Episode 9: Utilitarian Ethics: What Should We Do?

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. My name is Mark Linsenmayer phoned it in from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:18 Seth: This is Seth Paskin from Austin, Texas.

0:20 Wes: This is Wes Alwan calling it in from Boston, Massachusetts.

0:26 Seth: Phoning it in, huh?

0:28 Mark: Our question for episode nine is again, what are we supposed to do? Focusing on utilitarianism. For this week, we the podcasters, read chapters one through five of Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, as well as John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism and a short essay by a modern utilitarian Peter Singer, called Famine, Affluence, and Morality. But really, to understand this, you don't have to have read any of those things. If you want to, you can go look@PartiallyExaminedLife.com our website, and we'll have links to online versions of all of those.

But the ground rules for our discussion are, number one, we do not assume that our audience knows anything about any of this. You don't have to have read those things. Number two, no gratuitous name dropping. We're interested in ideas, not with fetishizing a bunch of dead philosophers. If you have a point to make, just make it. Can't say, you know, you'll understand what I mean if you go read Three Biscuits and a Cup of Angst by Mitch LeBlanc. Number three, we shall be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in the case we're not doing so.

Seems like it would be more entertaining. So we're going to do something a little different today, which is we're going to recreate or improve upon something that we recorded two weeks ago. Now, I believe that we got together and talked about utilitarianism, and we had some technical problems, and so the first two thirds of that conversation got cut off. So we're going to use as an excuse to have a discussion again about the same material, but at some point it will lapse into the original discussion and hopefully in a seamless enough way. And some of the stuff from the first part did survive.

So if you hear something glaringly out of place, that was us jamming one of the juicy bits that just couldn't be thrown away in from last time. So why don't we just start with a. Some folks don't know what utilitarianism is, so it's an ethical principle which just says do whatever will bring the most happiness or the most pleasure or the most good, the most benefit, whatever, to the greatest amount of people.

2:33 Wes: Right.

2:33 Mark: So all these different utilitarians just have different ways of stating that or different arguments for it. So utilitarianism. Should we just start with the closing statements? We probably already have opinions about this.

2:47 Seth: Sucks.

2:48 Mark: Sucks, man.

2:49 Wes: I'm gonna be Switzerland.

2:54 Mark: You're gonna be small and sell watches

2:59 Wes: and have good skiing.

3:02 Mark: The Bentham piece. Jeremy Bentham is the guy that. I don't know if he invented it, but he certainly was the first popularizer or the guy that was famous for formulating the idea of utilitarianism. And the thing that we read the beginning of was from 1789, whereas the more famous utilitarianism, the essay by John Stuart Mill, is from much later 1863.

3:21 Seth: In doing some research for the podcast, I found out that Bentham was a much more interesting guy than I had originally thought. Because I think when you think about the English philosophers who are famous and we talk about Mill and Hobbes and Locke and Hume and all these guys who influenced, certainly, political philosophy in the United States and so forth, Bentham's name doesn't really come up. He's there, but he's certainly not considered one of the big names. But that he's very much a kind of a Renaissance man, or he was in the mold of Leibniz, who's obviously one of Wes's favorite people.

He was involved in law. He created a bunch of concepts of rights. He was a defender of animal rights, defended women's rights. He argued in favor of giving homosexuals rights. He wrote on economics and free trade. He corresponded with people in both the New World and the Old, including people like Adam Smith. He followed and was in correspondence with people in Latin and South America. I mean, truly a really, really interesting and prolific writer. His body is encased in glass and on display at the University College, London. A friend of mine from high school, he spent a semester or a year over there studying and took a picture with him.

And that apparently the head is not real, but the body is. But even though he never attended the college or taught there, somehow he got affiliated with it, because the people who established University College did so on Bentham's principles and allowed lots of people to come and granted equality for studies and things like that. But they own his collected writings and that he's got something like more than 5 million words of stuff he's written and that they continue to publish volume after volume of his collected works even now.

5:14 Wes: My God. And that does not include his blog. Wow.

5:19 Mark: So they don't have his actual skull?

5:21 Seth: No, they did. Apparently it just used to be stolen as a prank by kids and stuff like that, and it just sort of deteriorated or it wasn't preserved properly. So they do have it. It's just not on display.

5:31 Mark: So they could use it like an animatronic head to read his collected works.

5:36 Seth: That is true.

5:37 Mark: Constantly, day and night.

5:41 Seth: It could be very much like one of those things in Disney World or

5:44 Mark: Disneyland, except with an actual corpse body.

5:48 Seth: Actual corpse body.

5:49 Mark: Well, I noticed that the reading that we picked, which we only read the very beginning of, and it was very, very long, and I sort of read a couple chapters past where we're supposed to skim some of the rest. You know, you could see how those words could add up, how verbose he is. Not unclear. So this is actually entitled, again, an Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. So it is a legal text, and it reads like a legal text. And a lot of the chapters after the ones that we stopped at have to do with like, aggravating and mitigating circumstances. And to what extent is an act voluntary? Just all these really fine distinctions like you'd find in a law book. I don't know how cutting edge he was at this point, but you can definitely see how modern jurisprudence is descended from the kind of thing that he was writing in this.

6:34 Seth: So I think that it probably merits a little bit more exposition, if you will, about Bentham's book, please, just for context. So what Bentham introduces in the book is what he calls the principle of utility. And the principle of utility, what it strictly speaking says is that an action is. Let's see, an action is right if it promotes or produces benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness. And an action is wrong if it does the opposite. Either prevents benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness from happening, or creates pain, unhappiness, mischief, evil, and so on.

So that's what the principle of utility is. And his purpose in sort of bringing that up was to basically say that he feels like in terms of creating legislation or in governing a state, that the laws and the. The laws should be written and the. The state, the legislature should try to create laws and rules and so forth according to the principle of utility. So that's kind of at the. At the top level, what this, you know, what the book's trying to say. And the rest of it is sort of some arguments against competing theories, and then also talks about the calculation and the sources, pleasure and pain, and understanding those sorts of things.

So I think the reason that that's significant is that it's that principle of utility that is going to get turned into a full fledged moral theory by a bunch of people after Bentham, that it's not in this book. He's not exactly saying this should be the way that you as an individual act. This is intended to be the way that legislators should guide their actions in creating laws and regulations and so forth. But it turns into kind of a full fledged. A full fledged ethical principle after his time. And this is. That's what Mill is talking about in Mill's text is he's talking about the principle of utility sort of as an ethical principle.

I guess this is one of those things where maybe on the surface that kind of sort of sounded like it makes sense. But I guess we have to ask ourselves, would that really make sense? That that would be the thing that legislators should use, is that the greatest happiness for the greatest number is the way you should make laws.

9:16 Wes: I guess we could try and name some drawbacks to that and then consider alternatives. I guess the argument against it is that you. It's like the arguments against popular culture today. It's this reduction of human beings to the lowest common denominator. So the greatest happiness for the greatest number may not be conducive to exceptional individuals or exceptional art or the sorts of things that ultimately make life worth living, let's say higher culture and things like that. That's the elitist, anti utilitarian argument.

9:53 Mark: Well, it's not even just the elites. It's those most downtrodden that it could be that just looking at, for instance, educational policy, it seems like we actually do have a fairly utilitarian approach to educational policy of trying to use the limited dollars that are available to try to bring the mass of students to an acceptable level. Which means, as you know, following what you were just saying, Wes, that sort of honors or gifted and talented programs would be shorted. But that would also mean taking that strictly, that the special ed programs would be gutted as well, because, well, if that's a very small percentage, that's a lot of resources you're using on those small number of people when you could be spreading them out and sort of bring the general welfare up. So, you know, we've had to have specific laws, specific protections, specific programs and promises.

10:43 Seth: So what is your objection specifically?

10:45 Mark: Well, if that's interpreted as the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Right. The Star Trek interpretation.

10:51 Seth: Right.

10:52 Mark: Then you're just saying, you know, we need to what will benefit the most people, and if the vital interests of some are contrasted to that, but accommodating those vital interests would be an inconvenience to everybody else, then maybe you should just triage. Maybe you should just help the mass and just kill off the bottom portion, Right?

11:15 Wes: Maybe. Unless you say that, you know, I guess the argument around that is that altruism and passion are such important values that their elimination or cultural attenuation would be a form of suffering, let's say. And so you can always give this roundabout utilitarian argument for making these exceptions. Right?

11:39 Mark: Yeah. And this gives us motivation to get clear about what exactly the principle is and how to apply it. Because you could have a very specific one where Bentham gives a specific utility calculation, like, you're supposed to do this when you're contemplating every individual pleasure or pain and add those up such that, okay, that's not really the same as the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Because if it's bad enough for one person. Right. Extreme pain for one person would overwhelm a mild inconvenience for a greater number. It depends how exactly the calculation works. How do you count someone's life in this?

12:15 Seth: Well, there's nothing that says that the principle of utility is incompatible with or somehow ignores a certain set of basic fundamental rights. Right. If you have the right to life, liberty, and religious freedom, let's say in the United States, that's the case, which is not clear to me, but it might be. There's nothing that says, okay, well, the greatest happiness would actually be for us to just get rid of anybody who follows Islam because we're a majority Christian country and Christians can't tolerate Muslims. And so we should just get rid of all the Muslims and shut down the mosques and all that sort of thing.

Because in this interest, the greater good would be served. Right. Or more people would gain from that than would suffer from it. But he doesn't suggest that this principle is kind of like wholesale always. He's not saying use it as a guide for determining good and proper legislation. But that doesn't mean that you can write legislation that overturns certain basic fundamental principles that you might have established in

13:07 Mark: your society, which can be themselves based on utilitarian concerns. I mean, he thinks that should be the case. But yeah. So a dumb version of utilitarianism would use the act. Utilitarianism would look at, you know, as a justice, for instance, I'm deciding a legal case, and I would look at every individual circumstance, like should I punish this person or not? Or should we allow the government to take this person's property or not? Or should we allow the government to kill this individual person or not? And you would consider that individual act?

Well, would anybody miss this particular person? Nah. And we need his house. We could put the freeway through it. We could make the house into a playground for many. So we should kill this person and take his house? Well, okay, that would have some absurd consequences. But if we actually look at, you know, passing laws that overall are supposed to grant utility, then, well, if people are afraid at all points that they're going to be the one chosen to be killed and their house turned into a playground, then everybody is going to be pretty anxious about that.

And that's going to be a terrible thing as well as just, you know, witnessing this happening to other people and feeling bad about that. Well, that's a bad thing as well. So this move toward rule utilitarianism, which is a pretty inevitable move if you're talking about making laws in the first place, is more about being consistent. We can't, in an individual case, violate one of our rights, one of our laws, to raise utility. Instead, we pass laws that in general will promote utility, which doesn't mean that they shouldn't admit of individual exceptions, but they're going to be, you know, for the most part, kept to, or else they wouldn't be effective.

14:35 Wes: Yeah, I think the more difficult objection to overcome is the cultural objection. I mean, as you've mentioned, there are usually, you want to make these laws generally, and there'll be exceptions like eminent domain, for instance, which is one relevant to the example you gave, where someone's house can be taken for the greater good. But those exceptions are meant to be rare, and there has to be an overwhelming need on the part of the society. And it's not a violation of certain rights that are considered inalienable, like life, for instance. You can't just kill the person to put the freeway through, but you can take their house.

I think that this idea of the communal good is relevant to again, this cultural objection. So take, for instance, the proponents of the rights of homosexuals and then the cultural right wing, which says this is going to destroy a fabric of our society. So there you have a very difficult utilitarian decision because there's a more difficult conflict between the communal good and then the concept of rights. Because you're going to make, let's say the majority of the country is right wing and it causes them a great deal of misery. For instance, that gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts.

And that's commonly the argument that's made against it, that there is some sort of harm being done by allowing gay marriage because it establishes certain kinds of cultural norms. So I'm not sure how we. Even with the sort of trick of being able to reduce these conflicts, I don't think utilitarianism can do a very good job of dealing with those sorts of situations.

16:06 Mark: Well, again, that sort of goes to the need for some criteria for a calculation of sorts. But actually, I thought, I always thought gay marriage was a simple one to solve the utilitarian way. That and in fact sort of utilitarianism light is the harm principle. This is also put forward. I think John Locke was the big proponent of that right, which is a pretty guiding legal principle. Right. That if there's demonstrable harm, then the state has an interest in preventing demonstrable harm to people. So it's not that we're trying to maximize happiness for everyone.

No, everybody can be just indifferent, but we're trying to prevent harm. And if you're preventing people specifically, the actual abilities that go with marriage, so the, you know, financial stuff, the medical decision making, that kind of stuff, those are. If you don't have those, those are concrete, demonstrable harms. Right. That your life was screwed up because you did not have this institution. So just measuring that against, you know, what harm is really being done. Is there any demonstrable harm? The moral climate is being eroded. Traditional marriage is somehow being devalued by allowing the, you know, it's so hard to demonstrate any kind of real harm going on there at all.

That seems like a pretty obvious utilitarian slam dunk to have at least the civil unions. Right.

17:23 Wes: At least at the substance depends on. But you have to accept the principle of harm and the principle of physical harm, as always, outweighing, let's say, emotional or the harms of cultural influence. But of course, many societies don't accept that. And traditional societies typically consider the harm of cultural influence much greater than, say, physical harm to the individual. The whole concept of the rights of the individual, at least when it comes to harm, outweighing any communal claim is a relatively recent and liberal concept.

17:57 Mark: Yeah, and I think that's one of the things that utilitarianism was created to address.

18:01 Wes: But I don't think the calculus will ever get you there. I mean, I think you have to assume harm and you have to assume certain kinds of values. In other words, the calculus assumes too much that People are alike. It assumes that their values are in concerts. What if people have such different values and such different conflicting conceptions of happiness and the good that there is no easy reconciliation of that type of conflict? In other words, you're just going to have a huge segment of society that is miserable and another segment of society that is relatively content with the application of some principle.

And, you know, at best, you're just going to get, okay, 51% likes it and 49% doesn't. Therefore, this is what we're going with. It doesn't easily boil down to some principle that's for the benefit of all, let's say, which I think is the. Is the way out that utilitarianism looks for or the rule utilitarianism wants to get us towards that, but I'm not sure that we can.

19:02 Seth: So it's not simply a quantitative calculation, right, that there's a huge qualitative piece like the. You know, we sort of alluded to this, that maybe qualitatively the utility of a life, you know, vastly outweighs, you know, almost an infinite number of individual's utility for said convenience.

19:20 Mark: Yep.

19:21 Wes: But you have to assume that the idea that gay marriage is destroying society is a matter of convenience or it is not.

19:27 Seth: Well, I wasn't talking specifically about that example.

19:30 Wes: Yeah, okay.

19:30 Seth: I was just saying that this idea that 54 versus 48%, regardless of what the issue is, that it may not always work out that way. You know, it may be as simple as there's a one, and that that one and the utility of that one's happiness in a particular circumstance may outweigh the happiness of everybody else in the world, relatively speaking. It's just difficult to think of it that way.

19:51 Wes: We could assume we've given a point value system that takes into account all of the qualitative and quantitative and the other things which we'll get to in a minute that Bentham spells out. But even under that point system, we could get to something like 51 to 49, a situation that generally is going to produce a large amount of misery for one segment of society and for another segment. Anyway, sorry, Mark, I think that's what you're trying to get towards, right?

20:15 Mark: Yeah. Just to calculation to jump into there, chapter four. This is where Bentham, he gets really concrete, which makes him easier to criticize, of course, if somebody's actually specific about how the calculation goes. But then in chapters after this, he doesn't really seem to use this in any literal way. So let's look at it pleasures, then, and the avoidance of pains are the ends that the legislator has in view. It behooves him therefore to understand their value. Pleasures and pains are the instruments he has to work with. It behooves him therefore, to understand their force, which is again in other words, their value.

So he is interpreting happiness or benefit as pleasure in particular, and harm as pain. So here's a calculation. To a person considered by himself, the value of a pleasure or pain considered by itself will be greater or less according to the following four. Its intensity, duration, its certainty or uncertainty, and its propinquity or remoteness. Is it nearby? And then he says, but when any pleasure or pain is considered for the purpose of estimating the tendency of any act by which is produced, there are some other ones that you have to take into account.

Specifically its fecundity, that is, the chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind and its purity, or the chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind. And then the last thing is just its extent. How many people are involved, the number of persons to whom it extends, in other words, who are affected by it. And it makes it sound like you could actually assign numbers to this, even though he doesn't. He doesn't say, you know, come up with a fake unit like pletons for pleasure. How many pleatons was in that orgasm there, let's measure them.

But he does give at least these qualitative factors that we have to take into account and somehow measure against each other, I guess, in order to figure out the overall pleasure of an act. So how long is it? So even if it wasn't that intense, if it lasts a long time, well, that's just as good. Is it mixed with a pain or is it a pure pleasure? So if you have sex for the 90th time that evening, it'll probably be mixed with some pain. It's fecundity. What chance has it of being followed by sensations of the same kind? Right. If I get the lady in bed, will she be likely to do it again later?

Or will it prove my inadequacy and I'll never have another shot?

22:26 Wes: If I eat the cheeseburger, will I feel like crap later on?

22:30 Mark: Exactly.

22:30 Wes: It strikes me this would be a good premise for a porn film, actually looking at these,

22:37 Mark: where they actually lie down on a couch that has a

22:40 Wes: scenes part one intensity, part two duration and so on.

22:46 Mark: I would like a numerical display, like on the edge of the bed, like in the Price is Right or Something where the price comes up on the front of the barca lounger or whatever, so that after they finish the act, then, like, the number of plutons is displayed. And there's a short roundtable discussion on how that was calculated. But that's sort of the implication that you could make these quantitative comparisons between any given experience and another experience to see which one is objectively better.

23:14 Seth: You know, I think it sounds almost plausible at first blush. I guess it assumes that there is some way to understand or to characterize experiences and actions in a way that they're equivalent for people. What some people find intensely unpleasant or intensely pleasurable may not be shared by somebody else. So you have to be able to say, well, the intensity of the pleasure that you feel at watching a professional football game. Right. And the intensity of displeasure or unhappiness that I feel at watching, you know, Grey's Anatomy, are somehow equal. Do you see what I'm getting at? I may want to watch football and you may want to watch Grey's Anatomy, and we might say, oh, well, they're equally intensely pleasurable and simultaneously the opposite being displeasurable. Does that make sense?

24:04 Mark: It's hard to find to think of an example like that. Sure, people's tastes are going to differ, but are they going to differ in morally significant ways? You know, is torture bad? Some people really like torture. Well, okay, there might be some masochists out there, but there are few enough of them. And maybe there's something wrong with them and they have other issues such that we don't want to use their judgment to set the standard. There are enough that we have in common. People don't like having their property taken away from them. People don't like their freedom of movement restricted. Yeah, you could come up with individuals that might disagree with these things, but it's going to be pretty rare.

24:43 Wes: But the argument would be that torture is necessary to keep America safe, right?

24:47 Mark: Oh, right. That's the extent part. So you have to do this calculation for everybody involved. So if you're saying, oh, well, torturing this one person. Yes, that's really bad for him. We're not denying that it's really bad for him. But we then saved a bunch of lives. And even saving one life, it seems like your whole life, Isn't that more important than the pain one person is experiencing at one particular short period? I mean, so it's a utilitarian calculation. It's not denying that we have things in common. Just saying that, yeah, the same action is going to affect different people in different ways as part of the calculation.

25:19 Wes: Get to the point where you wonder if utilitarianism is adding anything. Because to perform this calculation you have to assign these values. And the assignment is the hard part. You could really come up with any ethical situation you wanted, depending upon how you weighed the happiness and unhappiness of different individuals, depending on intensity and all those other circumstances. To go back to that objection, that it's possible that what makes most people happy comes at the price of eliminating higher cultural goods, nobility, exceptional individuals.

This is Nietzsche's argument. But you could say, you know, well, utilitarianism can take that into account. It's important that society not get rid of great art and that there be a place for the genius and so on and so forth. So you could back engineer it to any sort of ethical system you wanted, depending upon the hard part, which is the assignment of value. What's more valuable than what?

26:16 Mark: Well, and when you have a situation like that, sometimes that looks like a strength and sometimes it looks like a weakness. So it's like Freudianism that, oh well, Freudianism is not falsifiable because you can give an explanation of anything that a person is going on in their psyche, anything that is going on in their behavior. So that's unscientific. But you could say, oh no, in fact, Freudianism is giving me a rich language to talk about all these kinds of things. And maybe since you know that's not a perfect analogy, because Freudianism is trying to determine sort of the backdoor causes of your emotional issues and therefore how to work them out. Whereas there's nothing backdoor here. We're trying to analyze actions on the face of it.

26:56 Wes: Let me put it another way.

26:58 Mark: Go ahead.

26:59 Wes: The idea that it doesn't add anything if we're talking about calculating pain and pleasure, but when we get to the hard situations, we say, well, because people happen to value this and not that and they would be distressed. Therefore, this is what you go with. You're saying that, well, we determine value based upon pain and pleasure. But often pain and pleasure is the result of what people value. You're really not calculating value. You've already assumed certain cultural values.

27:30 Mark: Isn't that a long term analysis versus short term, though? So for instance, there are lots of societies that treat women like crap. And so if you allow women freedom in that society, that's going to cause a lot of distress. But if you analyze which kind of society is overall in the long run going to have more happiness in it. One where women have full rights or whether they don't. I think it's very easy to argue on utilitarian grounds. I mean, that's twice as many people are going to be having pleasures of their choosing as opposed to the women being crapped on all the time. So.

28:02 Wes: But you have to.

28:02 Mark: They might not like it now, but a generation from now they'll be just great.

28:06 Wes: Here's why I don't think that works. You have to assign the suffering of men and women equal value, which we know because of the qualitative workaround isn't necessarily the case. So the person from the traditional society that oppresses women may say, in fact, women are lesser individuals. Their unhappiness isn't as important as the unhappiness of men. We have to weigh it differently. They could set up that utilitarian calculation in a way, and they could talk about human nature. I think you have to make a lot of assumptions about, okay, what's human nature?

What's really good for human beings. If you think it's really the case that men and women are equal and that they're just as important and that their happiness is just as important, and so on and so forth, and that perhaps that's relevant to human nature, then yes, over the long term, you can say, yeah, this society that oppresses women, according to the utilitarian calculation, it doesn't make sense. But if you reject the values that are premises in that calculation and you accept values of that, let's say that very traditional or oppressive society still use a utilitarian calculation to come up with the result that you want.

And again, those come down to assumptions about human nature, assumptions about what makes us happy in general. And then maybe there isn't something that makes us happy, happy in general. Maybe people are radically different. Maybe there isn't a human nature, or maybe it's very malleable and culturally influenced and changes from time to time, you have all sorts of problems that come up there.

29:35 Seth: If I understand your point, Wes, I think it's fair. In order to be able to make use of something like the principle of utility, you have to make a bunch of assumptions about human nature. You know, you have to assume that all human beings have equal rights, that everybody has the same capacity to experience pleasure and pain, or at least, you know, in the aggregate, it's similar. And I think, actually Mill mentions that. I don't recall seeing or hearing about it in Bentham, but Mill does mention that, that there are certain things you have to assume and you know, his sort of responses.

And of course most reasonable people do assume that. And if you don't, you're being unreasonable. So to a certain extent, the principle of utility really is something that I think was limited in scope, whether intentionally or unintentionally by these guys to a certain type of society that they happen to be in. It doesn't seem to me to be something that's particularly good for cross cultural analysis and so forth.

30:29 Mark: Yeah, to look at Bentham for a minute, he does specifically say, this is in chapter five, Pleasures and Pains and their kinds. So he lists classes of pleasure, the pleasures of sense, the pleasures of wealth, the pleasures of skill, the pleasures of amity, a good name of power, of piety, of benevolence. So clearly this is within a certain cultural framework where people have pleasures of piety. Right. If you had a very non religious culture, then that wouldn't really be anything that anybody would care about or the pleasures of wealth. If you had a culture that had a low emphasis on material possessions, then who cares about that?

The pleasures of a good name, certainly that has varied a lot between different cultures. How much your reputation matters to you seems pretty low in America as far as compared to other things. Like I have enough self esteem that I don't care about my good name compared to some of these other things. Or the pleasures of the imagination is one listed. You could certainly think of many cultures or subcultures that do not place any value on that. Ultimately this is all supposed to be empirical though, right? So the way you know the differences between people is you just look at what they in fact seek.

And so yes, that means again, you're going to be looking at the people around you. But that's who you're making the laws for. That's who you're making your judgments about for the most part. So maybe you don't have to care so much about other folks. In chapter six he has of circumstances influencing sensibility. So he talks about, well, yeah, women are more sensitive than men. So actually it seems to follow from that that we should pay more attention to them in our utilitarian calculations because they're going to get more pissed off if they're wronged than we hardy men who can take a little bit of abuse and children and likewise.

Yeah, that still doesn't give you the argument for why you should count every person as one. And the trouble that that causes then is, okay, well, maybe it's not so strange to do that for every person. But then what about borderline cases? What about animals. What about, you know, people who are severely developmentally disabled or whatever? And that's a key space in which our friend Peter Singer is known for coming in. If empirically where we're getting this idea that we have to pay attention to people's, you know, include them in the utilitarian calculation is that they feel pain and pleasure.

Well, geez, don't animals feel pain and pleasure? So to the extent that they do, we need to consider them in the utilitarian calculation, which is something that other moral systems concerned with human rights say really don't care much about. Who cares what a dog is? Maybe the dog, dog doesn't have the same sort of mentality or whatever. But if you say no, at least animals like dogs can suffer, then you should at least consider them. But do you consider them as a full person or do you consider them as half a person? Like there's no obvious answer there.

So Singer himself gives. I'm sure we'll have an animal rights or something episode at some point way down the line if we go find it. Well then let's do it now. He at least argues in one of his essays, Animal Liberation, he had a whole book called that if they suffer we should consider them just as much as people. And likewise you should only consider people to extent that they seem to suffer, which requires, you know, some sort of self consciousness. Right. If you can anticipate pain, if you can anticipate your upcoming death, then you're gonna have more suffering.

So maybe there's an excuse there to maybe we could still eat animals because they don't know the difference. Or we could still, you know, keep my pet in the house. I don't have to give it as much freedom because eh, it doesn't know any better. It has certain limited mental capacities. But it does also follow from that that if you have a human being with limited mental capacities, for instance, one with less mentality than your average dog, then it should be as morally okay to for do scientific experiments on it in which it will suffer as it would be to do it on animals of comparable mentality.

So those are some pretty controversial stances that Singer takes from a utilitarian standpoint.

34:10 Seth: Well, and I think, you know, it should strike most people that that's just wrong. Yep, most people would say that. Yeah, that just doesn't seem right to me. If that is a consequence of the utilitarian calculus in this case, then I think most of us would say that there's something seriously wrong with that principle. I'm kind of struck by the fact, Mark, that you said earlier, we should probably look at a really simple case, because if it can't handle just even the most, you know, the simple cases, that it's not going to be able to handle the complicated cases.

And to some extent, Mill's text utilitarianism is really a defense of utilitarianism from a series of different attacks. And he's trying to address and respond to, I guess, sort of overtly stated and implied criticisms of the system from various people. And maybe it would make sense since we've just been objecting to either we should try to defend this thing by looking at some of these test cases and seeing if it makes sense to do it, or we should look at some of these objections and Mill's response to these objections.

35:12 Mark: I guess focusing on the calculation as Bentham gives it. Like I was saying, it looks like when he sets these things out that we're supposed to be able to come up with some sort of mathematical formula. But as it plays out in his own text, he doesn't do this. He lists these different types of pleasures, the pleasure of sense, the pleasure of wealth, skill. But he doesn't do ab comparisons. He doesn't do generalized. Oh, in general, the pleasures of sense are going to be inferior to the pleasures of skill, for instance. He just doesn't have that.

And I don't think it's just because, oh, there's so many different kinds of pleasures of sense and skill and we need to do this calculation individually. I think he's just abandoning that pseudo mathematical approach that maybe the way he's giving these individual factors that you should consider are really just to. Here are all the factors that you for sure don't want to leave any of these out when you're examining individual cases. It's not that we know exactly how to rate intensity versus certainty. Right. Those seem such different things. Right.

I could have an orgasm right now by myself, or I could go out in the town and try to get one from somebody else. It's much less certain, but it'll probably be way better. I'll probably be more intense. I mean, how do you. There seems no easy mathematical way to sort of settle that kind of question, even with something as basic as that.

36:23 Seth: Yeah, I feel like somehow in that example, and maybe in our discussion, we're kind of losing the sense of right and wrong.

36:30 Mark: Well, that's okay. We're just starting about if you can't measure these qualitative experiences, then considering specifically moral ones, that is ones that are Focusing on the maximum pleasure for the maximum people. You can't do those in mass either. The simplest cases are going to be these individual ones.

36:45 Seth: Yeah, but suppose that's not actually an example. So I understand what you're saying is if we can't say that one experience is according to all these principles better than the other, that's almost like it's looking at it in the abstract. It seems to me there has to be some measure of right or wrong or some measure of how the action will impact somebody else or some group of others before you can even start that discussion.

37:07 Mark: Well, how about I remember reading some sci fi book as a kid where it was a law in the military of this planet or whatever that everybody had to go, just like there's in their spaceships. They would go to the head, right? That's the toilet. They would also all go to the tail and have to have regular anonymous sex with somebody.

37:25 Seth: Okay.

37:26 Mark: And the idea was, oh well, people are going to be more relaxed. It's going to be a little weird at first. They might not be, you know, used to this, but once they get into the rhythm of it, it's just going to get that out of their system. And this is going to bring regular pleasure to everybody in these, you know, obviously in the experiences themselves. And then it's going free their minds from being repressed and thinking about it all the rest of the time. So, okay, let's decide on utilitarian grounds the maximum pleasure, should we have that policy or not?

And you could make a utilitarian argument for it, which I just did, or against it, which is, oh well, then there's not going to be special individual relationships which are going to be so much more fulfilling than these meaningless sexual things, or just that this is sinful and will destroy people's sensibility and they'll feel less and less and have less and less appreciation of their bodies or something like that. There's room for this argument, then you can just evaluate how legitimate those arguments are on either side.

38:18 Wes: The distinction between higher and lower pleasures, I think is the sort of weak point there.

38:23 Mark: Alright, well let's jump into that because. Right, that's something that Mill introduces. That's not in Bentham. So tell us about what Mill says about that.

38:30 Wes: Well, it's one way to get around the criticism that I made where the greatest happiness or pleasure for the greatest number might mean people being lazy and sitting around eating McDonald's all day and getting fat and doing things which are basically bad for them, but that are pleasurable and ignoring higher culture and not pursuing things which are initially painful. Like becoming a violinist where you. It takes a lot of discipline and it takes a lot of painful practice to reach that point. The idea is that. So in the case of the violinist, it's not just that quantitatively you're going to get more pleasure out of being a great violinist. It's that it's a qualitatively higher pleasure to be an excellent violinist than to be someone who's smoking crack all day and getting their pleasure that way.

39:19 Mark: Right. And you shouldn't actually use examples like eating McDonald's and smoking crack that are ultimately bad for your health. No, just imagine versions of those that are perfectly fine for your health. So maybe fine you get enough exercise or what people are subjected to in

39:32 Wes: watching TV all day.

39:34 Mark: Right. Even if you're on the StairMaster while you're watching TV, right.

39:38 Wes: Just to assume that you're.

39:39 Mark: That you'll ultimately. Consequences.

39:43 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. So Mill famously says that of course,

39:46 Mark: what are you watching on tv?

39:48 Wes: Socrates. Right. Being Socrates dissatisfied is better than being a pig. Satisfied. So there are higher and lower pleasures. And not just that, that sometimes being a different type of being, even if it's painful, is better than being this lower animal who is, let's say hypothetically, always pleased. I think that's a sort of add on to utilitarianism, which is really, if not essentially non utilitarian. It's close to it. It's a workaround that pushes the system to its limit.

40:19 Mark: Right. It's supposed to be based on what people actually desire. So who are the qualified judges? People who have experienced both sitting around and watching TV and playing the violin would judge playing the violin to be better, which I'm not sure I like that because it seems, well, maybe you just haven't sat around and watched TV enough to really see what's so awesome about it. Right. Heroin is supposed to be really awesome. And so I bet if you have somebody who's an experienced violinist and you give them enough heroin, they're going to choose the heroin. Right. So that means they're qualified judges. They know about the heroin, they know about the violin, they're choosing the heroin. For it to do what Mill wants him to do, he has to cook the books and with this sort of elitist preconception and just say, oh, yeah, that's what the competent judges choose.

41:03 Wes: Yeah.

41:03 Seth: Wait, let's distinguish two things here. One is the concept that there's an awareness, like part of the reason that the pig satisfied is not as good as Socrates. Dissatisfied is that Socrates theoretically has an awareness of all of the pleasures and pains of the pig, but the pig does not have an awareness of all the pleasures and pains of Socrates. Right? So that Socrates could be dissatisfied, but because his overall, let's call it, capacity for pain and pleasure is greater than the pigs, he might still have a much higher level of happiness than the pig, simply because he can encompass everything that the pig can experience, plus more.

But that also assumes that the pig's sense experience or whatever is identical to Socrates, that Socrates experiences things with his senses in exactly the same way that the pig does. And so even if you buy the first premise that by being aware you have a greater capacity for pleasure and pain by being a human being than a pig, you can still object to it by saying you just have no idea how intensely the pig's central experience works compared to yours, because you're actually a rational animal and you're dissociated from your senses, comparatively speaking, and all this.

42:14 Wes: Right, But I think for this example though, we have to assume that, I think the example is that we're choosing between two lives and we're treating those lives as completed, and we're thinking of living your entire life as Socrates and yet being essentially dissatisfied for the most part, or living your life as a pig and being satisfied all the time. To clarify the example further, he's thinking about dissatisfaction probably in terms of these sort of basic sensual pleasures, right? So Socrates is satisfied in a different sense. He's living the life of the mind, but he's running barefoot around Athens, he's not eating well necessarily, he doesn't live in a luxury villa, all those sorts of basic simple pleasures or luxuries that some people might think are most important.

So like the violinist, there's a be tremendously conflicted by, you know, even if you've made it and you're working in an orchestra and you get incredible joy out of being a great violinist, you could still think 90% of the time, God, what a pain in the ass this is, and what a pain in the ass practicing is. And you could easily forget sometimes why it is that you do this. And, and it's only those high moments where you're playing and you think, ah, yes, this is the greatest, this is a qualitatively different kind of pleasure, and all my sacrifices are worth it.

You know, it's only in that state where you get that comparison that he talks about where you've been to both places. But you know, that one is better. Well, I think often the case is once you leave that higher place, you forget for a long time and it's only when you get back there, let's say with the next concert, that you're reminded of them.

43:52 Mark: Or can we tie this back to our Aristotle discussion, which is, you know, the extremely awesome concert violinist is sort of this extreme personality who's to be really, really good, put his entire life into being excellent at this thing, versus someone who is well rounded, who maybe has taken some lessons, understands the joy of playing an instrument, but isn't striving for greatness in this way, but also does other things. And so really like Aristotle would clearly say that the person who is well balanced is going to be more happy. And that's what we should be encouraging if we're taking utilitarian tack in the populace as a whole and passing policies to allow. But that seems to go against. Again, this is the Nietzschean point you brought up against the conception of greatness, that maybe greatness somehow makes up for that.

44:41 Wes: Yeah, I think in the case of the violinist, or say the great artist, you see, he's trying to go from quantitative to qualitative of pleasure. He's trying to say, you know, it's not just the case that the greater quantity of pleasure when you're performing as a violinist, that that's greater than all the pain leading up to it. It's that it's qualitatively higher. But then what do you mean by qualitatively higher? Can it really just mean intensity? And because couldn't if it were intensity, couldn't you measure 10 moments of level 10 intensity pleasure versus 20 moments of level 7 intensity pleasure and come up with the former pig like pleasure being better ultimately.

So that qualitative really goes beyond it's additional dimension, qualitative, it's really more about what we think is more human or is higher. It really sort of elides into concept of intuitively what's more valuable. And I think that's the real problem with trying to work around all this by talking about quality of pleasure. It really is in danger of collapsing and simply saying, you know what? It's more human and it's more valuable, it's greater, it's better, it's more excellent, it's more virtuous to be the violinist than it is to be the TV watcher.

I don't know, I'm conflicted about this.

45:59 Mark: Well, here's another factor that seems to screw up the calculation which we've alluded to A couple times already is death. What if it's a painless death? That's not so bad. It's a painless death. So that seems like if you could give everyone a painless death, especially if you do some sort of calculation like the Buddhists do, that life is mostly suffering. Right. People are generally uncomfortable more often than they're comfortable. So therefore, if you're really cashing this out as pleasure versus pain, as Bentham seems to want to do, then, yeah, kill everybody in a painless way.

And even if you are more charitable to Bentham than that or don't follow that particular interpretation, you know, let's talk about happiness or benefit to the person. How much is someone's whole life worth as compared to these other pleasures? Right. So if it would make a thousand of us really, really happy to see David Hasselhoff clubbed to death, then should we do that?

46:56 Wes: Yes.

46:58 Seth: No.

46:58 Mark: Again, you could just deny that it will really make that much of a tab. But it seems for utilitarianism, if it gets somebody for. So, fine, not David Hasselhoff, Pol Pot, you know, your favorite horrible dictator. If it would make a million people because of the crimes he's committed, not because it's justice, but just because, you know, it would make a million people happy to torture this guy and kill him on tv, should we do that? Like, according to utilitarianism, it seems at some reasonable interpretation of the calculation. Yes, definitely do that.

47:29 Seth: Well, so you know how I hate limit case examples, which I consider this to be. But one of the things that's interesting about that is that in this particular instance, it is the very pain that is causing the pleasure for others.

47:42 Mark: Sure. Well, yeah, there's the torturing. But actually, the examples I'm trying to get at, like, there are all sorts of regular, everyday legislative things will have consequences for people's lives. So health care, for instance, the discussion going on right now, like, is it worth inconveniencing a lot of people with taxes or whatever? Oh, it'll probably save a few lives. Or like almost any law like that. Well, if you lower the speed limit to 35 everywhere on the highways, you're probably going to save some lives. But think of all the people who will be late. That was a Simpsons analysis of that.

48:20 Seth: That's actually a really good example.

48:22 Mark: It doesn't seem clear how to evaluate a life in this thing. And again, bringing it back to animal rights, it seems, of course, absurd to, you know, say animals should count as much as people, but because they suffer, it seems they should be considered somewhat. You shouldn't just torture a lot of animals for fun. And it's not because it would be bad for us, it would make us feel bad or something. No, it just seems like it's bad to torture animals because they hurt and that's not good. And it seems like a very utilitarian kind of intuition behind that.

But. So again, where does death fit into that? So according to Mill, Mill did think, unlike Peter Singer, that it was okay to eat meat. Just don't be mean to the meat. If you have ethical free range chickens or whatever and give them some relative comfort, don't have veal, then killing them off and eating them should be just fine. Because the thing that's bad is suffering. And humans have much greater capacity for suffering, which again includes anticipation of death, fear of death, than animals who just don't know what the hell's going on.

49:22 Wes: Yeah. And then the suffering of the loved ones, of the people who have lost a loved one.

49:26 Mark: Yep.

49:27 Wes: Chickens don't suffer when their sisters die.

49:30 Mark: Oh, we're gonna get letters about that.

49:34 Wes: I saw a.

49:35 Mark: Let's just say if you're sneaky about it, then they don't mind if you're sneaky about it.

49:40 Wes: I had a anecdote about that. I had a mouse problem my last apartment. At first I was really didn't want to hurt the mice and I was dealing with trapping them live. I got trapped, trapped them live, and I was gonna release them. And then I read it was illegal, first of all, you had to take them far enough away, but that transporting them was illegal and so on and so forth. And I thought I was just going to tolerate them. And then, you know, it got to the point where I couldn't tolerate them. So I was using other traps and they were working and realized I was going to have to go to glue traps.

50:10 Mark: Oh, which are the worst?

50:11 Wes: Yeah. Really nasty and causes a lot of suffering. And I was really huge ethical dilemma. And I was looking at websites about what glue traps do and how much suffering they cause. And. And I remember this one post from this one guy who's like, mice can't suffer. They don't even know. I have this one mouse caught in a glue trap and his brothers are climbing all over him and they don't even know that, blah, blah, blah.

50:37 Mark: So you decided glue traps are okay because of that?

50:39 Wes: Well, I tried it and then after seeing the consequences, I quickly abandoned that. That was very, very horrifying.

50:47 Mark: You know, I actually had a live trap, but it was such Like a long lasting but low intensity mouse problem that several months later I noticed that there is a mouse that has completely molded away inside the live stretch trap. Just vile. This is a good way to move to defenses of utilitarianism as opposed to some other kind of ethic. Bentham and Mill think that utility is grounded in our intuitions, that the way we justify our actions really does refer to utility, that this is not supposed to be something that these people are imposing upon our intuitions. This is ultimately what drives us, what motivates us. Right. Bentham says pain and pleasure are our masters. Everything we do really comes down to them. You know, in some abstract sense, if not more concrete, but yet obviously some intuitions seem to go against it.

51:36 Seth: Mill, in a lot of ways made me think of Aristotle again. That Mill's conception of utilitarianism is so tied to the idea of being a social animal, having a natural sentiment to be in unity with others, and a conscience, and that if you cultivate those correctly, people will naturally do the right thing. In essence, utilitarianism in Mill's conception just turned out to be kind of a rehash of, to some extent, of Aristotle's discussion of virtue, which we covered in an earlier podcast. And again, I was kind of like, okay, so how is having a name for something if you can't do the calculus and you have issues with the concept of determining right or wrong based on pleasure and pain, simply because it's difficult to figure out intensity, duration, propinquity, and all these other things.

And if ultimately what you're saying is that people are naturally social beings that have a conscience and that that conscience sort of makes them want to do the right thing, or at least makes them suffer from the consequences of doing the wrong thing or have some sense of right or wrong or whatever. And that if we train people well enough using the principle of utility, we'll create good citizens who do the right thing and we'll create good laws that increase the overall greatest happiness. You know, I'm kind of thinking, well, that's kind of hollow.

There's really not much there that isn't already covered by other theories or systems or ideas about morality and ethics and so forth.

53:07 Mark: It seems like these guys want to root what constitutes your own happiness, which is the way you figure out, by abstraction, sort of what happiness might be to other people. According to this, that, you know, Bentham says very explicitly, this is boils down to pain and pleasure, things that we experience right now. So yes, a good upbringing is required to Give us the habit of imagining this of other people and trying to do things not just to benefit ourselves, but to benefit everybody. That's where the conscience comes in. But what needs to drive the conscience in purpose, what really identifies what's going to be a good act, what's going to be virtuous?

In other words, bringing pleasure is something that's basic and innate in a much more immediate way than it seems like it was for Aristotle. Even though Aristotle did seem to think, like Plato, that virtue is its own reward. If you're strong and brave and it's going to work out better for you, it still seems more abstract than pain and pleasure.

54:01 Wes: But for Aristotle, it's for you, the individual. It's not for the greatest number. Right, but that's conceivably you could start with human being. And the pleasure of the masses could be absolutely antithetical to your well being and your greatness. And that's Nietzsche's sort of post Aristotelian thesis, which is that this utilitarian society is poisonous to great men and to artists, for instance, and that the lives of those great men in fact outweighs the happiness of the collective.

54:33 Mark: It's not even moral thinking to think it's bad to have, you know, rocks fall on your house, or for you to get sick or for this to happen to your family. You know, that's just obvious. You don't need morality to come up with that. And that's the kind of obvious basis that Bentham in particular wants to give to morality. And that what morality is beyond that is just expanding that to make it responsibility for other people as well as yourself, realizing that these things are bad for other people too. And morality is not just serving yourself, it's for serving everybody.

55:01 Wes: I mean, is that we know that

55:02 Mark: is obvious for you guys, it's an

55:04 Wes: illegitimate move because it's. And this you see in the Peter Singer argument, which he claims not to be an entirely utilitarian argument, but it is because he goes from, you know, I begin with the assumption that suffering and death are bad, and then you're supposed to be able to derive something from that. But no, the principle is they're bad for me. That's the principle that we accept, and yes, we altruistically accept that they're bad for other people as well, but we certainly don't weigh them as just as bad for others as they are for me and my family and my loved ones. So that basic intuition I think most people in fact reject. Of course he leaves it out because it's convenient for his argument to sort of conflate this abstract idea of these things being bad without acknowledging the fact that you can't move from the individual to the collective.

55:53 Mark: I guess that seems the point of these guys. And I guess I agree that you might as well. That's the overall, overall idea of morality. If you believe in morality at all, as you know, an objective should, it is the universalization. Now again, how the universalization takes place. Do I actually have an equal duty to my wife that I do to, you know, somebody around the world? That's to be worked out in the details. That's not at all obvious in the way that the utilitarian seems to think, right, that everybody's happiness counts equally across the board. Even if I've made commitments to certain people and I haven't to other people, or even I might have more commitments to people just living closer to me than people far away. That's all to be worked out. But just the fact that pure selfishness is not the good seems to be. That's the definition of morality in the first place.

56:36 Wes: Well, not for Aristotle, right?

56:38 Mark: He doesn't have a. These guys don't have a conception of morality. They have conceptions of virtue which, you know, you can have any, you know, old conception of virtue. I think that the most virtuous kind of people are blond and blue eyed. Those are the best kind of people. There's nothing.

56:56 Wes: But these are still. There's nothing referring to moral in there. I think these are all still conceptions of the good life, right? These are conceptions of the best way to live.

57:06 Mark: I actually agree with Nietzsche. It's hard to talk about ethics without talking about metaethics. In other words, if you're going to argue about what is morally correct, shouldn't you argue first about does the term morally correct even make sense? Is there an objective moral correctness? All that stuff, you know, when I've taught ethics before, we try to put that away, that even if, you know, you have more of a Nietzschean post moral view or something, we can still argue about what do our intuitions. If something was objectively morally correct, what would it be?

And so that's the game I'm playing here and trying to throw some of these intuitions aside. I guess I agree with the fundamental intuition of these guys that it's abstracting from my good to the good of everybody, that that's the moral leap. And you might ask, well, what justifies that? There's nothing that motivates that in me. Well, no, that's why you need normativity again, if you need normativity at all. Maybe that's just a stupid concept. You know, as Wittgenstein might say, it's. Since it's beyond a descriptive term about how people actually act, it's how people ought to act.

You know, this principle over and above how things are described. Maybe it's just meaningless, maybe it's silly to talk about, but given the history of talking about normativity, sure, let's indulge in that kind of talk. It seems a reasonable stab at what morality is. This universalization of, at least in broad strokes, what is good for me and those that I immediately know and care about to what is good for everybody. And actually caring about what is good for everybody and thinking you should do what is in some sense good for everybody. Can you think of any non Nietzschean.

Any non Nietzschean objections to that?

58:35 Wes: I guess this.

58:36 Mark: Not sure if a Kantian objection would work.

58:39 Wes: Well, this is a Nietzsche objection, but you needn't mention Nietzsche. I mean, take Peter Singer's argument where, you know what if we are all spending all our time trying to make sure that other people aren't starving, how do we measure, for instance, if Hemingway just joined the Peace Corps and did nothing but that.

58:57 Mark: Can you just lay out a little more what the Singer argument is if you're going to bash it right now?

59:01 Wes: Well, the basic steps of the argument that suffering is bad and we have the power to prevent something bad from happening without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, then we ought to do it. What if that meant turning everyone into the Mill's fool or pig, where we're all basically have all our basic needs met. But you sacrifice art and architecture and all these higher things. Is that worth it? Even if that counts as maximization for the collective? Is that what we think the good is?

59:33 Mark: Well, what he actually says. What he actually says isn't anything like that. He just says, even if you take a step in that direction, and I guess I agree that we should. All right, this is an argument. Specifically, the part that you didn't give was the circumstance. He's saying, look, people are starving elsewhere in the world, and we as individuals and as a rich nation can do things to address that and really can eliminate. He thinks again, maybe this is sort of a mathematical calculation, but he seems to think that we could eliminate the worst forms of poverty on the planet, this malnutrition and starvation and terrible, easily preventable diseases by taking some.

I don't know if they're modest steps, but steps that are within our power without destroying ourselves, without getting rid of art, without everybody joining the Peace Corps and not becoming artists. That certainly there are a lot of things we do that are very self indulgent as individuals and as a nation that we could decide to value saving people's lives more than those things. And he thinks that's a good idea. You're really gonna say that's a just a ridiculous argument?

1:00:45 Wes: You think I'm gonna give up my fucking hummer? My hummer for some also, I guess I'm thinking a lot about Singer's other writings and the way he lives his life. You know, he lives at just above poverty level because he's written elsewhere that you don't want to make too much sacrifice, right? You're not going to be able not to feed your kids, but you know, you're going to live pretty meagerly. And maybe that, you know, I mean, what is moral here? These are arbitrary intuitions about morality, ultimately. And that's the problem. There's no derivation. And there's no derivation in Mill. And I think that maybe the pretense of a derivation is what bothers me.

1:01:22 Mark: Let's talk about these bases. So we already talked a little about in Bentham. He just seems to think there are only a couple kinds of available morality. One of them is utilitarian morality, which is just obvious. It's just given by our experience of pain and pleasure and universalizing that. And the contrast to that are asceticism, which hates pleasure and loves pain. You might think, oh, it's more noble to not indulge yourself, to withhold pleasure from yourself. But clearly you don't think that pain is good and pleasure is bad, otherwise you would wish those on other people too.

And he says even ascetics are not that obnoxious. Like people who like to whip themselves Saint Francis of Assisi and show how holy they are. They don't create governmental systems that involve whipping everybody for their own good. Maybe in goofy sci fi movies they do that, but not in real life ascetics. So that just proves that you don't really think that pain is good, otherwise you would wish it for everybody else too.

1:02:17 Wes: Of course, if you're Mill, you might just think of that as a higher sort of pleasure or as a pain leading to a higher sort of pleasure,

1:02:26 Mark: or this sympathy antipathy, which we didn't define. He's saying this is really the same as intuitionism. And it's. We just have opinions about what is good and bad. That are unsupported. There are people that we're mad at and we hate and we think should be punished, and there are people that we, you know, think are awesome and. And should be rewarded. And it's just this irrational. So he has this very uncharitable interpretation of every other kind of morality. And so of course you should pursue utilitarianism because that's the only sensible one that's left.

1:02:55 Seth: The one good argument I saw. So, you know, I think the first thing is, of course, people get kind of hung up on the words pain and pleasure, and it has a tendency to distract from this ideas of the greatest happiness principle. And typically utilitarianism, or at least what are the different flavors? There's act utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism, and a few other different flavors. But typically utilitarianism is classified as something called consequentialism or a type of consequentialism, which is to say an action is right or wrong based on the consequences or outcomes that it engenders or that it has versus being right or wrong, sort of in itself or in its set of circumstances.

1:03:36 Mark: Going into this, yes, I'd heard the description because it seems consequentialism is obviously absurd because that means a single act. I thought I was doing the right thing, but it turns out the consequences were bad. So that act ended up being immoral. But if I did that very same thing and the consequences ended up being good, that would mean it was a moral act. That's what it sounds like consequentialism implies. But when you actually look at Bentham and Mill's analyses of these, like, Bentham is concerned how judges should judge particular actions that people take.

And he really takes into account what people think is going to happen. So it's not what actually happens, it's what we are reasonably able to predict is going to happen. So you don't really say that the morality of an action changes based on the outcome. You should choose an action based on the outcomes you can foresee. Insofar as you can foresee them. Yes. After the fact, you can say it would have been better had you chosen something else. It would have produced a better consequence. But that's not the same as saying you were morally wrong to do what you did.

So this kind of consequentialism is not as silly as its critics make it sound.

1:04:36 Seth: Yeah. And of course, the unnamed figure in that alternative theory is Kant. So typically there's sort of Kantians on the one side, and I believe if I remember correctly, the name was deontologists or deontology, which is, there's a way to determine if an act is right or wrong without reference to the consequences. And then you have consequentialism or consequences in utilitarianism. So Mill actually mentions Kant in the early part of the Utilitarianism essay, where he says, I cannot help referring for illustration to a systematic treatise by one of the most illustrious of them, meaning these other folks, the metaphysics of ethics by Kant.

This remarkable man whose system of thought will long remain one of the landmarks in the history of philosophical speculation, does in the treatise in question lay down a universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation. It is this so act that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings. In other words, you would determine if your act is right, if you would will, that everybody else in the world, always who is in your situation, should do exactly as you do. But when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails almost grotesquely to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical impossibility in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct.

All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur. Which Mill then is kind of saying, see, Kant is really a consequentialist. He's really a utilitarian. Because what he's saying is, first you have to figure out that the act is the right act, and then you will that it be adopted by everybody. That you can't just will that everybody do what you do if what you're doing is wrong. So Mill is basically using that as a criticism to say, you kind of have to know whether you're right or wrong before you can act in the way that Kant wants you to act.

And he goes on and uses these examples, like medical arts or medicine is considered good if it produces health. You can't prove that health is good per se. I mean, you can say it, and it seems pretty obvious to everybody, but you can't actually prove that health is good, so to speak.

1:06:52 Wes: I think the basic dilemma here is. So we want to go one level further, right? We want to go from this brood, okay, ought to do this. This is duty. We want to say, okay, there's one level, there's one stratum below that, which explains it. But, you know, how satisfying is it? Because when you get to the stratum below that, isn't it just as arbitrary? And so doesn't Kant have a point if he wants to stick to the odd and say it's really irreducible?

1:07:17 Mark: Well, with Kant in particular, and I think with these other things as well, he seems to think that they're not clear enough to give you verdicts on every single case. So this is the kind of stuff we'll talk about next time we're going to talk about Kant's morality. But, you know, so on one interpretation of the categorical imperative, just to give an example, so you're in a war and your commanding officer orders you to kill somebody. So one interpretation of the categorical imperative says you shouldn't kill ever, because if everybody killed, then we would all be dead.

The other interpretation of the categorical imperative analyzes the you're in an army part. Well, if everybody in an army refused to obey orders, there would be no army. You couldn't be in this situation. So right there, how do you decide between those two? Mill is going to say, well, you have to look at utility. You have to look at, in this particular circumstance, what's going to be the benefit. Right. So if it's part of a regular wartime activity and you're going and you're accomplishing the mission, then, yeah, you do what your officer says.

That's what the army is about. But if your officer is saying, kill all the women and children in the village, we must destroy the village to save it, maybe you shouldn't do that. Like that's, in effect an appeal to utility is what Mill is going to say to interpret the categorical imperative or any other thing. He specifically, in his last chapter, talks about the dictates of justice, that we have this notion of justice or fairness. And I liked his example about taxation, which we see all the time like people pay for the flat tax. Oh, what's fair in taxation is everybody pays the same amount regardless of what you have.

1:08:46 Wes: Or.

1:08:46 Mark: No, no, what's fair is everybody pays the same percentage of their income. Then it's graduated. People who have more can pay more, but it's the same percentage. Well, what we have now is not even that. Right. The people that are richer pay far more because that's, you know, they just have more. They can afford more. So there's these three different interpretations of fairness and which one we pick ultimately, Mill would at least say comes down to analysis of utility. So it's not arbitrary. It comes down to pleasure and pain and what's going to bring the most Benefit to the most people.

1:09:12 Wes: Yeah, but that's just a way of rephrasing the ought to. Right. You can say descriptively that's a consequence. In other words, I think the more telling criticism is that at some point you lose the idea of morality. Or you could just say, ultimately, he's just saying we ought to act in this way. We ought to do what maximizes utilities. You don't get any further in this analysis. Right.

1:09:34 Mark: Well, he does say that it is in some sense basic that. Just the stuff Bentham appeals to, the fact that, again, we like pleasure and we don't like pain, so therefore we understand good and evil. If we just understand that you're not the only one that's important in the world. Those two things together being bad pleasure,

1:09:49 Wes: good problems of calculating higher pleasures and lower pleasures and tremendous divergences between what people value and pleasure and all those sorts of things. And you avoid that. I'm not arguing for. I'm just trying to.

1:10:02 Mark: Yeah.

1:10:03 Wes: To give the deontological object. I'm not a deontologist myself, but I do see that there's a real problem trying to reduce ought to something else because you just reintroduce the term ought into your system.

1:10:16 Mark: That's a metaethical jump. And we should sometime read like some GE Moore or somebody like that who objects to this. So these utilitarians are all naturalists. Right. They don't think that ought is a basic term. They think that it can be cashed out in terms of descriptive terms, in terms of things, that we could look at the world and say, look, there's pain there. Look, there are a lot of people in pain there. And then the way the odd actually gets in there is not because then externally God comes down to us and says, you ought to care about that pain. You ought to try to prevent that.

1:10:49 Wes: It's just that people do.

1:10:51 Mark: People do. Yes. It's that we have built in desires and that's where morality comes from.

1:10:56 Wes: Is that what Moore calls the naturalistic fallacy.

1:10:58 Mark: Yes. Yes. And it is true, as a matter of logic, you can't state a bunch of descriptive claims. There is pain going on there. A lot of people are in pain and have it deductively follow that that's bad. Right. You can't get an ought from an is, you just can't. But so all these ethical philosophers, if they care about that, maybe they don't. Maybe they just said ought is fundamental. But if they try to reduce it in that way, they have to somehow get the ought into their system. And so Mill explicitly says, if we want to say something is desirable, the only way we know that is people actually desire it.

So it's like you were saying about how do we know the higher pleasures from the lower pleas? People who are familiar with both like the higher pleasures best. That really holds for the whole system. What makes something a pleasure at all is people feel it as a pleasure. People point at it and say, that's what I want to do.

1:11:46 Wes: Let me just quote from Moore here and his direct objection to Mill. The fact is that desirable does not mean able to be desired as visible means able to be seen. The desirable means simply what ought to be desired or deserves to be desired, just as the detestable means not what can be, but what ought to be detested. It's the naturalistic fallacy. So you can't look around and say that this is what people do and this is the way they behave and conclude that there's any moral implication to that. I mean, I know you've already outlined this, Mark, but I'm just rehashing that objection. But just to move to that word desirable, because it sneaks in. That ought sneaks into the word desirable. And we have to make sure that we don't elide that in order to get from is to ought.

1:12:32 Mark: It seems like we've covered most of it. Is there anything we've left out? We didn't talk politically?

1:12:37 Seth: Yeah, I mean, there is the talk of justice and kind of how the principle of utility relates to justice.

1:12:44 Mark: Should we read a quote or something specifically on that?

1:12:47 Seth: Sure, I will read something. Justice implies something which it is not only right to do and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his moral right. No one has a moral right to our generosity or beneficence because we are not morally bound to practice those virtues towards any given individual wherever there is right. The case is one of justice and not the virtue of beneficence. And whoever does not place the distinction between justice and morality in general, where we have now placed it will be found to make no distinction between them at all, but to merge all morality and justice.

This is also referred to at other places in the text as perfect and imperfect obligation. But essentially he was trying to not collapse the concept of justice down into the principle of utility and point out sort of why the principle of utility is useful and has more going on with it than just they're trying to outline a version of justice. So if you didn't quite catch what that means, basically if your neighbor is ill and you are out mowing your yard, and as a favor to them, just because they're sick, you mow their yard too. That is not justice, that's beneficence.

You don't have to do that, and nobody would expect you to do it. It's just a nice thing to do. And it's nice because it raises the overall utility by making that person happy. And presumably it doesn't put you out very much. And you might actually get some satisfaction out of it yourself. You might feel good about having done something for somebody else. But in terms of respecting, let's say, your neighbor's privacy, so not peeking in their window or not blaring loud music at five o' clock in the morning or whatever, these are things that you're sort of required by law to do.

They have a right to ask you not to play loud music or not to look in their windows, whereas they don't have a right to ask you to mow their lawn. And that's sort of the difference between what's just and what's just morally right without being additionally just now, the move

1:14:47 Mark: from Bentham to Mill here that I thought was pretty interesting is Bentham, you know, really wants us to get back to this basic principle and look at these laws we make and the individual judgments we're making as judges in criminal cases, back to this utilitarian principle. Whereas Mill specifically says, yeah, that's the primary principle behind everything. But we understand it's very hard to figure out in a lot of individual circumstances how to apply that. So there are all sorts of secondary moral rules. And so he has this whole chapter on justice in the importance we put on justice as a good, as opposed to many other goods, is just because we found time and time again, these are such important things to protect.

So in other words, we can pay attention to the dictates of justice and a lot of other secondary rules like this that we've determined over time have utilitarian value as long as we can ultimately justify them in terms of the basic utilitarian principle, which, like you're saying it does water it down, it seems like you could maybe give a utilitarian support for almost the entire status quo. Certainly, unless something is just blatantly bad. Like, can you imagine a utilitarian defense of slavery given by somebody in the time period of Mill that, oh, well, these inferior people have to be kept in line, and it's actually better for them to be treated like pets to get around it?

1:15:58 Wes: I guess you either have to revert to what I think is this deontological thing where you have to treat people as ends and there's an absolute value to the suffering of that. You know, like the death of one person has an absolute value that eclipses the small increase in happiness of the other 6 billion people. Or you have to say, well, you know, empirically it's just not the case that most people are going to get off on. But empirically, that's not obvious.

1:16:25 Mark: Yeah, gladiatorial games. Enough people would find those amusing. So that if a few people suffer and die and let's say we even, like, have people volunteer to go in this, we let people who are fucked up enough and want to risk their life, you know, fighting somebody else to the death, because that would be really cool if they weren't.

1:16:42 Wes: And it's a famous objection of the obliging stranger who wants you to bake him in an oven, and you want to bake him in an oven. And it's all. Something similar actually happened recently where there's that cannibal put out a classified ad for someone who wanted to be eaten. Then they had all these emails back and forth and they were fantasizing about it, and then they made it happen. Pain is pleasure.

1:17:06 Mark: So utilitarianism says these things are okay, but yet our intuitions say they are not right. That's what's wrong with utilitarian.

1:17:12 Wes: Have responses, don't they, to all this stuff? I don't know. What's the objection to the obliging stranger?

1:17:18 Mark: Well, what's the response? You can see what Mill's response would be, which is a rule utilitarian move. That we just don't want people in general doing this. That even if somebody says, do these terrible things to me, we just know from empirical experience that that person is probably not in their right mind. That if that person could step back from their particular insanity that they're in right now and evaluate the possible courses of action for themselves, this is not what they would choose.

1:17:42 Wes: Yeah.

1:17:42 Mark: Which you got to think is probably true most of the time. Like, if you really, you know, get somebody who's like a drug addict and says, I just love drugs. I just want to take more and more heroin. I just, you know, eventually that person will hit bottom or, you know, will be in a position that they can reflect and say, wow, I was really messed up then. I can't believe that that's what I wanted. Now I found Jesus and I, well,

1:18:01 Wes: yeah, what if the whole society's messed up. I mean, again, you get into that problem of higher and lower pleasures where I think the whole thing starts falling apart. Arguably it's not even pleasure that human beings strive for. People are driven by lots of other things. I mean, look at all the pain that people cause themselves. So that's empirical. If you were to describe what people actually do to each other and themselves, I don't think you would come out with maximization of pleasure.

1:18:31 Mark: Isn't it an argument very similar to. So we haven't read any Plato ethics yet, but Plato's fundamental thing going back is people always strive for the good insofar that they can recognize it and understand it. It's just that so much of the time they don't. And so if you're going to give an analysis of the way people actually treat each other in this way, it's because, you know, they just don't see that there are any better possibilities. They don't see a clear solution for increasing their happiness long term. We have problems with ourselves psychologically. We don't understand ourselves. If we did understand ourselves, there's no way we would do these horrible things. At least it looks like an empirical argument.

1:19:11 Wes: The thing is, in that situation you can say, yeah, if we understood ourselves better, then we would know what the good was. But that implies that we can't just descriptively or empirically get at the good. So then how do we know what the good is then? We certainly don't know it in the way that Mill says we know it. If people really are that fucked up around the world and they're all doing crazy things against their own interests, and if they just knew, well then how do you know? So again, you get away from this idea that you can just find out what people ought to do by looking at what they're doing.

1:19:46 Mark: Do you have that bleak of you of human behavior and self consciousness? I think that for instance, young people or people who are immature are very regularly self destructive. But when they sort of have been around the block a couple times and try to figure out what they want out of life to the extent that they haven't been so ground down by the shitty options that they see in front of them and frustration that, you know, people generally try to keep above water and have a happy family and do the right thing as they perceive it.

1:20:17 Wes: But again, you're giving an all things being equal argument where you're not deriving the do the right thing from what actually occurs. You're saying that if there are the

1:20:25 Seth: right circumstances, circumstances, well and you know, Mill, it does spend a long time responding to all these criticisms and objections. And again, I think that in doing so, he basically waters it down so much and talk, you know, basically, like, people just know this. It just makes sense. It'd be silly to think otherwise. You know, like, you have to take certain things for granted. There are certain cultural norms and stuff that you just have to assume and, you know, that kind of a thing. Again, you get to the point where it's like, well, what meat is there really on this bone?

It just comes down to that principle itself. Either you agree that this is a good way to measure right and wrong action, or you don't, and that if you adopt it, then you can do a bunch of common sense sort of things and say, oh, what a great useful ethical system or ethical principle this is. And if you don't, well, you could still go and do very, very nice things using a different principle. And it's no harm, no foul.

1:21:18 Mark: You're supposed to be able, these folks think, you know, refer to the principle to resolve tricky issues. So maybe we should consider some tricky issues or some major holes in the argument that make it hard to consider tricky issues. We're talking about Seth, not Seth.

1:21:33 Seth: Theft.

1:21:34 Mark: We're talking about theft.

1:21:35 Wes: Talking about Seth.

1:21:37 Mark: Theft. So a lot of people justify theft, like, well, of course, if you steal, if you steal some little kid's bike, that's going to make them very sad or steal someone's wallet. It's really gonna inconvenience them highly. Probably more so than it would help you. But what if you're stealing from a big corporation? They can barely feel it. There's a lot of utilitarian sounding, even though it's, you know, obviously Mill is not gonna go along with this, but this is the way that it plays into our popular culture. If it doesn't hurt anybody personally, then it seems to be okay.

And this goes to an extreme in truly victimless crimes. Should you just always obey the law just because it's the law, or should you pay attention? You know, so if it's stupid for the speed limit to be this low in this area, is it okay to speed anyway? Or brought up downloading music illegally in particular? Yeah, that. Or before that, you know, copying CDs or copying whatever. I mean, you can say you are depriving this artist of this money in the studio of this money that they would have if you bought it. But at least in the case of me, I am such a music junkie, you know, it's the same with like, getting things out of the library as opposed to buying books or whatever, that I don't stop buying things because I'm downloading things.

Like, in fact, it will probably drive me to spend more money on this person that's just me personally. Some people do it in such a way that they will just purely just never pay for music. But even me, once I open that as a defense, then I'm sure there are some circumstances where somebody would have gotten some money out of me that because I can copy stuff out of the library or download or whatever, that I just take that route instead. And I might have actually spent money on them. Though in general, my desire for entertainment so far, outreaches anyone's financial means.

It's almost like research. So it's kind of like using the library, indulging in these kind of things.

1:23:25 Wes: Yeah.

1:23:25 Mark: Is that a good example of utilitarian logic and perhaps the pitfalls of it at work, or is that just a bad interpretation of utilitarianism?

1:23:34 Seth: No, I think it's okay. I mean, I think the key is that the calculation in a utilitarian model has to somehow end up with the pain and pleasure of human beings and individuals. So you'd somehow have to say that if you download a song and you don't pay for it, the issue is that you're ultimately hurting the artist. Like, you have to be able to trace it back. Or somehow, because of your actions, you're going to make it harder for other people to do X, Y, and Z. And it gets more complicated to do it. I'm just saying the system is so focused on individual human experience.

I mean, it ultimately comes down to some other person that's right across the aisle from you. That's really the only way to think. Think about it that it gets really complicated when you think about governments and institutions and the environment. Like, okay, if you throw trash out of your car while you're on the highway, you know, in the grand scheme of things, who does that really hurt? Like, how bad is that? You got to go through some convoluted reasoning. You know, it's just like that.

1:24:32 Wes: That's one of the few areas where I become ethical.

1:24:36 Mark: Well, I throw car batteries, you know, out of my window into the lake. I'm just. I'm just kidding.

1:24:41 Seth: No, I know, but I'm just saying that it's like you really have to put all the pieces together. And I think it might have been that Singer article where it's like, well, if I throw just a cup, I mean. Yeah, you Know, it's kind of ugly, but it doesn't really in the grand scheme of things. But if everybody throws a cup, it's like, well, everybody's not going to throw a cup. It just, you know, you're kind of like, blah, blah.

1:25:01 Wes: So making you get caught up winding around in it for oneself. Well, you do the same with the music thing. It's like, well, I don't have the money. Other people do. I'm not gonna spend or software, you know, I'm not gonna spend hundreds of dollars or thousands even on this overpriced Microsoft monopoly software. And so I'm just gonna download it. You know, you can make up narratives about how they're corrupt and they're, you know, they have billions of dollars and so on and so forth. I guess it's easier with some software than it is for music.

1:25:32 Seth: No, that's actually a good point. I mean, you could argue that the utility of charging high margins on that there should be a cap on how much margin somebody can make on a product.

1:25:42 Wes: But I think what's interesting here is that often I'm acting like a utilitarian. I guess when I'm not acting like an anarchist or something, I'm making these sort of utilitarian arguments to myself, like, Microsoft has enough and is that utilitarian? I'm not. But on the other hand, I grew up in a family where for most of my life you would never have reached that point. My family would have reacted with horror to. They just would have said it's the right thing to pay for it. And you wouldn't even think, you wouldn't think about whether or not Microsoft is corrupt or this or that.

It's just a matter of honor and duty and things like that. So it's interesting, I've gone from that early sort of. So I understand that sort of ethics of obligation and pure right and wrong. But I've gone to the other end of that, which I think is a sort of utilitarianism. And I think that's what Kant worries about. You sort of slippery slope to justifying any sort of behavior, right?

1:26:38 Mark: That once you get in a habit going back to Aristotle, right? Habits being so important that you are judging whether you're going to steal something or obey rules in general or tell the truth. If you're judging individual circumstances and saying, well, like for instance, lying, should I lie in this particular circumstance, or not doing some sort of utility calculation, that means you're not in the habit of just telling the truth all the time. And if you are in the habit of just telling the truth all the time. The rule utilitarianism mill would say you're going to produce more happiness overall than if you're going to do this individual calculation every time.

Because it just once you start, you know, most of the time if I'm downloading stuff, that means that I've already spent a lot of money on these people or I'm going to spend more money on these people. But once you're in that habit, it's not going to hold every case. Like you're not going to then stop. Like when CD burners just started, I started with a. I will only copy jazz from people because it's just something that I wasn't spending money on and I wouldn't spend money on. And there's too many jazz things out there. Like I copied some Miles Davis.

There's always more Miles Davis to purchase, so. And then I would, you know, buy some of the bigger stuff. And plus he's dead anyway, so, you know, it's not like it's hurting him. But that particular rule didn't last all that long.

1:27:46 Wes: But also this, you know, I notice, I buy, you know, I download and I buy. But the business models have gotten a lot better. It becomes a lot easier and affordable. You don't have to buy the whole album. You buy a song on iTunes for 99 cents, it's instant gratification. You can do it on your iPhone or on your computer. The hassle of trying to go find it bootleg just becomes more effort than just paying the money. I don't know if that's relevant to.

1:28:12 Mark: Well, it does in terms of calculation or not. I mean, it does in terms of how we actually calculate these things. Like you, you know, I've bought more stuff on itunes or I've discovered looking for used stuff on Amazon that I can find almost any CD that I'm interested in probably for four bucks used right by some third party vendor off of Amazon and order it that way and get in a couple days. And like there's a lot of legal means of getting something that aren't producing any more benefits. So the library being one and like used things another that aren't benefiting the artist.

It seems silly to obey the letter of the law when the law seems so arbitrary. There's an artist I really like, I will buy all this stuff new when it comes out and I will pay for it. And it's the same, you know, with books or whatever. If I don't care that much about it maybe I'll just get them all from the library, but the ones that I actually will revere enough to plunk out money for hardcover books or CDs when they come out are very small compared to the number of things I'm actually interested in listening to or reading.

1:29:08 Wes: The thing is though, if you were in a very, very wealthy friend's house and you saw certain very valuable items lying around, I think we'd be much more reluctant simply to pick them up. Even though it's the same sort of utilitarian calculation there, I think. And so this is where I get to. And I think in a lot of these decisions it's not about duty, but it's not about utility either. And it's very, very specific to the situation. You know, whether or not it's like a rule about lying per se doesn't make any sense to me. There's a lot of truth telling that could do a tremendous amount of damage people.

But then even beyond considering damage, like if I thought a lie to a certain person who's close to me were neutral, in a sense, I still might feel that gut feeling of this isn't the type of relationship that I want to have with this person where there's a lie involved or this isn't the type of person I want to be in this particular situation. So I think they're more fundamental, just simply intuition, very circumstance dependent intuitions that are moral decisions which go beyond utilitarianism. No.

1:30:16 Mark: What do you think, Seth? Are these specific examples boring you or do you have any more specifics to add?

1:30:22 Seth: I guess it's just not really my sphere, you know, it took me your sphere. So I, you know, I didn't get an ipod until they'd been out for three years and I never have done, done BitTorrent or downloaded anything. I'm not saying I'm a rule follower. I'm just lazy. Like I just pay for things because I can and it's just easier that way. But you know, I don't think of those sorts of things as moral transactions. The idea of borrowing a CD from a friend and listening to it or copying it to listen to and then if I like it, buying it from it. I guess this whole concept or the utilitarian calculus wouldn't help me really deal with that issue.

And I think maybe this is where the question of proximity comes from into play and so forth. Part of the difficulty of understanding how you could have a moral obligation towards an institution or an economic system of some sort or a transaction is Understanding how the principles on the other side of that transaction, of that institution work. And it's so far removed that it's like not even practical to think about. You can think about it in abstract terms, but you can't really know. Utilitarianism seems to be something that's really focused on your individual interactions with other people.

It's really like a community morality.

1:31:34 Mark: Even though according to Peter Singer, our utilitarian. It is looking like that, that actually violates the spirit of utilitarianism. Because if we're supposed to treat everybody equally, then pretty much anybody you interact with is way less needy than people halfway across the world. So like all your little should I buy the CD or should I download it? Are completely frickin irrelevant versus the damage that you know, really you should download the CD and then use that money to pay for famine relief. That would bring the most happiness for all concerned.

1:32:03 Seth: It's clear that that's what he's saying. I just, I cannot buy into that in any way, shape or form.

1:32:08 Mark: So you don't think that you could be doing wrong. So he specifically says that people normally distinguish charity from duty, right? Charity are things that are nice to do, whereas duty are things that you have to do. But really if the idea is the moral commandment is to maximize utility, then you don't really get that you're just as bad if you let something bad happen as if you do it yourself. Which, you know, people use to criticize utilitarianism. That no, it does seem like there's a great deal of difference between those. You can certainly see in certain circumstances somebody is drowning in front of me and I could save them, but I'm just going to be passive and I'll let them drown.

That's the intuition that Singer refers to that that's essentially what we're doing because we know what's going on in some of these foreign countries because we have these, you know, high speed communication and good news services and things and we have the power to do something about it. You know, do our save a child fund $2 a day, forego your cup of coffee to save a life, then you really are guilty in some way just by being passive. So you don't buy that at all. You think being passive is. There's an important moral distinction there.

1:33:11 Seth: No, I don't think being passive is acceptable. But as far as I'm concerned, Singer can just shut up.

1:33:20 Wes: I always hated Singer too. Just something.

1:33:22 Seth: Well, you know, he's as obnoxious and abrasive as Any self righteous hippie. So there's a couple things. First off, the argument about we should do something to prevent a moral problem as long as it doesn't cause a similar moral problem. I think that's kind of dealt with to some extent by the discussion in mail about perfect and imperfect obligations. Right. Perfect obligation, which means there's a specific thing that you should be doing in a specific circumstance vis a vis a specific person. You do, you know, an imperfect thing which basically says be charitable.

But it doesn't say specifically who and when and how. That's up to you. If he wants to argue against gross consumerism and kind of tempering that, that's fine. But if he wants to say that you have no right to participate in the society in which you live, that you need to self abnegate to the point where you're just basically, it's ludicrous to think that that could an economically viable model that a society could run on where everybody just works to make money to try to alleviate the sufferings of others across the world. That's just ludicrous.

It doesn't even make any sense to me. That being said, what he's saying is the time and energy that I spend trying to improve my local community by helping alleviate the suffering of people who are habitual criminals as they transition back into society so that they can spend quality time with their family and be productive member of society. And that I should redirect that because that suffering is not significant enough in relative to starvation here or genocide in Darfur or whatever. I'm not saying that those things aren't worthy of people's attention, but it basically sounds like what he's saying is that he's going to go out and rank based on suffering all the world's hotspots, and that everybody in the world is supposed to kind of focus their energies on those particular places and fix those problems somehow.

Which by the way is not even clear to me that that's even doable. One of the things that I think he says that's completely ridiculous is he says expert observers and supervisors sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently stationed in famine prone areas can direct our aid almost as effectively as we could get it to somebody on our own block. That's one of the most naive and ridiculous things I've ever seen anybody who's published in print say.

1:35:35 Wes: Yeah, I thought about that.

1:35:36 Seth: The reality of the situation is the reason there's famine, the reason a lot of these things obtain corruption, is that you have insanely corrupt Governments, you have warfare. You have geographical and racial divide. I mean, there's a million things going on, and just throwing aid at the problem is not going to solve it.

1:35:55 Wes: I have a good friend in international development, and it's a huge problem. It's simply pouring money and resources into it doesn't fix it, as Republican as that sounds.

1:36:06 Seth: I mean, what if I said to him, you know what, Peter Singer, here's what we give the greatest utility. If you would shut up and go get a foreign Service degree.

1:36:16 Wes: Get me a fucking cheeseburger.

1:36:18 Seth: Go. Go get a foreign Service degree. Enter the Foreign Service for Britain, get posted to Bengal and act as an efficient aide de camp to the ambassador from Britain over there so that they can help weed out corruption in the government and improve the efficiencies in their supply lines so the ample food that's being produced in the regions local to that can be efficiently transported. That. You know, you're actually taking the cop out by just throwing money at the problem because you're alleviating your own conscience, which is a very, very mild form of improving happiness, but you're actually contributing nothing or almost nothing to their actual relief.

1:36:56 Mark: Look, he addresses that. He says, you know, maybe you have a problem with this specific strategy that I have for addressing this. Well, then use your own strategy. If you think that, you know, the problem is overpopulation, then you should be putting forth your time to alleviate overpopulation. But he's saying most of the people that would give that argument or say, oh, governments are corrupt. They don't follow through in some other way to address what is the real problem either. It's just that people are stingy with their volunteer time. I think he would have a hard time arguing against you specifically, you know, about, you know, you've chosen to do a substantial volunteer thing locally. I think you have a good case to make against him. He's maybe more focusing on, say, Wes and myself, who I'm confident, neither of which has a comparable local commitment. Am I right, Wes?

1:37:43 Wes: You're very, very right.

1:37:44 Mark: But look, we're just trying to freaking

1:37:46 Wes: get through the day, but I'm enough of a narcissist that I think I'm doing a tremendous benefit to mankind by concentrating on honing my own faculties, which requires a tremendous amount of downtime watching tv. But look, on the other hand, isn't Singer, in a way, making that sort of calculation himself? I mean, he's a professor. Why even spend any time writing these articles?

1:38:11 Mark: Well, he thinks that he can inspire a lot of people to think more his way and contribute. I mean, I think you can.

1:38:20 Wes: He thinks he's inspiring anyone with his,

1:38:22 Mark: hey, that explains why he's saying such like a publicity hound. Why he's like one of the philosophers I thought he was relevant to bring up because, like, you know, he's been on the Daily show recently. He's done things to get himself in the public eye in a way that a typical ivory tower academic just, you know, we're just trying to determine what the good is.

1:38:39 Wes: But I think if he does not, he would know that he's preaching to a certain crowd that already believes what he believes and he's not going to persuade anyone else and that so ultimately he's doing what he's doing because he, he enjoys it.

1:38:52 Mark: I just, I don't think the ad hominem argument works though. Even if you say, oh, Singer, you're so, you know, such a hypocrite because you have a leather belt. And despite what you said about him actually apparently living up to his standard by having a very low standard of living just above the poverty line, you know, whatever you can say about him, even if he is guilty of some stuff. Well, does that mean that what he's arguing is wrong? That's just kind of beside the point. It could be something we're all guilty of to some extent.

1:39:19 Seth: No, I think these are the three principles premises. Right. Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad. Don't dispute that. If it's in our power, and I would qualify this one, if it's in our power to prevent something bad from happening without sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance, we ought to do it. I believe that if you say it's within your individual power, I think if you talk about at the national level, it becomes a more complicated question. And then the third premise is do not take distance and proximity into account.

That I disagree with entirely. My concern is that it's extremely naive what he's saying and that he's generalizing to national or organizational, governmental type matters from what is a relatively solid individual principle. And I mean, George Clooney has probably done more for Darfur than Peter Singer has done for any of his causes. And it just so happens that that's because George Clooney has a certain kind of status in the society that transcends his scope. His individual sphere is way greater than any of ours. Right, right.

1:40:16 Mark: Or Bill Gates.

1:40:17 Seth: Yeah, well, Bill Gates has had a tremendous impact on the world as a philanthropist. He's given millions and millions and millions of dollars and presumably had a pretty significant impact in some areas. Although without having looked at the details, I can't really say. I'm just assuming. So if Peter Singer's basically saying, hey, stop being such a conspicuous self interested consumer and share a little bit with those who are less fortunate, I can get on board with that. By the way, he's talking about England. But Americans are like some of the most charitable people on earth. Right? Our government is extremely charitable and its foreign aid. And our people in our society give lots of money and lots of time to causes. But you know what? The stuff is still out there. I mean, it's still going on.

1:40:58 Wes: I want to make a confession here, which is that even if I had a tremendous amount of money, I have this fantasy of winning the lottery. And they force you to have one of those press conferences where you're forced to say, yes, I'm going to give half of it to charity, and so on and so forth. When you're asked what you would do with the money, I would just say, I'm gonna buy things. I'm gonna take this money and I'm gonna buy things. Well, part of the fantasy is I fantasize about giving money to family members

1:41:26 Mark: and to buy their freedom. Yeah, that's what I buy. Like and.

1:41:29 Wes: But I don't fantasize about. I have no interest in philanthropy. I hate to say it. I get worked up about certain issues of justice and the things that people do to each other. You know, the horrible things that, you know, happened in the war in Chechnya or say in the war in Iraq. And those things actually really disturb me. But I have no interest in helping alleviate them. No, I'm glad that other people are interested in that, But I don't see that everyone needs to have that interest. And I think that my interest in, say, tutoring kids or maybe in becoming a shrink, I.

I see that both as something. There's enjoyable aspects to that and then there are elements of altruism to that. And I think you can conceive of these different spheres of activity, but I just don't have an interest in setting up a philanthropy organization or even in dumping a bunch of money into one. I couldn't explain why exactly.

1:42:24 Mark: Wes, you're just bad.

1:42:26 Wes: I'm a bad person. Except that I'm. Yeah, that part I know. Yeah. You know, selfish. I'm a narcissist. But on the other hand, I like to tutor little kids, But I wouldn't do it if I didn't like it.

1:42:36 Mark: I feel like my attitude is sort of typical in that I keep feeling, you know, at least typical in the way it is phrased, maybe not in the way I enact it, which might be more self indulgent than many people, but that you have obligations to your family to. You gotta make enough money to get by, you know, I'm trying to save up enough for the college, for the kids and whatever, and to do things with my time that are meaningful, you know, whether this or the many other fun activities like the band or whatever that may or may not have a positive effect on others, I hope are adding some joy to the world in some way.

But it's certainly mostly narcissistic and sort of feel like, oh, once I can get past that certain spot, like again, if I won the lottery, oh, okay, well, then I'd be taken care of. And maybe my next move would be how much money would be required for each of my relatives or each person that I really care about to let them choose to do whatever they want with their life and not be stuck in a crappy job that they don't like. Because I want to have a real effect on, you know, people that I care about. And then beyond that, just the way Bill Gates life ran, you know, everything was given into building this thing, this company.

And once he has more money than God, well, hell, then, yeah, start to put some major energy and money into making the world a better place. And just like George Clooney, like you were saying, maybe it makes sense that the best way to just from a utilitarian point of view, that at least one way to help a lot of people in this way or a lot of people far away or feed some of these causes is by aggregating money. Right? The rich are going to be the most philanthropic, so maybe we should give them as many of their tax cuts as possible to. Because they're the ones that are going to be giving most of the money, unlike the rest of us poor slobs that maybe some percentage of us have some public service thing.

So even if I'm poor and in school, I'm still giving so much of my time to the homeless shelter or whatever.

1:44:26 Wes: But maybe not. I mean, isn't there something ethically compelling, even if it seems very selfish about. And this goes back to Aristotle and Nietzsche, you talked about doing something important with your life. I mean, we all suffer. There's a hell of a lot of suffering in the world. And we all experience it to some degree or another. And we're all Going to die. And there's that urgent sense to do something meaningful and to spend one's own life in a maybe, you know, trying to do something great or trying to do something lasting. And I don't think that everyone thinks of alleviating suffering in Darfur as a way of doing that for themselves.

1:45:01 Mark: Right. Creating a great piece of philosophy or great piece of art or whatever. It's not necessarily pulling up the lowest of the low. It's a way of enriching the people that already have their basic needs met.

1:45:10 Wes: It becomes essential, ethically, more important than working at a homeless shelter. I mean, when I think about what I want to do with my time, I mean, there's no question that I think that writing a novel, for instance, not that it's ever going to happen, but that that would be more important if I could do it, and not just important to me, but. Well, I don't know.

1:45:30 Mark: No, I understand. Exactly.

1:45:32 Seth: Okay.

1:45:32 Mark: Exactly what you're talking about.

1:45:33 Wes: Yeah.

1:45:34 Mark: That.

1:45:34 Wes: More valuable and in some push to greatness. Yeah. Right.

1:45:38 Mark: And I do feel guilty myself about, like. I don't feel guilty about my interests. I don't feel bad that I like reading a lot or, you know, doing music or watching tv. I feel more guilty that I'm not doing it as well and aggressively as I could.

1:45:50 Wes: Yeah.

1:45:51 Mark: That I really should be, you know, pumping out an album a year and I should have written several more books than I have and, you know, be aggressively pushing them out there to, you know, create something lasting for the world and not just be a complex form of masturbation.

1:46:08 Wes: That's great. Did you just make up that phrase, or have you had that for a while?

1:46:12 Mark: I don't think I'd put it that way,

1:46:16 Wes: Seth. Love it. Greatness or help people?

1:46:21 Seth: I just don't think the two things are mutually exclusive.

1:46:25 Mark: Should we give our closing thoughts? However long they may be? Let's start on that path.

1:46:30 Wes: All right.

1:46:30 Seth: Yes, I think so. Well, here's kind of where I'm going to go with this. And it's probably just rehashing what I said previously, but very impressed by the Bentham stuff, particularly learning more about him. Certainly suggest to people that they look him up and learn a little bit more about him. I think the idea of the principle of utility as a guiding principle for creating legislation and sort of managing the state is intriguing because if you were just trying to manage a state that already had an established set of social mores and certain standards for right and wrong that had kind of already evolved, it would Be an interesting way to guide legislation in that context.

The principle of utility as a way of guiding your interaction with other individuals, I think is also has some utility, no pun intended. But the system itself as a system really seems to break down into a lot of very commonsensical things or things which you're supposed to just take on faith as part of the cultural fabric that you grow up with, which makes me wonder whether there's actually any there, there. And that's kind of my opinion.

1:47:37 Mark: Okay. I was pleasantly surprised by the Mill reading on the subtleties involved and his reactions to many of the arguments against. In some ways, you know, I guess I had seen it as a failure of utilitarianism that the calculation that Bentham put out there doesn't really work, that you can't really, you know, on an act by act basis, certainly, or even on a rule by rule basis, look at the chain of infinite effects from your actions and do the pain and pleasure calculations to figure that out. Like you say, it's either trivial or it's hopeless. Right.

You can either easily figure out what's going on in front of you and don't hit your sister. I know it'll make you a little happier to hit your sister, but just don't do that. It will, it will be better for all concerned, that kind of stuff. But I think utilitarianism, by introducing some of these things that are in some ways problematic, that, you know, the higher, lower pleasure distinction or the move to rule utility as opposed to act utility, it gives you more conceptual tools to argue with. And so this kind of moral reasoning that I was doing when talking about the, you know, downloading stuff versus buying it or whatever, that seems to me like, you know, real useful moral reasoning.

But, you know, you should also be aware of the pitfalls involved in that. If you evaluate every act, like I was saying individually, you can fall into habits that maybe it's better to just tell the truth as much as possible and only in very exceptional circumstances, lie instead of just, just think about it every time you're about to say something, whether you're going to tell the truth or not. Like it seems truth telling as a general habit would be good to be into. But that's not an argument against utilitarianism. That's just all within the conceptual apparatus that utilitarianism offers you in terms of moral thinking.

And I don't see some of the other options like Kantianism that we'll talk about next week or even Aristotelianism as offering That I do like the Nietzschean idea, sort of taken from Aristotle but made more individualistic of, you know, what kind of person do you really want to be? Just reflect on that deeply and think about that as a guiding, you know, on a daily basis. I like that too. And so I guess because my meta ethical views, you know, I really don't think there is an objective standard of right and wrong for everybody that we should then consult and then do that.

And every time we see that something is wrong, then that motivates us to do it or at least it should motivate us to do that if we're thinking correctly. Eh, I don't care that much about ethics in some ways, but I do have these intuitions and there are plenty of opportunities like I do see, you know, even just making a decision like on a moment to moment basis, this is especially cutting when you have really little kids. So like they want your attention all the time and you can on a moment to moment basis decide to be a good parent and give them that attention or to just like lie there and not get up and not go to their room and not give them that.

And it's a balancing act every second, you know, you don't want to ruin your own life, you want to get some sleep, you know. So those to me are moral decisions. And sometimes thinking of it in terms of utility helps these kind of things. So on balance I think it is very useful to have read this stuff and to have thought about these things in these terms in a way that Kantianism has not helped my life in that way. Thinking about morality in Kantian terms. So taken with a grain of salt. Yay, utilitarianism.

1:50:48 Wes: Wesley, I don't know, I've always liked John Stuart Mill. I'm honestly confused about question of morality and I guess that's a meta ethical thing. And like you Mark, I don't know that there's any objective basis for it, that there's any metaphysics to it or you know, there's that sort of nihilistic hunch that beneath it all it's all just a matter of psychology or the emotivist idea that there is no real meaning to ethical statements. But on the other hand then there's the reaction against that. I'm sort of in between the Kantian, you know, obviously I like the Aristotelian and Nietzschean views which I see as connected.

And I like them because I think they're also related to the conception of the human good as related to psychological health and where I'M taking the Aristotelian conception of virtue and excellence as having something to do with the well functioning of the human being and psychological health and the role of psychoanalysis and so on and so forth. But I never been able to make sense of turning any of that into an ethical system in the sense of introducing the odd into it. And that, I think is my trouble with utilitarianism as well.

1:52:04 Mark: It's not bad qua utilitarianism, it's just bad qua ethics. Well, I think potentially useless.

1:52:10 Wes: I think that Kant, for whatever my dissatisfactions with that, I think he preserves a viable sense of the ethical. What I'm trying to say is, in a sense, I'm a utilitarian by nature, but deep down I know it doesn't really make sense to call it an ethical system. You haven't done anything. You know, like I said before, you have to stop at this odd and to go any further and to try and explain these sort of very basic intuitions about right and wrong in terms of considerations which inevitably reintroduce the word odd. It's just tautological.

1:52:44 Mark: Okay.

1:52:45 Wes: It's confusing to me.

1:52:46 Mark: Well, this is a good kickoff of ethics proper. I know we already had Aristotle, but getting into these things about motive and obligation and, you know, if we have to come up with a rule, what should the rule be? That's kind of what the stuff of ethics class is. Not so much trying to figure out what the hell Aristotle's talking about and how the pieces of his theory fit together. When we can, you know, get to the ideas themselves and away from the specifics of the text. That always seems a good thing to me. So this will be an ongoing process. Starting next time listeners, we'll be doing more ethics featuring Wes's special friend Immanuel Kant reading.

So if you want to prepare for that, read the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, also called the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, depending on the translation you read. And we will provide a link to that and many other things from our website. I'm waiting for one of you guys to say what it is. Partiallyexaminedlife.com and please go and participate on our forums. Why? You can just reply to the postings on the blog itself, partially examined life.com or go to our Facebook page. You can join it, be a public supporter of us.

You could go to Urban Philosophy, Urban philosophy dot net. There's many advantages to doing that. You'll be extra cool and please, you know, spay or neuter your Pets.

1:54:13 Seth: Good night.

1:54:14 Mark: Good night.

1:54:15 Wes: Good night.

1:54:18 Mark: Put it together, love it up Free the markings and sew it shut. We only want to be here and not go home. Sell it lightly, cut it short Kill for nothing and hold the fort. Beg a moment all to come round and bless this idle horde. Cause if I feel that it's in my power to make you happy. You bet you I will. I feel better by the hour. I'll let it all flow down on you. Spin a whole way, drive a mite no rehearsal on tonight we only want to be here and now. Go home. Smoke and lucky fire alight. Action also in my sight. Monumental spectacle is almost gonna blow. Cause if I feel that it's in my power to make you happy. You betcha I will. If I feel better by the hour. Only little all float down on you. We've done a long lot to be here. Do you need to be alone? I could bless this love I see.

1:56:38 Wes: Yeah.

1:56:39 Mark: But I won't. Fishing, horny loving tight. Arguably our best night. I'm aware we're good for something. Am I right? We're all together, all stuffed up, happy till we must again. So what do you think? Cause if I feel that it's in my power to make you happy. You bet you I will find the better Find the hour

1:57:39 Seth: float on you,

1:57:41 Mark: darling if I can

1:57:46 Wes: can make.

1:57:59 Mark: Darling,

1:58:13 Wes: No one's gonna come for you.

1:58:14 Mark: That's because I don't share. I'm only consumer. I don't actually let people download from me. So I will not be targeted. I disobey the categorical imperative. Yeah, if everyone were a leech, it wouldn't exist. So what? Like for instance, one should. One should never pay for porn. Or duh. I mean, I don't want to support that industry. Doesn't mean I'm not going to take advantage of the fact that it exists. But I'm not going to fucking support that industry with my hard earned dollars. That the exploitation of women and stuff. No way. They should just stop making porn and just use all the porn that was previously made. There's enough. Seriously, there's enough. All those people have been exploited already.

1:59:00 Wes: I prefer 70s porn anyways.