Utilitarianism is the foundation of modern economics. It is the belief that at some level people try to maximize their utility (happiness) and that good social policy aims to maximize the sum of individual utilities. This is central to most economic analysis, notably cost-benefit analysis. Unfortunately, this philosophy has many problems that are not discussed frequently enough in economic and political circles.
We all are acutely aware that there are some things that we are forbidden to do to other people regardless of whether the loss of that individual’s utility would be made up by increases in other people’s utility. For example, a modern day Robin Hood who robbed from the rich and helped the poor might very well increase total utility in society, but theft is wrong and unlawful nonetheless. On a more extreme note, we could certainly increase overall utility if we infected a small population of humans with AIDS and studied them in labs (because it would greatly increase our knowledge of the disease), but this is rightly viewed as morally abhorrent.
However, through such public policy tools as cost-benefit analysis we often engage in actions that are in many ways equivalent. For example, when new coal power plants are built the benefit– cheap electricity for large numbers of people– is weighed against the costs– a certain number of premature deaths due to particulate pollution. The fact that these deaths are statistical makes it easier for us to trade off human suffering against the economic benefits. But imagine if we could precisely identify the people who were going to suffer and die because of each new power plant and then had to ask ourselves whether it was alright to go ahead and build it; it would obviously be much more difficult and morally problematic.
In addition, utilitarianism is incapable of differentiating the root sources of utility. For example, some people may get utility from viewing beautiful scenery and others from performing sadistic acts. In the value-free world of utility theory 10 utils is 10 utils no matter how it is derived. This is troubling since we clearly want to differentiate between the sources of happiness; deriving pleasure from helping people shouldn’t be equivalent to getting pleasure from harming others in any sensible moral calculus.
When it comes to the environment utilitarianism runs into even greater problems because humans are the sole deciders of what has value, and intrinsic value for non-humans is paradoxically granted only through human action. If a person gains utility from shooting an elephant or eating whale meat that can only be weighed against other people’s utility derived from protecting that elephant or whale; the animal’s interests for its own sake are assumed to be zero.
The claim that only human interests count is not based on reason or any ethical system, but simply done by fiat. It is essentially no different than claiming that only one nation has value, or one family, or an individual person; it is essentially an arbitrary dividing line a world of millions of types of living entities, many of whom are highly intelligent social creatures with a great capacity for pleasure and pain. As a side note, advances in genetics are making it even harder to support arguments based on a unique species claim because it is likely that a male monkey has more genetic similarity with a male human than a male human has with a female human; obliterating the clear distinctions that humanity has clung to for millennia.
I was recently motivated to consider these issues because of the renewed interest in whaling among some of the most advanced nations in the world (
The point is not that we should scrap utilitarianism; it has many useful purposes and at some level we do need to be able to sum up benefits and costs using a common metric in the public policy arena. But we can all agree that there are some actions that are wrong in and of themselves, and therefore, are not subject to any utilitarian calculus. I think the sooner that we can all understand the limitations of utilitarianism and think more broadly about the interests of animals and the environment we will come to realize that many of our actions today are immoral and should be stopped regardless of whether they or sustainable or not, or in some limited sense pass a cost-benefit analysis test.
J.S.
