling him “Captain Moron” everytime he mentions JS Mill. Negative reinforcement is more effective than sound reasoning.
Tell him to read Mill’s essays on Bentham and Coleridge, if he hasn’t done so already. Mill criticises the mechanical utilitarianism of Bentham (“pushpin is as good as poetry”) and acknowledges that utility is not the only measure of the moral value of an action. For example, in the essay on Coleridge he argues that aesthetic considerations about what contistutes a “good person” are also important.
If you’re looking for staightforward arguments against utilitarianism, then the absence of any compelling theory of justice is a good one. Mill’s theory of justice in Utilitarianism is only really a theory of economic efficiency. It has no way of incorporating ideas of dessert. So, for example, if the utility I derive from a particular good is much greater than yours and, for whatever reason, the marginal utility I derive from it does not diminish, then in Mill’s scheme it would be just for me to consume all of that good while you have none. You could argue that justice should be an end in itself because justice carries its own utility, but I think you’d be skating on thin ice if you tried to argue for a theory of distributive justice while retaining a commitment to utilitarianism (Cf Mill’s commitment to liberty).
Mill’s argument is that, since people always seek pleasure and seek to avoid pain, then pleasure must be the greatest good for man. But the argument is circular; if anybody is seen to be behaving in a consciously non-pleasure-maximising way (e.g. an ascetic) the only way Mill’s argument can cope with it is to say that he must expect some higher pleasure to come from it or he must get some kind of kick out of it. (This is the same problem with revealed preference theory in economics. Keynes said something to the effect that “people do whatever they do and economists call it ‘revealed preference’.”)
This is a long-standing controversy in economics. Essentially there is a dispute about whether preferences are selfish or self-interested (or I guess whether there is any meaningful distinction between the two terms). Most welfare economists would claim that the utility of modern consumer theory is not pleasure. Whilst you could argue that some gift-giving is based on receiving a warm-glow from doing so, it is not necessary to assume so to be consistent with consumer theory. The utility that is maximised in standard consumer theory has no psychological interpretation, it simply represents a person’s ordering of outcomes. If we use W[sub]i[/sub] to represent the welfare (pleasure) of individual i, then yes W[sub]i[/sub] = w(various goods directly or indirectly consumed). But utility (preference) can be any* ordering of outcomes you like. Generally U[sub]i[/sub] = u(W[sub]i[/sub], W[sub]j[/sub], …, W[sub]n[/sub]) That is, my preference over outcomes is a function of my own and various other people’s welfare. There is no requirement that I care only for my own pleasure. It is true of course that it makes the maths easier to ignore this for many purposes, and it’s also true that implicitly a lot of economists assume that own consumption is what really matters for most people most of the time.
This is itself a small problem for utilitarians, who have to come to grips with the question of whether it is welfare (people’s pleasure) or preference (what they want) they wish to maximise (a word BTW said to have been coined by Bentham).
To assist anyone who wants to do a search, Diletante’s “offences against innocent persons” argument can be put as an argument that pursuing the utilitarian goal is inconsistent with even minimal liberty. AK Sen’s The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal really put a scare up the utilitarians.
One problem that hasn’t been cited so far is that persons are not valued as such in utilitarianism. They are merely a site of what is to be maximised. With a fixed population, this isn’t too much of a problem. But if population can vary, you reach the conclusion that if you have enough people living in misery just preferable to suicide you have a social state better than a smaller number of pretty happy people.
Most of the time a utilitarian will try to get around objections by one of two strategies:[li]Asking what happens when “rights” conflict. Suppose you believe in free speech and the right to a fair trial (or any two rights). I can dream up a situation where the two conflict. How do you resolve this? You trade off. If you do, then those rights are not fundamental values, they’re rules of thumb to maximise some underlying utility function.Manipulate the time frame or the richness of the informational environment. Any argument about a utility monster or apparent lack of respect for personhood (like King Rat’s shoplifting case or Bentham’s Bishop/ Bishop’s mother case) can be smoothed over by saying that we don’t have the information to make those sort of judgements and adopting cautious rules which constrain us from making such judgements is the best way to maximise utility in the long term. They will then say that the principle is nonetheless sound and you are left to gnash your teeth.[/li]
- [sub]well, it has to be non-lexicographic, locally non-satiated, transitive, reflexive and complete, but that’s not important right now[/sub]