Does Utilitarianism Need a Rethink? (Preprint)

Journal of Economic Methodology

2021

Philosophers have typically shown high confidence in their evaluations of Utilitarianism, whether as an endorsement or a disparagement. Rarely, however, has much effort been spent on investigating what utilitarianism means. In their recent 2020 book The Pursuit of Happiness: Philosophical and Psychological Foundations of Utility, the cognitive scientist Louis Narens and the philosopher of science Brian Skyrms have teamed up to address the question of how utility can be measured and aggregated for the purposes of ethics and policy-making. The Pursuit of Happiness constitutes a beautiful example of benefits of collaboration between scientists and philosophers. Narens, one of the leading experts on measurement theory in the behavioral and cognitive sciences, and Skyrms, a pioneer in mathematical philosophy with his work on evolutionary game theory and the evolution of conventions, make a perfect team for examining the foundations of utilitarianism. The majority of The Pursuit of Happin...

This article is an attempt to take an overview of the current position of utilitarian theory. It begins by providing a definition of utilitarianism as it is found in the works of Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick. These authors are all interpreted as intuitionists. It is claimed that the main rivals to utilitarianism are egoism on the one hand, and reflective non-egoistic pluralism, as found in the work of Ross, on the other. The significance of disagreement between proponents of these views is explained, and modern attempts to ground utilitarianism are found lacking. The article ends with a plea for history.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Harsanyi invested his Aggregation Theorem and Impartial Observer Theorem with deep utilitarian sense, but Sen redescribed them as "representation theorems" with little ethical import. This negative view has gained wide acquiescence in economics. Against it, we support the utilitarian interpretation by a novel argument relative to the Aggregation Theorem. We suppose that a utilitarian observer evaluates non-risky alternatives by the sum of individual utilities and investigate his von Neumann-Morgenstern (VNM) preference on risky alternatives. Adding some technical assumptions to Harsanyi's, we conclude that (i) this observer would use the utility sum as a VNM utility function, and crucially, (ii) any social observer would evaluate both risky and non-risky alternatives in terms of a weighted utility sum.

The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2005

Endorsements: "The Happiness Philosophers is a remarkable achievement. Bart Schultz uses his skill in philosophical biography to bring the founders of utilitarianism to life. But he does much more than that. By revealing the early utilitarians' fascinating mix of intelligence, passion, and reforming zeal, he dispels caricatures of utilitarian thinking. His conviction that utilitarianism can guide us in our search for solutions to the ethical and political problems we face today only adds to the importance of the book."—Peter Singer, author of Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter "In The Happiness Philosophers, Bart Schultz tells the gripping story of the founders of utilitarianism. Far from being prosaic materialists dedicated to calculating pleasure and pain, the utilitarians were passionate humanists and reformers whose ideas offer crucial insights about inequality and suffering. They were fascinating individuals, brilliant and eccentric, creative and surprising, and their lives are as important to study as their writings. A wonderful achievement."--Charlotte Gordon, author of Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley "Utilitarianism has been a central ethical position in Western philosophy for more than two centuries, yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the lives of its major proponents. This is especially remarkable given how unusual and fascinating those lives were. Bart Schultz has found a marvelous topic, and he writes beautifully, seamlessly connecting the lives and ideas of these thinkers."—Roger Crisp, University of Oxford "The Happiness Philosophers is a beautifully conceived and brilliantly executed book. Its focus on the founders of utilitarianism is a masterstroke, and it provides wonderful details about their lives."--Brad Hooker, University of Reading

Utilitas, 2002

This essay examines D. G. Ritchie's claim that 'in Ethics the theory of natural selection has vindicated all that has proved most permanently valuable in Utilitarianism'. Principally, it endeavours to determine what Ritchie means by Vindicated' and what kind of utilitarianism he thinks evolutionary theory vindicates. With respect to the kind of utilitarianism vindicated, I will show how he tries to fortify Millian liberal utilitarianism with new liberal values such as self-realization and common good. Ritchie's intellectual debts were eclectic and included mostly Mill, T.

In this response to the essays by Crisp, Parfit, Hooker and Nakano-Okuno on our The Point of View of the Universe, we focus on the following topics: whether egoism is more susceptible to an evolutionary debunking argument than universal benevolence; our defence of impartial ra-tionalism; wide and narrow definitions of " ethics " ; the role of moral rules; the extension of ethics to all sentient beings; how best to define and understand pleasure as an intrinsic value; and whether Ross's ethic of prima facie duties is as defensible as utilitarianism.

Mind, 1967

2008

In his metaethics and philosophy of language, Jeremy Bentham was strongly influenced by John Locke's empiricist framework. In his works on logic and mind (but also in his ethical writings), John Stuart Mill displayed a blend of empiricism and common sense philosophy, which he inherited from his father James. In addition to this, both Bentham and Mill viewed ethics and politics as empirical disciplines, based on human experience, and modeled after empirical, inexact disciplines, such as medicine. Despite his intuitionist leanings, even Henry Sidgwick presented his moral epistemology as a correction of an originally empiricist framework. Moreover, in Sidgwick's argument for utilitarianism, a lot of room is left to the power that a utilitarian ethical theory has in accounting for our common moral experience, embodied in our common sense moral judgements. Even through the twentieth century, utilitarianism has kept its connection with human experience, if only because of its frequent and numerous incursions in detailed applicative problems. Possibly, utilitarian ethical thinkers were the first to realize a turn to applied ethical theory. Paradoxically, the often repeated and most well-known objection to utilitarianism, namely its alleged counter-intuitiveness, concerns the relationship between utilitarian ethics and experience. This aspect of utilitarian moral theories was placed at the center of the three-day Conference "Utilitarianism: An Ethic of Experience?" (held at the University of Rome, June 12-14, 2007), where the papers published here were originally presented and discussed. From the many presentations, discussions, and informal talks that happened in those three days in Rome, it turned out that the question mark at the end of the conference title, originally indicating the ironic, yet provocative and wary spirit the organizers had toward the subject, could be removed safely. Experience is at the centre of utilitarianism, both in its historical and contemporary versions. Experience, however, is only a common point of departure, and it is not able to settle the various puzzles that scholars interested in utilitarianism must face. It is also for this reason that the title of the present collection was changed to a more neutral one, aiming to show the two directions assumed by the contemporary scholarship: an increasing penetration into the historical texts of eighteenth and nineteenth century utilitarians and a more detailed refinement of utilitarian ethical theories to respond classical and new objections and problems.