Utilitarianism, impartially consider'd

Utilitarianism, eh. I've previously described it as "broken" on the grounds that there is and cannot be any utility function to optimise, though now I come to it I can't find out where, though the Rawls stuff comes close.

ACX directed me to AXIOLOGY, MORALITY, LAW from 2017 which seems largely correct. And thus to rule utilitarianism, which also seems sensible, though most sensible when not clearly distinguished from classical liberalism¹.

So Hayek on Hume is helpful, perhaps. Everyone wants Hume on their side. But perhaps more particularly Mill, in this case. And yet it is a rather weak version of Utilitarianism: Mill formulates a single ethical principle, the principle of utility or greatest-happiness principle, from which he says all utilitarian ethical principles are derived: "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals utility, or the greatest happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure." Use of "greatest-happiness" is regrettable, as this is (as before) just broken. But "tend to promote" is more defensible.

Yes, this is a rather weak post. I'm gathering my thoughts.

Ukraine war: Poland says missile deaths an unfortunate incident

It's amazing how quickly a given event can go from being an international outrage to being a regrettable accident.

Update 2024

Whilst I think U is broken as a moral theory, it is not useless in the right circumstances. As Bryan Caplan points out in Life-Years Lost: The Quantity and The Quality, in thinking of Covid response it is natural to do a cost-benefit analysis, which is essentially U, or at least one of the many variants. That also, correctly IMO, says that if doing the (inevitably imprecise) cost-benefit calculation, you should err on the side of your principles.

Notes

1. In which context, the Preface to the Second Edition of Hazlitt's Foundations of Morality is relevant: "If I have anywhere written a sentence which seems to imply that individuals are or should be always actuated by exclusively egocentric or eudemonic motives, I would now modify or withdraw it. I would emphasize even more strongly than I do in the section which runs from page 123 to page 127 that though the ideal rules of morality are those best calculated to serve the interest of everyone in the long run, there will nevertheless be occasions when these rules will call for a real sacrifice of his immediate interests by an individual, and that when they do so this sacrifice must be made because of the overriding necessity of maintaining these rules inviolate. This moral principle is no different from the universally acknowledged legal principle that a man must abide by a valid contract even when it proves costly for him to do so. The rules of morality constitute a tacit social contract. Is the moral philosophy advocated in these pages "utilitarian" or not? In the sense that all rules of conduct must be judged by their tendency to lead to desirable rather than undesirable social results, any rational ethics whatever must be utilitarian. But when the word is used it seems most often to arouse in the minds of readers some specific nineteenth-century writer's views, if not a mere caricature of them. I found it extremely discouraging to have my ideas characterized in one so-called scholarly journal as "straight utilitarianism" (whatever that may mean) even though I had pointed out (p. 359), however facetiously, that there are probably more than thirteen "utilitarianisms," and in any case had unequivocally rejected the "classical" ad hoc utilitarianism implicit in Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick, and espoused instead a "rule-utilitism" as earlier propounded by Hume. The review just cited only reinforced the conviction I expressed (also on page 359) that the term Utilitarianism is beginning to outlive its usefulness in ethical discussion. I have called my own system Cooperatism, which seems sufficiently descriptive".

Refs

* Merchantilism and Denialism impartially consider'd

* Sawyer, 1972, impartially consider'd

* Coronavirus days: the Imperial model, impartially consider'd

* Throwing Soup at Art Shifted People’s Views of Climate Protests—But Maybe Not In The Right Way - William in agrees with Mann shocker

* Surviving and Thriving in Tech's New Winter

* The Foundations of Morality by Henry Hazlitt

* The Enlightenment Project

* On morality (2008)

* Book Review: The Righteous Mind

* SSC: BOOK REVIEW: HIVE MIND

* Copleston on Marx

* Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot

* Who Will Carry the Classical Liberals? by Veronique de Rugy

* A white elephant flies: The world’s most pointless rocket has been launched at last