This is the first of 3 posts on the approaches to justice that Michael Sandel outlines in his book Justice (as I understand it):
- Maximising welfare: Utilitarianism (Bentham and Mill)
- Respecting freedom: Libertarianism and deontology (Kant).
- Cultivating virtue: Virtue ethics (Aristotle)
I developed an interest in understanding some scholarship on ethical theories, after someone recommended that I read the Bible. As my first foray into scripture, I closely read through Genesis and the Gospel of Mark, finding their passages both mysterious and challenging.
The question I had after I finished was simple:
How can we know what is the right thing to do?
That so happens to be the subtitle of Justice.
I started reading it, as it is often recommended as an introduction to moral and political philosophy. The book is based on a course at Harvard University.
Do the greatest good for the greatest number
Jeremy Bentham's classical utilitarianism says that we should act in a way that leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Sandel's opening example in Justice is the stranding of the Mignonette, in 1884. In the desperation after an accident at sea, a sickly 17-year-old cabin boy is killed and cannibalised for the survival of 3 others.
Is it okay to end 1 life to save 3 others?
A historical instance of the trolley problem.
For Bentham:
The ends do justify the means. Consequences over motive.
Bentham might condone cannibalism. This seems cold to me. But why might I feel so?
Maybe we are thinking of these 2 objections:
- we ought to respect the consent of others — the boy was vulnerable and did not want to be killed. That is, morality is more than just costs and benefits, it should have something to do with how we treat one another.
- we ought not to weaken the norm against murder in society — this killing being justifiable might affect societal norms. This mild objection just means we have to factor in that larger societal effect in our cold "happiness" calculations.
Is morality a matter of counting lives and weighing costs and benefits, or are certain moral duties and human rights so fundamental that they rise above such calculations?
Objection 1: individual human rights
In the Roman Empire, Christians were fed to the lions for the entertainment of so many citizens (Damnatio ad bestias)... is it morally justified?
Is torture ever justified?
Former Vice President Richard Cheney’s argument that the use of harsh interrogation techniques against suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists helped avert another terrorist attack on the United States seems to rest on utilitarian logic.
So why don't we always torture suspects?
The objection would be human rights, that we should respect human dignity.
Utilitarians may argue that torture seldom works, since:
- information extracted under duress is often unreliable. So pain is inflicted, but the community is not made any safer: no increase in the collective utility, or
- if our country engages in torture, our soldiers will face harsher treatment if taken prisoner.
In truth, this case of terrorist interrogation rests not only on utilitarian logic, but also the non-utilitarian idea that terrorists are bad people who deserve to be punished.
To see this, say the only way to get the terrorist to speak is to torture his/her innocent young daughter. Would it still be morally permissible? That's harder.
This is the true test of utilitarian logic.
Sandel also brings up the short story The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas by Ursula K Le Guin, which tells of a utopia built on the perpetual torture of an innocent child.
If you believe in universal human rights, you are probably not a utilitarian.
If all human beings are worthy of respect, regardless of who they are or where they live, then it’s wrong to treat them as mere instruments of the collective happiness.
Objection 2: A common currency of value may be impossible
Utilitarianism relies on the idea of calculating "net utility", but..
Is it even possible to translate all moral goods into a single currency of value without losing something in the translation?
People dying earlier is better?
Philip Morris commissioned a study in the Czech republic, people dying earlier due to smoking cigarettes leads to savings in health care, pensions, and housing for the elderly, which outweigh the extra medical costs smokers incur when they are alive...
A tobacco company is bragging that they end lives early!
For a Benthamite, the smoking study does not embarrass utilitarian principles but simply misapplies them. They would say to add to the moral calculus an amount representing the cost of dying early for the smoker and his family.
But is it not morally outrageous to put a value on human life?
Should we put a price on human life?
In the 1970s, the Ford Pinto was a popular car, that had a fault in its design that made it more likely to explode due to a crash from the rear.
Turns out Ford knew about this fault and had taken into account the cost of human lives that would result due to it. The extra cost to make it safer would have been $11 per car.
$200,000 per life, and $67,000 per injury were the figures gotten from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Ford simply calculated it was cheaper to settling burn victims' lawsuits, than to correct the design.
Was the jurors' objection to the price tag, or the principle of assigning monetary value to human life?
Should the life of someone older have less value than someone younger? After all, the elderly have less happiness left to enjoy...
Defenders of cost-benefit analysis think that we already assign monetary value on human life, implicitly.
John Stuart Mill on liberty
A utilitarian one generation after Bentham. I'd say, "Utilitarianism plus rights".
His essay "On Liberty" (1859) writes:
- People should be free to do whatever they want, provided they do no harm to others.
- People should not interfere with individual liberty even to protect someone from themselves.
- In society, the only actions you should be accountable for are the those that affect others.
"Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign"
Utilitarianism plus rights
Mill thinks we should maximize utility, not case by case, but in the long run. He argues, over time, respecting individual liberty and the right to dissent will lead to the greatest human happiness.
Why so? Mill offers 2 reasons:
- Social progress: The dissenting view may actually prove to correct the prevailing view, and/or prevents the prevailing view from hardening to dogma.
- General welfare of society: To force all of society to conform is to deprive itself of the energy and vitality that prompt social improvement.
Sandel doesn't think those explanations provide a convincing moral basis for individual rights:
- In a society that achieves long-term happiness through despotic means, would individual rights not be morally required?
- Shouldn't persecuting dissenters be doing an injustice to them as individuals, regardless of what it means to society?
Mill has an answer: Forcing a person to live according to prevailing opinion is wrong because it prevents him from achieving the highest end of human life: "the full and free development of his human faculties".
Mill concedes that following convention may lead a person to a satisfying life path. "But what will be his comparative worth as a human being?" he asks. "It really is of importance, not only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it."
So actions and consequences are not all that matter after all. Character also counts. For Mill, individuality matters more for the character it reflects, than for the pleasure it brings.
Since On Justice appeals to moral ideals beyond utility (ideals of character and human flourishing) it is not really an elaboration of Bentham’s principle but a renunciation of it...
Higher pleasures
For Bentham there are only quantitative differences, not qualitative differences between kinds of pain.
One objection to Bentham's utilitarianism is that Romans throwing Christians to the lions in the Coliseum caters to "perverse pleasures" rather than noble ones. We shouldn't promote such preferences, should we?
Mill tries to save utilitarianism from this objection. Unlike Bentham, Mill believes it is possible to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures - to assess the quality, not just the quantity or intensity, of our desires.
How can we know which pleasures are qualitatively higher? Mill proposes a simple test:
Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.
So if (almost) everyone prefer A over B, then A is more desirable.
Mill's test seems open to an obvious objection: Isn’t it often the case that we prefer lower pleasures to higher ones?
Many students prefer watching Homer Simpson, but still think a Hamlet soliloquy offers a higher pleasure. Is The Simpsons worthier than Shakespeare?
As with individual rights, so with higher pleasures: Mill saves utilitarianism from the charge that it reduces everything to a crude calculus of pleasure and pain, but only by invoking a moral ideal of human dignity and personality independent of utility itself.
Of the two great proponents of utilitarianism, Mill was the more humane philosopher, Bentham the more consistent one.
Next up
Pivoting to an approach that is more centered on individual rights, the next part of Justice goes into Libertarianism and deontology.