In Our Time - Utilitarianism

Episode Date: June 11, 2015

A moral theory that emphasises ends over means, Utilitarianism holds that a good act is one that increases pleasure in the world and decreases pain. The tradition flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and has antecedents in ancient philosophy. According to Bentham, happiness is the means for assessing the utility of an act, declaring "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Mill and others went on to refine and challenge Bentham's views and to defend them from critics such as Thomas Carlyle, who termed Utilitarianism a "doctrine worthy only of swine."WithMelissa Lane The Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton UniversityJanet Radcliffe Richards Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of OxfordandBrad Hooker A Professor of Philosophy at the University of ReadingProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1789, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham published one of his most important works in which he developed his theory of utility, titled, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, it's one of the founding texts of modern utilitarianism. He argued, quote, an action may be said to be conformable to utility, when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community

is greater than any it has to diminish it, unquote. The aim of government, he said, should be the greatest happiness of the greatest number. His ideas were developed by John Stuart Mill, the son of one of Bentham's closest friends. They were taken up by further generations of philosophers, and the refinements on utilitarianism affect many decisions we and governments make today.

With me to discuss utilitarianism are, Melissa Lane, the Class of 1943, Professor of Politics at Princeton University. Janet Radcliffe Richards, professor of practical philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Brad Hooker, a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Reading. Melissa Lane, how far did the ancient philosophies develop ideas that fed into utilitarianism? Ancient thought supplies the content of utilitarianism rather than its form. So if we think the content is the principle of utility, what does that mean? by welfare. And the ancient philosopher Epicurus suggested that that was determined by pursuing

pleasure and avoiding pain. And that's really the fundamental ancient idea. We call it hedonism from the Greek word for pleasure. But it's important to remember that Epicurus took that in a non-obvious direction. So for him, we would get the most pleasure by eating barley cakes and water. It wasn't what we now think of as Epicurean or hedonist in the sense of indulging in bacchanalian feasts and revelry. And that sort of counterintuitive aspect, I think, fed into modern utilitarianism as well. What did Plato and the Platonic Circle have to say about it? Well, so Plato is saying what we should aim at is the good. And broadly speaking, utilitarianism is also saying we should aim at the good. One idea that is developed in Plato's Republic is the idea

that the person who's best suited to choose among pleasures is the philosopher. And we'll see that come back in John Stuart Mills' ideas about utilitarianism later. So was there, is that, are we just talking about the Greeks isolated in this case? Or their ideas, not just isolated, or did they track through the next, I don't know, 2200 years? Well, the, the Epicurean idea did become influential, although it was always seen as a controversial and, and kind of, um, marginal in a way philosophy, but it continued. So in the thought of the Roman poet Lucretius, for example, and it carried on.

And that idea that our main goal is pleasure and that that might override any strictures of religion or strictures of duty coming from other sources. I think that idea, that sort of controversial edge, does feed in in a way to utilitarianism. But it's not really revived until later. Would it be fair to say that the ancient philosopher is concentrated on happiness

for the individual? Exactly. So that's what I meant by saying they didn't really invent the form. So if we think that modern utilitarianism is saying what we should do is, as you said at the beginning, pursue the greatest happiness for the greatest number

in a calculating, aggregative kind of way, that's not an idea that we get with the ancients. So Epicurus is talking really about individual happiness and he thought we owe other people justice, but he didn't think we owe other people to sacrifice our happiness to theirs or something like that. That's that idea, applying it in that aggregative way is really a modern development. How far did their

ideas then influence, what sort of people were they addressing? And how far did their ideas sort of get through? Well, Epicurus is famous for founding a circle of friends who lived in the garden in which he founded his school in Athens. And that idea that there's a kind of community of people who should live sort of happily among themselves and just serve the larger political community only as much as is required to maintain justice and security. That idea does remain influential. There's a number of Romans, for example, who pick it up. People who are friends and rivals of Cicero, for example,

very much adhered to Epicureanism. Cassius, for example, is an adherent of Epicureanism. So it does it does have a longer lasting life. Bride Hooker, to go forward about 2,000 years, to the 17th century, the century before Bentham, anyway. Some theologians were developing the ideas as I understand it about the divine,

which appeared to incorporate what became known as utilitarianism. So can you correct that one for us? Yeah, that's absolutely right. In the late 17th century, the second half of the 17th century, Cumberland, and then in the early 18th century,

Paley, well, sorry, Paley was in the middle of 17th century, sorry, the middle 18th century and Priestley, but also Bishop Barclay developed this idea that God was a utilitarian. God loved all individuals equally and cared about their happiness. They didn't use the word, though. They didn't use the word utilitarian. They didn't, not until Frances Hutchinson in 1725. Sorry. Did the word utilitarians and get used. But, sorry, not until 1725.

did Frances Hutchinson say it's the greatest happiness for the greatest number. I think the first person to actually use the word utilitarianism was bent them considerably later. But you asked about the 17th century. In the late 17th century, these theological utilitarians, as we now call them, saw God as being a utilitarian. And actually, I think you can see, especially in the New Testament, this idea of God loving everyone equally and in commanding us to love everyone equally, love thy neighbor as thyself.

And you think, well, if you carry that through and you think that is the fundamental principle of ethics, and you mix that with the Epicurean hedonism, then you think, okay, we love everyone equally, and what we care about when we love everyone is there happiness, so we get utilitarianism. And how far was this a sort of movement of thought that was then taken up in the 18th century? Oh, I mean, it was taken up especially in France and Britain, Scotland with Hume, and then Bentham read Priestley in the 1760s and in 1768 and took it up and then published Fragment on Government in 1776. And by that time it was a groundswell. Godwin came very soon thereafter.

Paley was writing at the same time. So with the Enlightenment and the radical temperament of the Enlightenment, which would sweep away the old traditions and kitchens and kuzzi. customs and mythologies and come forward with something new, much more empirically based ideas, reform for the sake of making people better off. What did Benton mean by utility? He meant pleasure in the absence of pain, and he had a calculus for how he'd come up with like a little computer in a sense.

Well, almost. He thought there were dimensions of pleasure, and actually much of these we can see. I mean, one of them is, of course, intensity. Another is during duration. Another is the, what he called certainty, by which really he meant the probability that the pleasure is going to happen. Another is the purity of the pleasure, whether it's mixed with pain or it's pure. And he calculated this, and he thought you could assign numbers to each of these things, but also and very importantly to the, what he called extent by which he meant how widely it was spread, whether it was just one person's pleasure or many people's pleasure. And he really did think you could do a calculus of this. I mean, he admitted, of course,

that it was to some extent impressionistic and that quite often we don't know with any degree of confidence what these numbers would be, but anyway, ideally he thought you could calculate pleasures and pains. Although it wasn't yet called science, it wasn't cold science until the year that Bentham died in 1832. Science was influencing.

He wanted ethics to become a science. That's right, yes. And he saw it as continuous, I think, with empirical science, which was, of course, flourishing. And so if you could work it out on his calculations, Well, I wish you, I wish there, did you, is there what, does it, do they still exist? Does what, I think this calculator, if his.

Ah, a nodded calculator. I know, it's just a digression, I just got intrigued by the sky cloud. It's quite like I have one, never mind. A copy will do. Janet Radcliffe Richards, what was Bentham trying to achieve when he was putting forward this theory? Why did you think it was needed? Well, he wanted to make ethics into a science.

He was concerned about the way people just use their own intuitive judgments, especially legal people and politicians who were trying to say what was good for the community. What did you mean my intuitive? Just what struck you, what your conscience thought? But lawyers refer to previous cases, so don't they? They don't intuitive. They say, I go back to the judgment in what's his name versus what's his name, and I base my plea on that. Well, they probably were using intuition as well. Sorry.

He wanted to get beyond the idea that you could tell what was good just by your feelings and work on it the way you worked on other sciences by actually investigating and getting at the truth and basing your moral judgments on this. And so he wanted to overturn all that as that he saw. Did he see that in the Bible as well, which was the great moral authoritative? for many people at the time, even though the Enlightenment was turning things over, as it were.

For many, many people, they looked and they saw the Ten Commandments, they saw the Servant on the Mount. Oh, certainly he would want to get rid of Ten Commandment type morality because he saw that the goodness of an action came in how much utility it produced rather than the inherent characteristics of the action. So a lot of things that people would think of, moral absolutes, thou shalt nots, he would say, well, it depends on how much utility

it produces. You can't just look at the action itself. So if they say, thou shalt not steal, he would say there's a context in which stealing's okay. Yes. In fact, stealing would be morally required. Really? Yeah. Now tell us about that. Well, I mean, if you steal from the rich and give to the poor, thereby getting a greater total of happiness. He would think that was okay. By his standards, it would necessarily be okay. I mean, he might have to say things about what the general policy should do about it, what the government should do about it, and he was very interested in penal reform

and how the government should set up its punishments and rewards. But certainly, that's what utilitarianism would imply. So did this calculate to say, if you earn more than such and such you're rich, therefore you can be stolen from? I have no idea. You'd have to ask Brad about that. That was a trivial question.

But yes. I mean, he'd have to work out, would the rich person lose more happiness than the poor person gained? And if rich person would lose more happiness then you shouldn't do it, but if the red person wouldn't. So it becomes nice and murky and complicated,

doesn't it? Because what do we mean by happiness, chance? Ah, well, that was exactly where the problems started to arise and where Bentham's philosophic calculus, even if it had got off the ground, would run into trouble. Because the point is, he hadn't turned it into ethics into a science. He'd made ethics depend heavily on scientific investigation

because you needed scientific investigation to understand how to make things better. But you also need a criterion for what counts as better. and he was just talking about maximising happiness, which sounds fine from a distance, but as soon as you start investigating what counts as happiness, you start running into philosophical controversies which the empirical investigations can't help you with.

So the Roman circus, it's Roman circus, people watching, people killing each other, let's say they're very happy, but people being killed aren't very happy at all. That was one of the problems immediately run in, to by aggregative utilitarianism, the idea that you looked at the total happiness, because you might achieve the greatest total happiness by having some people wretched at the bottom. Thank you very much.

Melissa, Minister Lane, where did he want to apply his principle of utility? You talked at the beginning of the programme about the Greeks applying their ideas to individuals. But now Bentham is talking about governments, movements. You tell me. So Bentham was absolutely committed to a major program of comprehensive law reform, and he spent much of his life drawing up such legal, ideal legal codes, and they were influential from Russia to Latin America. But a good example is what Janet mentioned, penal reform, because if you think about the laws of punishment at the time and even still, they are based to a great degree on ideas of retribution, inherited ideas, maybe even sublimated of vengeance and so. on, and utilitarianism would say none of that is a good reason for inflicting pain, which is what punishment is. The only reason to inflict pain is if it's going to produce more utility or welfare

in the future. So we have to restrict punishment and to only such amount as is needed for deterrence or for reform and so on. And that's a very good example of the radical reforming political edge of utilitarianism. What did you do about people who said it's only by people, producing a lot of pain on a person who is a mass murderer who are not going to hang, that he will think in any way of changing. Well, Bentham thought that was empirically wrong, again, to go back to Janet's point. So he developed actually an idea for a model prison or reforming institution, the Panopticon, which in fact he was working with Pitt's ministry to try to build, and it looked like for a while it might be built.

And that would be an institution in which by constant surveillance, Bentham believed that we could actually promote people. moral reform. So he would just disagree with that premise and say it's not, we don't need to inflict pain if we watch people and guide them in everything that they do in this prison, then they will reform better. And so we don't need to inflict the kind of pain that was previously thought necessary. It seems that it works for many people, but for few, it doesn't work at all. Is that right? Well, it depends again in what you think empirically. I think that's the sense in which, you know, utilitarianism is a kind of framework for thinking about society. but it's a framework that might be revised as new discoveries come in.

Brad Hooker, some people regard Bentham as being in a rather an awkward situation and you're one of them. Why? Well, because on the one hand, he thought that people were driven by the desire to seek their own pleasure and avoid their own pain on the one hand. So that's what's often called now psychological egoism, or indeed even psychological hedonism. People are driven to pursue their own happiness or pleasure. And on the other hand, he thought that morally we have to think that, think impartially. So there's an immediate conflict between the motives that we find in ourselves,

which are egoistic, and the moral point of view, which is impartial. And he struggled with this throughout his whole career. I think by the end, he was willing to admit that we also have benevolence and sympathy, which can compete with our self-interested motivations. But for a long time actually he was stuck on this fork. The fact that he accepted it, does that mean it was absorbed and squared with his basic notion of the greatest happiness for the greatest number? Well, I think that he, for a long time, he contended that actually you get pleasure out of being kind to others.

So he thought that the two were compatible because, on the one hand, what you thought was your own pleasure, but you got pleasure out of being kind to others or being benevolent. And so he thought he could reconcile the impartiality and the self-interest in that way. Later in his career, he thought, well, actually, we obviously do have a desire to be kind to others, which is not a desire for own pleasure, but a desire to be kind for others. And that's why we get pleasure out of being kind for others. Wasn't it rather awkward as well, though, when you encountered people who got pleasure about being unkind for others? Absolutely. Absolutely.

I mean, anybody who's open-eyed will see that some people do get pleasure out of being. sadistic, vicious, asking awkward questions, for example. But it's all over. I mean, this isn't just some people. It seems to me more or less the history of the human race, actually. People have been unkind to others for thousands of years. That's where you read, the history of unkindness. Yes, well, there's that wonderful quotation from Hume that, which I'm paraphrasing, goes something like, we find a bit of the dove needed into our frame along with the wolf and the serpent. Yeah, so he's talking about a bit of the dove. I'm just trying to

Yes, that's right. But if you're right, you're right, if there's a bit of dove, but there's also a bit of wolf and serpent, then there's a real problem. You want to pop in, Melissa. Well, in a sense, I think precisely because of that problem is the reason that Bentham put his hopes in government. Because if you put your hopes in government, then you can say it doesn't matter what individuals are aiming at. Government can try to create channels which will restructure their motivations. Now, there's still a problem. What are the motivations of the people in government?

And he did become much disillusioned with that, starting off thinking he'd just be able to persuade them to throw out the common law and adopt his utilitarian law code. And then he had to kind of realize, well, even people in government might have their own sinister interests. And that actually led him to democracy. Can you, Janet Rutcliffe Richards, can you tell us, can you give us more about the objections at the time to utilitarian by other thinkers, philosophers? This came at them and they didn't all embrace it. And what arguments were they using, which then have developed over the last century to, with people like yourselves refining this? ideas? Well, one of the most obvious problems was justice. In a way, utilitarianism was a model of justice

in having impartiality between individuals. And incidentally, Bentham even got to the very modern stage of thinking that animals suffering mattered as well. So the impartiality... Because he said that the idea... You tell us why he thought that. The question is not can they think, but can they suffer? And if they could suffer, then pleasure and pain applied to them as well. And it mattered there. And also, no proof that human species had cells, so animals could or could not have cells on the same grounds. Well, that is a very interesting problem for theologians who think that animals don't matter because they have no souls.

but then of course their suffering on this earth seems to matter more. But of course, Bentham was going in for an entirely secular philosophy. I mean, you might say that people who believed in an afterlife were a sort of utilitarian because they wanted the greatest happiness overall, but they had a completely different set of views about what the world was like and how to bring about that happiness. Did people who are following theological ideas, did they see this

as an enemy, which would be telling something to be combated? Bound to. What happened at the time then? Well, you'd have to ask one of the historians about that. That's not my area. There's nobody hand going up around the table.

Well, I mean, it is true that many religious believers thought that utilitarianism conflicted with various rules laid down in the Bible. And they therefore thought that utilitarianism, especially a utilitarianism which was very direct, which suggested that acts are right or wrong depending on whether those particular acts

produce more utility than the alternatives. They disagreed with that because, for instance, it could require stealing, not just permit, but require stealing, maybe even, maybe even the killing of innocent people. But that was the main thing. was the main complaint. That's the other area of justice, because if you're trying to produce

the greatest happiness, you can imagine a situation where the mob was baying for blood, and if you incriminated an innocent person to appease the mob, that might be better on grounds of utility, but it would seem to be radically unjust. To the innocent person? Yes. And then the other issue about justice, which I think came rather later, was distributive justice, and the idea that if you maximize happiness, that might be the cost of extreme inequality. And people came in later saying, you have to bring in considerations of equality or something like it. How have you maximised happiness do you get extreme inequality? What's the connection now? Well, you might. It isn't necessarily. But if you could

maximize happiness at the cost of increasing inequality, then according to classical utilitarianism, you should. But then egalitarianism came in, which skybushed that? Well, it didn't skybush it. I meant kiboshed. Yeah, and I just followed you. It didn't actually do that, but what it did was bring in the difficulty

of two incommensurable concerns. One was getting as much of the good as possible, whatever that was, but the other was a concern about how it should be distributed. And if you're a strict egalitarian, you might say, let's lower the happiness of all the best off until everybody's equal. So most people didn't want to be strict egalitarian, so they tried to have a compromise. Right. Hoka. Yes, I just wanted to, I mean, I agree with everything Jan has just said, but I just wanted to emphasize that Bentham is often credited with perceiving the diminishing marginal utility of material goods. So the idea is that the more of some material good you have like money or other resources,

the more of it you have, the less you benefit from a given increment of it. Therefore, taking an increment of good from someone who has a lot and giving it to someone who has a little is likely to increase utility. So the diminishing marginal utility of material goods and other resources looks like it's in favor of redistributing from those who have a lot. lot to those who have a little. On the other hand, he also thought that to take away a good from someone typically harms that person more than to give that same good to someone else if they were at the same level of well-being. So he thought we miss more what we is taken away from us than

we miss what we haven't got, if you see what it means. So those two things compete with each other. I want to come to Melissa Jones. A new mind comes on the case, who is John Seward-Mill, who is the son of Bentham's best friend, well, close's friend. And this is an extraordinary young man educated Greek and Latin. He was speaking when he was five and brilliant.

And I had a breakdown, slightly unsurprisingly, but recovered coming, came through it, partly through the romantic poets and falling in love with words with, as a poet. So, what did he add? John Stewart Mill. As you suggested, Mill was really raised

as a utilitarian baby to be the perfect utilitarian sage, and he had a breakdown precisely along the fault lines that Brad was describing earlier, because he was raised to pursue the happiness of everyone, but what did that mean for his own happiness? And in healing from that breakdown, as you say, reading the romantics and idealists, what he came to realize that was missing in Bentham was a distinction between what he came to call the higher and lower pleasures. And the idea was that Pushpin is not as good as poetry, which is something that he, Bentham had said,

that rather, we have to think of utility. The pendulum is that pushpin was as good as good. Yeah, I mean, it's in, almost in so many words. Mill slightly paraphrased him, but that's, Bentham had said, essentially, without prejudice, pushpin can be as good as poetry if a person gets as much. Pleasure from it.

Pleasure from it. Yeah, a kind of game with little pins pushing them over each other. Think of a video game or something in our time. And what Mill said was, well, no, because we have to think of utility in terms of our capacity to develop as human beings, that we can have these higher pleasures of art and science and beauty and friendship and so on. And so the higher pleasures can only be judged by the person who's actually experienced them. On what grounds did he justify the use of the word higher?

Well, that's exactly the point in a way, is that he has to take this view that humans have a capacity for development. So he referred to utility in the largest sense grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being. And it was really drawing on these romantic and idealist thinkers that gave him the grounds for hire. Why did he go in the, well, it's not too difficult to see given his background, but why did he go in the area of this being higher pleasures to do with actually being more and more educated, instead of being, say, kinder? Well, I think being kinder also comes into it for him. I mean, he is actually also thinking about developing our moral capacities as well as our intellectuals.

intellectual capacities. Janet, right, now we're going to deal with consequentialism, and you're going to tell the listeners what that's about. Well, consequentialism is a development of utilitarianism in that the more criticisms that were, there were a lot of criticisms applied to classical utilitarianism, which still allowed ethics to concentrate on producing the best outcome. But the account of what the best outcome was,

was exactly the thing that couldn't be subsumed under the idea of the science. This was where moral philosophy came. And people had to develop what they counted as the criteria for deciding whether one outcome was better than another. And consequentialism has become established as a kind of umbrella term of which classical utilitarianism is one part, one type, but other kinds of consequentialism taking into account distributive justice and so on.

So in very brief, and I'm sorry, please correct me and get it right. But consequentialism is saying you judge an act by the consequences who feel followed from that act. And how far do you go in the future and how on earth can you judge when you're talking in that sort of dark area? You may well ask. That's my job. Well, if I could answer, philosophy would be at an end.

that is one of the many kinds of problems which philosophers are wrestling with now. But the point is, the idea is you don't, all consequentialisms are still different from people who say simply, you must cultivate virtue, or you must do the will of God or something like that. They come into a different area, but there are so many of them now

that they are a large part of the whole of moral world. philosophy. What did G. E. Moore bring to the table, Melissa, can you first briefly tell us who he was, and what did he bring to this argument? So Moore is a Cambridge philosopher, and he publishes Principia Ethica in 1903, and on the one hand, he launches a devastating attack on the content of utilitarianism, but again, he maintains the form in the form of an ideal consequentialism. So the attack is to say, Bentham was assuming, because pleasures are what make people happy, therefore it is right to pursue pleasure. And Moore said that's a fallacy. That's what he called the naturalistic fallacy because it's saying what is that people want pleasure is what's right. And

Moore said, we can't get from is to ought in that kind of way. Ethics is an autonomous domain. We have to think about it as a separate question. But then when he came to the question of, well, what is his philosophy, he develops what's known as an ideal consequentialism where he says, well, we should pursue consequences, the best consequences. But again, those are now a much more pluralistic idea of value. So it's not simply pleasure, not even mainly pleasure for him, but friendship, beauty, other kinds of values. And we should try to, as it were, maximize those rather than maximizing pleasure. Brad Hooker, these two phrases, two words came in act and rule, act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism, what's the distinction and how helpful is it?

Oh, it's an immensely important distinction. I think myself actually the most important distinction in this whole discussion. So an act utilitarian thinks that an act is right or wrong depending on whether that particular act produces as much utility as any available alternative. And a rule utilitarian says we shouldn't judge acts by their utility. We should instead judge rules, laws, codes, practices, institutions by their utility, and then judge the acts by those rules, codes, practices, institutions. So that's the distinction between the two. And the distinction was not actually given that name until 1959. So we can go back in history and say, okay, well, Paley was a rule utilitarian. Actually, arguably, G.E. Moore was a kind of rule utilitarian because,

or rule consequences because he thought that the best way of maximizing good consequences was to stick to rules because we were so bad at predicting the consequences we should just stick to tried and true rules. But Richard Brandt in 1959 published a book where he used this terminology, act and rule.

But every time you say something, a lot of questions come up and then you say tried and true rules. By whose criteria were they true? Very good question. So suppose that we look at rules of the 19th century and look at the rules that prohibited homosexuality. Just take an example. Were those rules that maximize utility or not? Well, actually, it's very hard to see how they would have maximized utility rules that prohibited people from engaging in practices that they felt extremely drawn to and really had no victims.

the practices had no victims. So in that case, you take a tried and true rule of the 19th century, and you say, oh, no, that should be swept aside. But you take another rule, for example, the rule that says you shouldn't steal, and you think, well, on balance, generally, stealing does produce more harm than good, so we should have a rule against stealing. So that would be how you would distinguish between them. But that still leaves a problem.

One question is what institutions should we have, what laws should we have, But there's quite separate question is whether an individual deciding how to act should follow a general rule or see that there are exceptions in this kind of case. And that he, the individual, is the exception? Well, maybe. I mean, maybe you should argue that you should never murder irrespective of the circumstances, which is different from saying there should be a social rule that you should never murder. Maybe you should as an individual decide that a murder of Hitler would be a good thing, whereas the society ought to condemn you if you did it. So you've still got a problem between social pressures and individual decisions.

How influential utilitarianism has utilitarianism been on political philosophy? Enormously. I mean, quite apart from all the reforms that the Victorians were going in for, It's still relevant. Women's suffrage and so and so forth. Well, that all goes back to the impartiality business. You could not justify the position of women at the time. In the terms that were being used by the politicians themselves,

they had to resort to saying women are no good at this or women are naturally drawn to homes and families and such. They couldn't get it squared with the empirical evidence. and still come out with their conclusion. So the impartiality arguments were very important. And were they very effective across many areas of government? Well, yes. I mean, they started with, of course, things like slavery

and went into questions of women, but they're only just recently coming into questions about animals and impartiality becoming a mainstream. Melissa, you want to come in. There are also some paradoxes in applying utilitarianism. in politics. Because, for example, you might think, well, if we're looking at what's going to make for each person's happiness, we should have a democratic vote. But if people are wrong about what's going to make for their happiness, then a democratic vote might not be the way. And so there's always

this tension in utilitarianism between a kind of government house utilitarianism, as Bernard Williams called it, where the rulers know what's best and might even make provisions in secret because they know that that's going to tend to the greatest happiness versus a more democratic idea, where we actually take what people themselves think is going to be for their own happiness and let them decide. You want to come briefly? Yes, I mean, once again, there's the question of the empirical evidence, which the ordinary person can't be supposed to have,

but on the other hand, the individual is best judge of their own state of mind. There's another phrase, a preference utilitarianism, Brian. Can you tell us about that? As we've talked about before, people immediately judge, When utilitarianism came forward, people immediately jumped on the idea that there's more to life than pleasure and there's more bad in life than pain. And for a long time, utilitarians tried to expand out the concept of pleasure so that they could take on board the most successful of these objections. But eventually people said, well, actually, you know, it's just true. People do care about more than pleasure and pain.

and are we really in a position to tell them? No, no, you should only care about pleasure and pain. So they said, okay, well, perhaps what we should do is think of utility as just the satisfaction of people's preferences, whatever those preferences are for. If they care more about achievement than pleasure, fine. If they care more about knowledge than pleasure, fine. We just think that their welfare consists in the satisfaction of their preferences, whatever those preferences are for. Now, that might sound initially like a good idea, but I think it pretty immediately runs into even more

prominent objections than hedonism did. Do you want to give us those objections? Everything leads to other objections, don't they? There's a sort of endless proliferation of objections to good ideas. Anyway, absolutely. Well, some of the objections we mentioned earlier that people might have sadistic preferences. They might have preferences about how other people are treated, which arguably could lead to a kind of double counting. And so this led to the idea that what we need to do is launder people's preferences, which sounds slightly sinister, that we need to kind of clean up their preferences and only allow the satisfaction of those preferences that are going to, you know, going to be sort of judged okay. But it should be said that this line of thinking has been incredibly important

in the foundation of welfare economics. I mean, this is essentially the way the basis of modern welfare economics is exactly comes out of this way of thinking that will satisfy people's preferences suitably cleaned up. And that should be the goal of... Preparters like everybody wants to have good teeth, those sort of preference. That sort of thing, exactly. Those are all right. They pass the laundering test. Yeah. You're shaking your head. Does everybody, you have a problem.

What are the most prominent debates, Brad Hooker, in the utilitarian sphere currently? I think that, to go back a minute to the Act and Rule distinction, I think everybody accepts, everybody in the utilitarian sphere accepts, and their critics accept that it would be a bad idea if people went around trying to calculate utility on a case-by-case basis because they would often not have the information they need to make the calculation, even if they had the information they would often just miscalculate. So it's a good idea, actually, in terms of producing utility or good consequences, if people do stick to certain familiar rules like don't kill, don't steal, don't lie,

don't break promises, do good for others, et cetera. It's a good idea if people stick to those rules. But the question is how often and under what circumstances should they be willing to depart from them? And Janet touched on this earlier. So some consequentialists think, well, actually they should. be fairly ready to depart from those rules when they see that the consequences would be bad of sticking to them. And others say they should be very reluctant to depart from those rules. And so there's a debate along a spectrum about how quickly people should be willing to abandon

traditional rules. And I think the other main debate going on within consequentialism more broadly is whether it can be married in some way to a kind of Kantian contractualist ethics. I think that's the other sort of reigning thought. So the idea, that somehow we should think about rules that everyone would have reason to want everyone to accept. Can we think of the idea of rules that everyone would want everyone would have reason to want everyone

to accept as somehow mirroring the very same outcome that a kind of rule consequentialist theory would have? Derek Parford has been the one promoting that idea. Janet, are we talking about finding rules? A lot of what's

coming through to me is that we have these rules but you can break them, you have these rules, can change them, the rules are changing, individuals. So is this a search for, to go back to them and say, yes, we will somehow find rules, exceptions proliferate so thickly that maybe the rules are obscured or eroded? Well, we certainly need rules for organising society, so that's not really what the problem is, because we know we need rules, and we know we have to be prepared to change them if they turn out not to produce good outcomes.

the business of individual ethics is really quite different. It's the question of whether you should break a rule. You might, for instance, say it would be right for me to break this rule, but also for society to punish me because I did. It's a very familiar problem. Do you still feel that that is connected with Bentham's idea of utilitarianism? Have you gone a long way away from it? It's not exactly a way.

It's developing. And this is just what you expect in philosophy. You have an idea. It looks good from a first impression. Then you start asking questions. Sorry, no. Please, don't stop. You start asking questions.

You discover problems that you hadn't anticipated. You run into new questions. Just as you said, this is what moral philosophy does. Melissa, what would you say, how significant has utilitarianism been? It's incredibly significant. I think there's a sense in which it's the de facto starting point for public philosophy. You know, it's very hard, especially if you're in a secular and impartial age,

it's very hard to think of an alternative to saying, well, what we want to do is produce the best outcomes for the community. And so there's a sense in which it becomes the starting point, at least, although there are some important objections even to it as a starting point, as Brad mentioned. But, I mean, today one of the major issues I think that it's also facing is the question of future generations. When we think about climate change, for example, it's very hard to know how to calculate the utility of people who don't yet exist. And how do we even think about who those people will be and our role in producing them? That's actually produced a series of puzzles

that's really at the frontiers of ethics today. Well, thank you all very much. I enjoy that a lot. Melissa Laine, Chandler-Ratley-Bridge, and Brad Hooker. week we'll be talking about Jane Ey, which is published under the name of Curabell. Thank you very much for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Well, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed that.

Yes, thank you. A lot of raised eyebrows going around the table, but they didn't quite hit the ceiling. No, no, I think you were all right. It's quite a good topic because there's such a kind of rich structure embedded within it in terms of, you know, what do you plug in? the content should we be aiming at the consequences. Is it individual or political? So there's lots of kind of axes that one can explore.

There's a very interesting movement among young philosophers at the moment for effective altruism. And the idea is, well, these are people, some of whom commit themselves to really extreme sacrifices for the benefit of people they don't know in other parts of the world. but they also insist on doing real empirical research to calculate where most good can be done. So they don't respond to flood and earthquake appeals. They think, well, it's the thing that works best is getting rid of worms and things like that because that actually has more effects on more people, even though it's emotionally much less striking. So that goes back to what you were saying in the program about the scientific aspiration

and Bentham was very struck by Hume's phrase about a kind of investigative in form of inquiry that we can't just assume we know what's good. We have to actually use our reason and go and find out. There are also problems in the other direction in that governments are inclined to say, our scientific advisors have told us to do this, or that this is safe or this is the right thing to do. If the government really understands it, it should know that the scientific advisors are giving them the facts, but there is still a moral judgment to be made about how to use them, which the scientists should not be telling them about, not quay scientists. When you know Simon, here's Simon, producers come to make an important announcement.

Very important, you would like to. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.uk slash radio 4.