Utilitarianism, Hedonism and Desert, by Fred Feldman (Cambridge)
In the nineteenth-century, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, presented utilitarianism – the theory that morality is essentially about maximising happiness – as the morality that should replace all others. But the second half of this century has seen a vigorous backlash against their views. Today, writers in the utilitarian tradition are more shy of taking on the outside world. They increasingly prefer to discuss their problems amongst themselves, rather like members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Those who are more outward looking, tend to be less straightforwardly “utilitarian”. So much of the most challenging recent work in ethics has been by “consequentialists”, who hold that we should promote the best consequences while remaining quiet on the question of whether these are the ones where happiness is maximised.
Fred Feldman is bold enough to stand up for a hedonistic theory of the good, and to go back to Benthamite basics by defining it in terms of pleasure. Unfortunately this goes with his standing firmly in the first of the two camps noted above (‘My name is Fred Feldman…and I’m a utilitarian’). His explicit aim is to come up with the most coherent formulation of utilitarianism, rather than to defend it against other ethical outlooks.
A consequence of this approach is that the essays are likely to be of interest only to those who are well acquainted with utilitarianism’s internal problems. The blurb on the back of the book states that “the collection is ideally suited for courses on contemporary utilitarian theory”. This statement is misleading without several qualifications. The book would only be suitable for courses at an advanced level, and then only in conjunction with other work on the same issues.
But at that level, Feldman’s book is of some interest. It consists of ten previously published essays that purport to offer original solutions to three issues that have troubled utilitarians. Firstly, there is the question of what aspect of agency is the utilitarian criterion of rightness to apply? It has often been argued that performing the acts that maximise utility may involve breaking the rules that maximise utility, both of which may be incompatible with having the motives that maximise utility. Feldman maintains that the problems dissolve with the adoption of his “World Utilitarianism”. The idea, roughly stated, is that people should behave as they would in one of the lives available to them that would make the outcome best. Secondly, he offers a theory of the good that utilitarianism should be concerned to maximise. Feldman defines the good as pleasure. But rather than maintaining that the various activities that give us pleasure somehow give rise to a similar sensation, he argues for “propositional pleasure.” What the different pleasures have in common, according to Feldman, is the fact that we hold the same attitude towards them; the attitude of ‘taking pleasure’ from whatever experience is referred to. This strikes me as implausible. An adequate theory of pleasure should allow it to be felt by animals. But it seems odd to say that a dog holds a certain attitude to eating Pedigree Chum: more reasonable to say that it makes him feel good.
Feldman’s hope is that his formulation of utilitarianism will be immune to many of the objections that have been held against other varieties, and may thereby win some converts. But I suspect that most of those who are troubled by the two problem areas just mentioned will already be sympathetic to the cause. The third area Feldman deals with, however, is the problem of how utilitarianism can account for common-sense precepts of justice. Here he does part radically with tradition, and there may be some who prefer Feldman’s revised account to traditional utilitarianism.
But to my mind, Feldman panders too much to common-sense morality for too little gain. His suggestion is that we can weigh pleasure to the innocent more heavily than to the guilty; perhaps giving it negative weight in the latter case. These weights are compatible with the consequentialist requirement that we are able to quantify the ‘goodness’ of the outcome. But this quantity, which he calls “justicised utility” can diverge from the quantity of pleasure the world contains. An outcome where the guilty suffer might be better than one where their crimes go unpunished. This suggestion provides too little gain because it does not provide resistance to the objections Feldman claims it does. Utilitarianism might direct a sheriff to hang an innocent man to prevent many others being killed in a riot, and some people find this objectionable. But Feldman’s “justicised” utilitarianism would give the same direction if the others who could be killed were sufficiently innocent and undeserving of death.
More disturbing are the elements of “common sense” morality that Feldman allows to determine an agent’s level of desert. So a thief would not be able to justify his stealing of a painting on the grounds of the greater pleasure it gave him because the wrong act of theft makes him less deserving of pleasure, and so would lower justicised utility. But Jeremy Bentham was adamant that theft was wrong, only because the gains to the thief are outweighed by the loss to the owner combined with the fear of theft that such an act instils in society at large. This method of calculating the wrongness of an action was integral to the utilitarian approach and the challenge it presented to everyday morality. And if you’re prepared to depart from it, on the grounds that it conflicts with everyday morality, then what’s the point of calling yourself a utilitarian?
