Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer. The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics. (2014)
The Point of View of the Universe:
Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics
Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer (2014)
In a paragraph
The book sets out Sidgwick’s utilitarian position, relates it to more recent literature and argues compellingly for a Sidgwickian contemporary utilitarianism. Impartial reasoning and the direct awareness of pleasure are central to utilitarianism, and unlike our partial intuitions these cannot be debunked by considering evolutionary origins.
Key points
The book sets out Sidgwick’s ideas and argues the case for utilitarianism. Each of the twelve chapters covers a theme and starts by summarising Sidgwick’s ideas and then considers more recent literature and presents the authors’ arguments for their contemporary utilitarian views. The main points in the twelve chapters are:
- What is Ethics? Sidgwick took a broad view of ethics as covering all practical reasoning for an individual and not just morality. He considered the task of philosophers to reason towards a more systematic approach and he identified three main systematic methods of ethics – Egoism, Intuitionism and Utilitarianism. For most of the 20th Century philosophers have concentrated on morality, but more recently there has been a return to a broader view of ethics. Parfit distinguishes ought in the decisive-reasons sense and in the moral sense and thinks the moral concept is worth preserving. The authors agree with Sidgwick that ethical judgements are about matters that are real and important and we should aim for clearer and better answers to the central question of what to do.
- Reason and action. Sidgwick considers, against Hume, that reason can motivate. The authors agree – we think so as to guide our actions and we feel dissonance when we are not doing what we believe we should.
- By this Sidgwick means a system of common-sense moral rules that are to be obeyed whatever the consequences.He distinguishes unreflective intuitions, the more systematic morality of common sense and a further refined Philosophical Intuitionism. He discusses intuitionism at length and concludes that the rules are indeterminate with justification and marginal applications being based on utilitarian considerations so that it is ‘unconsciously utilitarian.’
- For Sidgwick trustworthy ethical propositions should be clear and precise, survive careful reflection, be consistent with other intuitions and supported by other competent judges. His approach is somewhat foundationalist, unlike the coherentist reflective equilibrium method originally suggested by Rawls.But, if more theory and reasoning is incorporated in a wide reflective equilibrium approach, we revert to a more or less foundationalist method.
- The Axioms of Ethics. Sidgwick identifies axioms of justice, prudence and benevolence. Hare tried to justify impartiality using language but for Sidgwick the issue is not what language we use, but what we have most reason to do. The authors resist Rawls’ view of the separateness of persons and note that Sidgwick’s principles have explanatory potential, unlike common sense morality.
- The Profoundest Problem of Ethics. For Sidgwick, both self-interest and rational benevolence are rational, giving a dualism of practical reason. Parfit compares Present-Aim Theory, Self-Interest Theory and Impartialism and highlights that Self-Interest is somewhat inconsistent on a Humean view of personal identity. He also thinks that Impartialism only trumps Self-Interest where there are decisive rather than sufficient reasons to be impartial.
- Evolution and the Unity of Practical Reason. Sidgwick was aware of Darwinian arguments against intuitions. The authors develop these arguments further to suggest that partiality is based on instinct, but impartiality comes from reason, so resolving the dualism.
- Perfectionism and Desire-Satisfaction as Ultimate Good. The authors think that desire satisfaction appeals initially as it is an internalist theory that resonates with what we want, but it faces numerous problems and slides into hedonism. It was popular in the 20th Century currents of non-cognitivism and economics but was a mistake. Perfectionist theories seem arbitrary, including Parfit’s composite thesis, while Aristotle’s approach assumes a purposeful universe.
- Hedonism as Ultimate Good. Sidgwick defines Happiness as a state of consciousness where there is a surplus of pleasure over pain and recognises that pleasure covers ‘all kinds of agreeable feelings.’ Pleasure is defined as ‘a feeling which the sentient individual at the time of feeling it implicitly or explicitly apprehends to be desirable: – desirable that is when considered merely as feeling,’ or, more shortly, as ‘desirable consciousness.’ Sidgwick considers that estimates of happiness are used in decision-making, but comparisons can only be rough, particularly between people. According to Berridge and Kringelbach. ‘Pleasure is never a sensation. … instead it always requires the activity of hedonic brain systems to paint an additional hedonic gloss onto a sensation to make it “liked”.’ The authors consider and dismiss arguments against Hedonism from Feldman, Haybron and Nozick. Instead, they favour a radical view of the significance of pleasure: ‘Our belief in the badness of pain is grounded in our immediate experience and is not affected by our knowledge of the origins of the state. All other claims to value are subject to evolutionary debunking except pleasure and pain which we are directly aware of in a unique way.’ Sidgwick struggled with the question of how to measure happiness. Economists effectively gave up that effort and ended up measuring something quite different. Psychology is indispensable. Kahneman measures the moment-by-moment pleasure of the experiencing self and contrasted with the remembering self. The authors doubt measuring happiness through life satisfaction surveys.
- Sidgwick appreciates the utilitarian case for rules and so utilitarianism is partly self-effacing and should often not be used directly as a decision procedure. Sometimes it should only be used by an elite (be esoteric) and on occasions used secretly. On Hare’s two-level account there are intuitive and critical levels of morality. Rule utilitarianism was proposed but collapses as rules are made more complicated. Rawls, Scanlon and Hooker think morality needs a publicity condition. This is because they are looking for a societal standard rather than asking Sidgwick’s broader ethical question of what to do.
- Sidgwick thinks we should praise above-average behaviour and try to raise the standard.Praising and blaming is a separate question from deciding what is better to do. It has been suggested that utilitarianism requires moral saints. The demands of utilitarianism may seem much less absurd, however, when considered from the perspective of a person who needs help. A highly demanding morality is reasonable, given the world in which we are living. Those who can make a positive difference, face demanding obligations to do so.
- Sidgwick thinks that impartiality requires concern for animals, for those in need and for future generations, where total happiness should be the aim. He was ahead of his time. Utilitarianism is instrumentally egalitarian because of diminishing marginal utility. Different capacities for happiness and the possibility of utility monsters are issues. On the Repugnant Conclusion, Parfit suggests a possible answer is that utility levels are only roughly comparable. Extinction risk is perhaps the biggest issue and on which moral uncertainty suggests a cautious approach.
It is concluded that that Sidgwick’s form of utilitarianism can be defended and that Parfit may be right that of all books about ethics, Sidgwick’s ‘contains the largest number of true and important claims.’ Sidgwick’s view that ethics should have a rational basis is becoming more popular and we can expect to improve our understanding of ethics and get closer to the truth about what we ought to do. Pinker suggests that moral improvement has been due to more abstract and impartial moral reasoning. Like Sidgwick, the authors see their work as clarifying ethical understanding in order to improve ethical practice.
Comments
This is a very ambitious and valuable book with every page full of argument. It achieves several things. First, it sets out Sidgwick’s views and relates them to later discussion. Second, it covers much of the philosophical literature around Sidgwick’s subjects. Third, it sympathetically but critically discusses the relevant work of Parfit. Fourth, it documents Singer’s considered views. Fifth, it extends Sidgwick’s position, notably on the duality of practical reason. Finally, it sets out and argues compelling for a contemporary utilitarian view close to that of Sidgwick.
The book’s main addition to Sidgwick is the view that evolutionary origins debunks the partial aspects of our intuitive morality but leaves intact impartial ethics, which comes from reason not from survival. This allows the dualism of practical reason to be resolved.
Another important theme is that philosophers have caused confusions by focusing on a narrow sense of morality instead of Sidgwick’s broad sense of ethics which covers all reasoning about practical reason. Related to this is the theme that moral philosophy went astray in the 20th Century and is only now returning to Sidgwick’s normative theme of reasoning about what to do.
The long discussion of happiness is interesting but inconclusive. There is a suggestion that happiness is the only source of ultimate value because it is not a debunkable belief but is uniquely directly known.
NOTES
Preface
If you think of classical utilitarianism at all, you probably think of Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill. We believe that you should think of Henry Sidgwick.
In writing this book, one of our aims has been to enable you to appreciate Sidgwick’s thought without having to face the difficulties of reading all 500 pages of The Methods. Thereby we hope to restore The Methods, or at least its key chapters, to its rightful place as the book to which the reader seeking to understand utilitarianism at its best should turn, and to gain for Sidgwick the recognition that is due to one of the greatest of ethical thinkers. To advance this goal, we begin each chapter of this book with a section in which we seek to present Sidgwick’s ideas on the topic of that chapter in as clear and straightforward a manner as possible. Because our aim in these sections is to enable you to grasp what Sidgwick wrote, usually in a much more complex way, in his original text, we reserve our assessment of Sidgwick’s arguments for the subsequent sections of each chapter. We do not cover all the topics that Sidgwick does, but we have chosen those that seem to us most interesting and important.
Our second and more significant aim is to defend utilitarianism. Sidgwick himself denied that he wrote The Methods for this purpose, and in one important respect, he failed to do it. We have attempted to develop his ideas in a way that overcomes some of the problems he faced, and shows how, consistently with his approach, objections to utilitarianism made since his time can also be met. Thus, in each chapter the remaining sections are focused on the contemporary debate over the issues presented in the exposition of Sidgwick’s ideas in the first part of the chapter. You will see that these issues are not in any way peculiar to Sidgwick. They include the most fundamental problems of ethics. But on many of these issues, Sidgwick provided penetrating and plausible answers. In reading The Methods we repeatedly find Sidgwick making points that are still at the centre of current philosophical discussions. On one important aspect of his overall position, however, for reasons we explain in Chapter 7, we part company with him. This allows us to provide a more complete justification of utilitarianism than he himself was able to achieve.
We treat Sidgwick as if he were a contemporary philosopher, to be listened to, but also to be argued with.
In this book we make the strongest case we can for the views that Sidgwick defended. Thus, with regard to the basis of ethics, we argue that ethical judgments can be true or false, and that these normative truths do not describe any natural facts about the world. With regard to what we ought to do, we push as far as we can to defend classical hedonistic utilitarianism. We recognize that there remain many points at which one could object to this view, but it has the great merit of being clear and straightforward. Whether or not classical utilitarianism is ultimately judged to be correct, there will be much to be learnt from a discussion of its strengths as well as its weaknesses.
Philosophy is a constant dialogue and having this dialogue together over the issues we cover in the following pages was much more fruitful than musing in our separate heads would have been.
Book to Poland from Jerry Schneewind.
1. What is Ethics?
Can we improve our methods of ethics, becoming more scientific?
A method of ethics is any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings ought to do. Individual rather than politics.
Clear that aim is normative, although useful to examine what others do.
People have a variety of confused and even inconsistent principles. The task of philosophers is to examine these principles, ensure they are consistent and if not to revise them.
Ways of deciding can be consolidated into a small number of methods of ethics.
Egoism, intuitionism and utilitarianism.
Seem to need to choose between these for a consistent system.
Alternatives. God’s will. Self-realisation. Our own natures – but the oldest and most common may not be best.
The scope of ethics
The most striking aspect of Sidgwick’s definition of a method of ethics is its breadth.
Hare and Rawls think egoism is not morality.
Parfit. Ought in the ‘decisive-reason’ sense. But there is a distinct moral ought that is worth preserving. ‘He ought to have distinguished more clearly between the concept of what we ought morally to do, and of what we have most reason to do.’
Sidgwick consistently used ethics in the broad sense and morality in the narrow sense.
Egoism could be called a method of rational choice rather than of morality.
Although late 20th Century moral philosophy focused on the meaning of moral judgements, today the pendulum has swung back towards a focus on what we have most reason to do. Hence Sidgwick is quite contemporary. Scanlon.
Internalists – Morality gives reasons to act, perhaps overriding reasons. Externalists – reasons to act are outside morality.
Moral judgements are about something real and we can get them right or wrong. Clearer and better answers to the central question of what to do.
Moral philosophy aims to guide by thinking through and systematizing and getting beyond common sense.
To find valid ultimate reasons for acting
Why should an all-powerful god need us to do anything? Free will. But is free will worth all the suffering in the world?
How do we find what god commands? Unclear, so use reason to work out what is good.
Contractualism? Sidgwick concerned with all ethics (practical reason) not simply just institutions (Rawls) or what we owe to each other (Scanlon).
Kant’s categorical imperative cannot be the sole criterion of moral [or practical] rightness.
Not all historical ethical theories are methods of ethics. Limiting to three probably acceptable.
[Expecting ethics to have a systematic base is Sidgwick’s key assumption.]
2. Reason and Action
Reasoning can motivate. Against Hume.
Objectivist. Moral truths independent of our desires.
Future Tuesday Indifference. Subjective goal can be criticised.
Morality not like football.
Can normative reasons motivate?
Psycopath is irrational, not weighing appropriately,
The essence of moral agency is the concern to act in respect of reason.
Asperger’s Syndrome. Attraction of logical systematic rules. Feels like Spock against Kirk. More reason than feeling. [Interesting.]
Both reason and feeling. Impartiality (or full implications) v empathy. Batson research on balance.
Cognitive dissonance can motivate.
Keshen. The reasonable person cannot have self esteem while ignoring the interests of others.
Shaver. Beliefs can cause desires.
3. Intuition and the Morality of Common Sense
200 pages. Common sense morality is not fully satisfying because we want to know not only what we ought to do, but why we ought to do it.
Intuitionism as a method of ethics has three phases, each one more philosophically developed than its predecessor: first there is the ‘voice of conscience’ which Sidgwick sometimes calls ‘ultra-intuitional’ and sometimes ‘Perceptional Intuitionism’; second there is the Morality of Common Sense, which Sidgwick also refers to as ‘Dogmatic Intuitionism’; finally there is the third phase, which Sidgwick calls ‘Philosophical Intuitionism’.
Intuitionism in the wider sense, as a view about the immediate manner in which we grasp moral truths, and intuitionism in the narrower sense that refers to the morality of common sense, with its demand for obedience to rules irrespective of the consequences. Sidgwick’s intuitionism is about substance and nature, as now called deontological, rather than how known.
Dancy. Holism about reasons.
Ross.
Bernard Gent.
Sissela Bok. Lying.
Common sense morality is, Sidgwick tells us, ‘unconsciously Utilitarian’
4. Justification in Ethics
Trustworthy ethical propositions:
- Clear and precise.Most common-sense morality isn’t.
- Careful reflection.
- Consistent with other intuitions.
- Supported by other competent judges.
Rawls reflective equilibrium. Initially narrow, taking intuition as facts and trying to make coherent. Then broad, giving greater weight to theory. Norman Daniels.
But broad can include any theory, at extreme pure utilitarianism.
Modest foundationalism in epistemology. Justification not from coherence, although incoherence undermines.
Sidgwick. Utilitarianism rests on a ‘fundamental intuition.’ So, somewhat foundationalist, although other arguments.
[The problem of justification is a symptom of the peculiar notion of morality that we are trying to work with. If instead we look at practical reason directed at human welfare goals, then justification links to how good the goals and means are. Very different from justifying morality which can be about rules existing in isolation from facts about the world and what matters to people.]
5. The Axioms of Ethics
Axiom of justice (‘whatever action any of us judges to be right for himself, he implicitly judges to be right for all similar persons in similar circumstances’), an axiom of prudence (‘a smaller present good is not to be preferred to a greater future good’), and an axiom of benevolence (‘each one is morally bound to regard the good of any other individual as much as his own’).
Egoism can be just if stated in third person terms – everyone should pursue his own happiness
Hare. Mackie three stages of universalizability – mere difference irrelevant, put self in other’s place, take other’s tastes and ideals. Moral language at most does first two stages.
For Hare there is a specific form of discourse that he refers to as ‘moral’ whereas for Sidgwick, as we have seen, ethics encompasses any rational procedure by which we decide what we ought to do, or what it is right to do.
The issue, for Sidgwick, is not what language we use, but what we have most reason to do.
Bernard Williams. Ground projects give person’s motive force. Internalist Humean view of motivation. But motivation may be irrational. Eg if chose to go to less good movie then will regret it, you wouldn’t be acting coherently.
Williams emotively labels self-centred pursuit of own projects as integrity.
May discount future too much for our current greater security.
Michael Slote. Natural life cycle. A life with growing success more satisfactory than with decline. Prime of life more important than childhood or dotage. Kahneman peak end demonstrable errors.
Rawls. Alternative to strict classical utilitarianism, as best formulated by Sidgwick
‘The most natural way’ of arriving at utilitarianism ‘is to adopt for society as a whole the principle of rational choice for one man’. ‘the principle of rational prudence applied to an aggregative conception of the welfare of the group.’ ‘Utilitarianism does not take seriously the distinction between persons.’
Nozick. No social entity.
Earthquake example of trade-offs
Hare. To have equal concern for all people is to seek equally their good, or to give equal weight to their interests.
Supererogation. Going beyond what was due.
Satisficing. Herbert Simon. Knowledge gathering costs.
Slote. As long as we do enough good we don’t need to do the most good.
Sidgwick criticises Common sense Morality for being indeterminate. Yet he admits his principles are abstract and generally not directly applicable. Yet his principles have explanatory potential, unlike other principles which stand or fall alone.
6. The Profoundest Problem in Ethics
Dualism of practical reason
Both Prudence and Rational Benevolence are rational
Rational basis for conduct left a chaos
In practice selfishness often causes unhappiness. Our nature generally brings the two together. The sense of elevation and enlargement given by the wider interest.
Divine rewards.
Parfit. Present-Aim Theory, Self-Interest Theory, Impartialism
Inconsistency in Self-Interest Theory. Especially with Humean view of personal identity.
Compare a 20 year-old planning a holiday for next summer and planning her retirement. She will be to an extent a different person, at worst like her parents.
Sidgwick mentions this kind of thinking, including Hume
Nagel. The Possibility of Altruism. There are reasons for the future and similarly there are reasons for other people. To ignore is a form of solipsism.
Critical Present-Aim Theory to remove irrational aims.
Wide Value-based Objective View. Thinks may often have sufficient reasons to act either impartially or for ourselves or for those to whom we have close ties. In extreme cases would have decisive reasons.
Morality only trumps where there are decisive rather than sufficient reasons. [Eg do not have decisive reasons to sacrifice my wife to rescue a young person but do have decisive reasons to save ten people.]
Parfit milder than Sidgwick’s wholly incomparable reasons.
David Brink. Metaphysical egoism. We have concern for the interests of others. Only partly resolves dualism.
David Gauthier. Morals by Agreement 1986. Hobbes social contract. Rational to have dispositions for mutual benefit. Constrained maximisers fit for society. We are neither transparent or opaque but translucent. Does not address animals or future generations. [And not a full theory of practical reason.]
7. The Origins of Ethics and the Unity of Practical Reason
Evolutionary debunking provides a solution to dualism.
Darwin and Sidgwick. ‘A superior bee … would aspire to a milder solution to the population question.’
Street’s dilemma. Either evolution does not select for people who hold objectively true moral attitudes so our views are not objectively true. Or evolutionary forces do so select, but this is not how evolution works. Remarkable coincidence.
‘We have greater obligations to help our own children than to help complete strangers.’
Sidgwick could have seen only some moral judgements as evolutionarily problematic. [Impartial principles seem to be reason not evolution.]
General capacity to reason is selected for.
Includes the ability to reject arbitrary grounds for making distinctions.
Reasoning may lead us to conclusions that do not help our survival. Advanced physics and maths. Reasoning may not be separable.
Point also in McGinn, Singer, Parfit and Pinker.
If the ability to grasp moral truths is an aspect of our ability to reason, it is easy to give an account of how it arose.
[Broaden this discussion to practical reason. We have evolved to take certain approaches to practical reason. These have generally be good for survival but will be less than optimal for choosing the best acts. Intuitions are to be respected (as generally helpful) but reviewed by reason (as can do better). By moving away from the centrality of a concept of morality as something that needs to be true (but looks worryingly as if it isn’t) to taking practical reason first, Street’s challenge is softened. Because I don’t think morality needs to be real and true, it is only part of the practical reason story.]
Sidgwick. ‘no theory has ever been put forward professing to discredit the propositions that I regard as really axiomatic, by showing that the cause which produced them were such as had a tendency to make them false.’
Group selection favours within-group niceness and between-group nastiness
Sidgwick derives his universal principle from extending irrationality of time preference.
‘the good of any one individual is of no more importance from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.’
‘as a rational being I am bound to aim at the good generally – so far as it is attainable by my efforts – not merely at a particular part of it.’
[Scepticism about morality is possible, but not scepticism about the reality of better or worse practical choices.]
Our intuitive grasp of the principle of universal benevolence seems to come from reason not from evolutionary pressures
Criticisms from Crisp and Tersman.
To check that intuition is reliable: 1. Careful reflection. 2 Agreement of other careful thinkers. 3. Absence of explanation as from non-truth-tracking psychological process.
Impartiality supported more by normative reasons than by motivating reasons
I have a normative reason to go to the dentist, but I don’t have a motivating reason. I have a motivating reason for revenge, but not a normative one.
Motivating reasons relevant to how people act, but not how they ought to act.
Partial reasons are not normative reasons but common motivating reasons. [A strong and interesting idea]
Parfit. Evolutionary thoughts may undermine claim that everyone having attitude is ground for thinking justified. Singer thinks Parfit should have used this to go further than wide reflective equilibrium.
8. Ultimate Good, Part I: Perfectionism and Desire-Based Theory
Hobbes calls objects of desire good
Sidgwick: a man often desires what he knows is on the whole bad for him.
What as a rational being I ought to desire.
But Sidgwick does not consider desire theories in detail, probably as thought descriptive rather than normative.
Internalist and externalist theories. Resonance constraint.
Desire satisfaction as main internalist theory.
Encouraged by non-cognitivism giving minimalist meta-ethics eg Hare. [Why is desire primitive but quality of experience not?] [Desire Satisfaction as a product of the terrible emotivist mistake]
But numerous objections. Changing preferences. Non-transitive. Ignorance and idealised. Babies and animals. Credible versions loose resonance constraints and end up valuing other things.
Externalist theories.
Not necessarily dangerously paternalistic.
Perfectionism
Moore subsequently agreed that nothing is intrinsically good unless it has some relation to consciousness
Parfit composite thesis
Knowledge plus enjoyment of knowledge
Difficult to construct a function to combine these
Fermat (or Newton’s) lives did not go badly because their knowledge was imperfect
Aristotle. Our function is to perfect our natures.
Made sense only in a purposeful universe
Our original natures may be less than our civilized natures.
Need to appeal to consequences to decide which virtues are good.
Hurka. Stripped down perfectionism.
A truly human life.
Would we rather be truly human or happy?
If our nature is to be cruel to the weak should we perfect this?
9. Ultimate Good, Part II: Hedonism
Happiness – a state of consciousness where there is a surplus of pleasure over pain
Pleasure – all kinds of agreeable feelings
Recognised was refining ordinary word usage
Dismisses pleasure as desired, and pleasure as a distinctive thing.
Nothing common in the various feelings except that desirable
Dismisses Mill’s hierarchy of pleasures. Some pleasures also create others but this additional instrumental value.
Intensity and duration can be traded off
There is a hedonistic zero.
Most of the time we are above zero as everyday life has moderate pleasures.
Obviously inexact to describe pleasure as the kind of feeling that we desire to retain in consciousness
A feeling which the sentient individual at the time of feeling it implicitly or explicitly apprehends to be desirable: – desirable that is when considered merely as feeling, and not in respect of ….. things such as its consequences
On a diet, I may desire to stop eating, but as a mere feeling my pleasure in eating is desirable.
In grief, I may desire to sustain grief but not like the feeling.
Desirable consciousness
Finds he cannot avoid using estimates of pleasure in his practical decision. But recognises that comparison are very rough, more so between people. Only limited confidence.
[Recognition of the vagueness of happiness measures goes back to Sidgwick. I don’t think he worked through the implications. I think very important.]
[More thought is required about whether happiness level is a fact independent of my judgement. We experience the niceness and nastiness of our consciousness even when we are not judging, as do non-human animals. It seems to be a fact when I am suffering from toothache, especially as this can be judged independent of me. But judging trade-offs is another matter. Is the badness of the toothache worth the badness of going to the dentist? Sometimes, who knows. Sometimes, it is near a fact that with severe toothache that is not going to get better and a dentist visit a solution, that I should go to the dentist. Spending money gives us a simpler parallel: there are times that it is clear I should spend money and times when there is no answer. Is there no answer because the facts are complicated and difficult to predict or because there is no fact about happiness levels? The uncertainties of the world may leave the question of whether happiness levels can be measured as not too practically important.]
Kent Berridge and Morten Kringelbach. ‘Pleasure is never a sensation. … Instead it always requires the activity of hedonic brain systems to paint an additional hedonic gloss onto a sensation to make it “liked”.’
Olds and Milner ‘pleasure centres’ reinterpreted as wanting without the reward of pleasure.
Fred Feldman suggests classical utilitarians concerned with ‘sensory hedonism’ – balance of sensory pleasure over pain. Phenomenally given sensory intensity. But Wendell in disappointing organism machine has disappointment despite pleasure; joy despite pain of childbirth.
Sidgwick not a sensory hedonist and can answer these cases
Attitudinal hedonism. Propositional attitudes, more beliefs than feelings. But hearing good news that does not affect you emotionally – takes the fun out of happiness.
Haybron.
Superficial pleasures just don’t get to us. Flit through consciousness. Not relevant to happiness.
Emotional states and moods are dispositions. Propensity to be in good mood.
Yes, one common meaning of happiness is a certain emotional state and dispositions.
But Sidgwick explicitly specified the term in a more precise way.
Haybron is criticising definition of happiness rather than hedonistic theory of value. Suggests utilitarians use pleasure rather than happiness as their term.
Happiness as a disposition is instrumentally good as causing the ultimate good of pleasure.
Happy people are likely to have pleasure.
Better to think if a career will make me happy rather than give me pleasure as happiness (propensity to good consciousness) is easier to track than pleasure (good consciousness)
[Both pleasure and happiness are unsatisfactory words for hedonism. I prefer happiness, which I think is sometimes used in the utilitarian senses of ‘good experience’ and ‘good experience overall.’ Happiness is also used for feelings of enjoyment and contentment and for dispositions to feel good, so there can be some confusion. For me ‘pleasure’ implies ‘sensual pleasures’ and I think this association is hard to get beyond. By using the word pleasure utilitarians encourage the misunderstanding that they are only concerned with a narrow part of human experience.]
Internalist theories are in accord with desires so meet resonance constraint, unlike externalist theories.
Hedonism internalist on desirable consciousness but externalist in prohibiting desires about things outside consciousness such as posthumous fame
[But are there facts about desirable consciousness that we can misjudge?]
The Experience Machine
Not a problem for desire-satisfaction or pluralist views
Explanations for initial repugnance
Status quo bias. Greene. If woken up in experience machine would you continue? Reactions to this don’t support Nozick.
[Life itself is very peculiar, yet we enjoy our experienced life within it. The experience machine is perhaps less odd as a creator of an experienced life as it creates life purposefully and not as a by-product.]
Sumner. Concern for machine failure. Tanks and electrodes.
Crisp. P had a life of achievement and Q was in an experience machine and thought she had a life of achievement. Thinks we judge they do not have the same level of well-being.
Crisp. Our judgement is because we have evolved as goal-seekers. In the experience machine there are no goals and nothing is achieved. This is alien to what we think life should be. But this can be debunked as not relevant to the welfare of the individual.
Is hedonism insufficiently against killing? Loss of future happiness, grief, societal fear, ignorant paternalism arguments may be insufficient. [Intermediate institutions, particularly legality, authority. We have effective legal safeguards against taking matters into our own hands and killing people. Stopping killing is one of the first functions of a legal system.]
Why worse to kill humans? Humans more goal-orientated. Thwarts desires. Untimely death. But incapable humans.
Food animals who have good lives and are replaced.
Guy Kahane. Debunk hedonism.
Adam Lerner. ‘our belief in pain’s badness seems to be justified by our immediate experience of how its object feels’
Neil Sinhababu.
Our belief in the badness of pain is grounded in our immediate experience and is not affected by our knowledge of the origins of the state.
All other claims to value are subject to evolutionary debunking except pleasure and pain which we are directly aware of in a unique way. [A strong and very significant claim.]
Moral disagreement suggests scepticism about all moral judgements except beliefs about pleasure and pain which are fundamentally different.
If hypnotised to have a blinding headache, learning the illusory origins of the headache would not stop it from having been painful. The badness of the pain is independent from the origin.
The way pleasure and pain feel is on its own sufficiently motivating without needing a belief that they are desirable/undesirable. There is not a belief involved that could be debunked.
The Indispensibility of Psychology
F Y Edgeworth
Irving Fisher
Then psychology struck back with Kahneman
Fail to maximise the utility of outcomes as they are actually experienced – that is, utility as Bentham conceived it.
Sidgwick struggled with the question of how to measure happiness. Economists, as we have seen, effectively gave up that effort and ended up measuring something quite different.
Kahneman.
Experiencing self and remembering self
Sidgwick principle of impartial concern for all parts of conscious life
Judgements of others’ happiness tends to be time impartial, particularly if graphical.
[For self and others we think through stories but sometimes think we should better look to the totality of the moments.]
Distorting effects of memory rather than what we should do
Experiencing self as intrinsically good, but politically we also have to deal with the remembering self
People’s memories of experience are not authoritative guides to the value of those experiences.
If experienced time slows down, its value increases.
Life Satisfaction
Reported varies with trivial matters, suggesting most people do not have a settled view.
Not something that people think much about. Cannot be equated with well-being.
[Layard uses extensively. Flawed, but seems to work in identifying factors affecting happiness.]
What is good on the whole – or, good from the point of view of the universe – is the sum total of what is good for all sentient beings
[Summing is natural as we sum in our own lives, then in our families]
10. Rules
On Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to do in the face of the world; and even, if perfect secrecy can be reasonably expected, what it would be wrong to recommend by private advice and example.
The opinion that secrecy may render an action right which would not otherwise be so should itself be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems expedient that the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric. Or if this concealment be difficult to maintain, it may be desirable that Common Sense should repudiate the doctrines which it is expedient to confine to an enlightened few.
All agreed that many utilitarian reasons to uphold moral rules.
Hare two-level account. Intuitive and critical levels of morality.
Is murder right if it is expected to produce slightly more good?
[Limits of authority should be an important concept here.]
Rule utilitarianism. R F Harrod 1936.
Fatal objections to rule utilitarianism from adjusting rules. Lyons.
Footnote
Petit and Smith. Global Consequentialism. Evaluate rules, motives and everything else against value. Broader than act consequentialism.
Sidgwick. Wrong to assimilate all normative questions to questions of ultimate value.
Richard Chappell. Fittingness: The Sole Normative Primitive. A distinct kind of normative judgement on acts.
Ord. Beyond Action.
[I am sympathetic. Hard to delineate acts as spreads into other considerations]
Esoteric Morality
Plato. Catholic mental reservation.
Support a ‘give 10%’ rule but secretly recommend doing more. Support ban on torture but teach to use in extreme circumstances of ticking bomb. Secret mercy for deserter.
First do no harm.
Rawls. Publicity condition. Public conception of justice.
It seems that Rawls and Gert want to define ethics as ‘any rational procedure by which we determine what a community of human beings ought to take as a standard of right or wrong for the voluntary actions of its members’. That simply rules out of court what is surely a proper normative question: whether it is sometimes ethically justifiable to do what will, if and only if it remains secret, have best consequences.
Scanlon in What we Owe to Each Other asserts that ‘thinking about right and wrong is, at the most basic level, thinking about what could be justified to others on grounds that they, if appropriately motivated, could not reasonably reject’.
Parfit. The Kant or Scanlon question is not about the particular act but about the principle.
But is this the right question?
Many philosophers have been interested in the question how we should determine the public standards of right or wrong on which a community should agree. That is a legitimate and interesting question to ask, but it is not the only question that ethics can investigate, and it is not the question with which Sidgwick began The Methods. ‘What ought I to do?’ is a distinct question from: ‘What are the principles that it would be reasonable to accept’
Brad Hooker Ideal Code, Real World
Thinks a genius in a world of imbeciles should still follow the same simple code. Avoiding disasters exception.
Consequentialist arguments for publicity. Common purpose, openness, against elitism. Government House utilitarianism.
Maximize the good is not the best decision procedure.
Ord. Thought in the world distinct from decision procedure.
But only partly self-effacing. Vital flexibility.
Consequentialists have made the world a better place.
Decision procedures and acts.
Can we blame someone for following the best decision procedure (rule) when it leads to bad outcome? Or for breaking the rule to give a good outcome?
Authors, like Sidgwick have defended the view that sometimes we are right to do in secret what it would be wrong to do, or to advocate, in public.
[A better societal understanding of the place of the happiness end and intermediate rules, of how they fit together would help. E.g., appreciating the role of limited authority and the difficulties of happiness estimates.]
11. Demandingness
Theoretical impartiality limited by my capability to help myself and those near me, be in good shape helps me help others, universal benevolent impulses weak, any love is good love, effectiveness and naturalness of working in small family and other units.
Sidgwick: obligations to strangers sometimes reduced by disincentive effect but not for unforeseeable disasters. Wants praise for above average acts, but try to raise standard.
Moral saints. Moral fantaticism.
[If we discussed better acts rather than right acts the problem would disappear. The problem is trying to put utilitarianism into a divine command or natural law black and white conception of morality.]
Other theories are also demanding.
How the world is makes morality demanding.
What is natural is not necessarily right or even rational.
We want a theory that is right, not easy to follow.
Sidgwick may have had greater power to help poor than he thought, but we certainly have greater power now. Greater gap between rich and poor. Now power to help without affecting own welfare. Makes utilitarianism more demanding.
The demands of utilitarianism may seem much less absurd, however, when considered from the perspective of a person who needs help. Impartiality between two viewpoints.
Scanlon’s approach may be more demanding.
A highly demanding morality is reasonable, given the world in which we are living.
Those who can make a positive difference, face demanding obligations to do so.
With some natural resources we are receiving stolen goods that should benefit all the country’s people, but instead enrich only the despots.
Morality cannot demand that I do more than my ‘fair share’ of resolving the world’s problems? But shallow pond.
Parfit. Blameless wrongdoing.
Richard Arneson
Alastair Norcross. Scalar Utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism should not be seen as giving an account of right action, in the sense of an action demanded by morality, but only as giving an account of what states of affairs are good and which actions are better than which other possible alternatives and by how much.
Authors disagree [I agree with Norcross.]
12. Distribution
If our duty is to aim at ‘the Good Universal’ then it is arbitrary and unreasonable to exclude from the end… any pleasure of any sentient being
‘for human beings generally, life on the average yields a positive balance of pleasure over pain’. Men act as if death is a great evil.
‘it seems clear that, supposing the average happiness enjoyed remains undiminished, Utilitarianism directs us to make the number enjoying it as great as possible’.
Notices new issue of lower average happiness with larger numbers.
If the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible—but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum. Having reached this conclusion, Sidgwick concedes that it ‘wears a certain air of absurdity.’
In less than seven pages of The Methods, Sidgwick raised four major ethical issues, about each of which there is now an extensive literature.
Sidgwick ahead of common sense and other philosophers on animals.
The fact that no one has come up with a really convincing reason for giving greater moral weight to members of our own species, simply because they are members of our species, strongly suggests that there is no such reason. Like racism and sexism, speciesism is wrong.
Capacity to reciprocate? Morality as mutual agreement.
Animals who would not have lived without meat-eating [but effect on wild animals]
Asymmetry of moral risk encourages vegetarianism and anti-abortion.
‘Everybody to count for one, and nobody for more than one’ is really a constitutive element of utilitarianism, a rule requiring honest counting of utility, rather than an independent principle. Instrumental egalitarianism — aiming for equality in order to achieve more happiness.
The possibility of individual variations in capacities for happiness. Nozick imagined that there might be ‘utility monsters.’ Philosopher may have comparably feeble sensual enjoyments. Capacities for happiness.
Snail. Brain-damaged.
Bentham makes explicit working assumption that people are roughly the same.
[This is a significant issue. Perhaps address by focusing on capacities to be happy. Age may give decline in capacity for enjoyment and problems felt less acutely, numbed by time.]
Tables of distributions of happiness. Easy to mis-interpret as resources. Diminishing marginal utility and envy already taken into account. Greene.
Rawls primary goods.
Moral uncertainty suggests an element of egalitarianism or prioritarianism.
Sidgwick suggests giving similar treatment as egalitarian supplementary principle if no clear utilitarian preference.
Discount rate. For time value of money, greater future wealth and for survival risk appropriate. Pure time discounting wrong.
Treat welfare of future generations as on par. Philosophers and philosophically minded economists have this right.
David Benatar. Desire is a negative state, only briefly lifted when fulfilled.
How many people should there be? Not really considered between Sidgwick and Parfit. A problem that any ethical theory needs to address.
[If you bring somone into existence there is someone to say thank you. If you don’t there is nobody with a view. And there is nobody existing now who is grateful. There is partial justification. With moral uncertainty this may be enough.
It is not clear empirically that bigger population means lower average happiness. More growth, more economically active young people, more cultural growth. Overcrowding can be addressed by smart growth. Challenges that haven’t much been thought about and we may be able to meet.
Where population growth increases existential risk, that is a big factor.
Perhaps control population now but expect it to grow in future.
Discussion of the repugnant conclusion is premature until we have better evidence that larger populations will reduce average happiness.
But authors suggest already passed optimum total happiness. Probably due to environmental degradation and effects on animals.]
Average view clearly wrong.
Total view leads to repugnant conclusion
[But only with falling average happiness and at extreme levels and in the long run. Less of a guidance to current policy. Lives are currently better than barely worth living.]
Unnatural to give too much weight to unborn, eg couples not conceiving.
More importance to future people who will exist prior to our decisions?
Nobody can complain?
Mere addition paradox also leads to repugnant conclusion.
Parfit suggests softening by using ‘imprecisely as good’
Eg conservation work on £50k is imprecisely as good as office work on either £200k or £250k.
Perhaps should not be concerned with results far from real world. Greene.
If animal farming is net positive for animals is it justified? Inconclusive. Moral risk on both sides.
The supremely important question of catastrophic risk.
Effect on animals and environment? But do wild animals enjoy their lives? May we be able to help animals in future?
Parfit’s view that extinction much worse than 99% death. Depends on total happiness view rather than prior existence view.
Moral risk suggests taking seriously as future numbers could be so large.
Conclusion
In this book we have followed the main lines of Sidgwick’s thinking about ethics, and tested his views both against our own reasoning and against the best of the vast body of recent and current philosophical writing on the topics he addresses. The overarching question we have sought to answer is whether Sidgwick’s form of utilitarianism can be defended. In most respects we believe it can be. Parfit’s claim that, in the long tradition of ethics, ‘Sidgwick’s book contains the largest number of true and important claims’ stands up well.
We have argued, as he hesitated to do, that ‘the Point of View of the Universe’ is the perspective of a rational being, in a way that alternative perspectives, such as that of egoism, are not.
Like Sidgwick, we believe that ethics is based on reason, and this makes it possible to expect that, as our reasoning develops and builds on the work of those who have thought about ethics before us, we will improve our understanding of ethics and get closer to the truth about what we ought to do.
For much of the 20th century, Sidgwick’s belief that ethics has a rational basis was decidedly unfashionable. In some circles it still is. There are signs, however, that on this issue opinion is swinging back in Sidgwick’s direction, and not only among philosophers, but among scientists too. The role of reason in leading us to act more ethically is a major theme of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature. Pinker regards our ability to reason as one of the key factors in this ethical improvement.
Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. If he had read Sidgwick, he might have written that our enhanced reasoning abilities make it more likely that we will take the point of view of the universe, and begin to see that the good of any one individual is of no more importance than the good of any other. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. Pinker therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a ‘moral Flynn effect’. [IQs seem to have improved over time perhaps due to scientific reasoning and our moral thinking may similarly be able to improve, using reasoning over instinct.]
Ethics is a unique subject. As an area of philosophy, it challenges us to develop theories, construct arguments, weigh objections, and above all, to reason clearly; but ethics is also the point at which philosophy engages with our everyday lives, and can have an impact on the way we live and on the world as a whole. Sidgwick was well aware of these two faces of ethics. In the preface to the first edition of The Methods of Ethics he wrote that he saw his work as a contribution to knowledge, seeking to show ‘what conclusions will be rationally reached if we start with certain ethical premises, and with what degree of certainty and precision’. But this quest was not for knowledge for the sake of knowledge; rather it was a necessary element of a proper response to ‘the urgent need which we all feel of finding and adopting the true method of determining what we ought to do’. Our aim in this book has been the same as Sidgwick’s, to make progress in philosophy in order to make progress in practice. Ultimately, we hope that our work will be seen as part of a long line of thought that has helped many generations to live in ways that are happier, more fulfilling, less prone to inflict cruelty or to suffer it, and committed to improving the well-being of other conscious beings. In a word, lives that are more ethical.