IDEAL UTILITARIANISM [received 26/02/11; edited draft 1] According to classical utilitarianism, an agent acts rightly insofar as her act produces at least as much aggregate pleasure on balance as any other act she could have performed in her situation. Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics (1874) provides the most sophisticated defense of this framework. In this defense, he considers the view that there are non-instrumental goods other than pleasure, e.g. knowledge, virtue, and contemplation of beauty, resulting in the position that an agent acts rightly insofar as her act produces at least as much aggregate pleasure, knowledge, virtue, and contemplation of beauty on balance as any other act she could have performed in her situation. This view is known as ideal utilitarianism. It agrees with classical utilitarianism that the right is fixed by the good, but denies that the good is confined to pleasure alone. Its principal defenders are Hastings Rashdall, G.E. Moore, A.C. Ewing, and Oliver A. Johnson. Its main critics are H.A. Prichard and W.D. Ross. The early ideal utilitarians – Rashdall and Moore – developed their view in opposition to Sidgwick. Sidgwick considers (among others) two rivals to hedonism. The first maintains that only states of consciousness are good, e.g. intellectual activity and virtuous willing, the desirability of which is not determined by their quantity of pleasure alone (Sidgwick, 1907, p.398). He rejects this view: once we distinguish these forms of consciousness from the pleasures that accompany them and the relations that they bear to the ideals that guide them, e.g. truth and morality, we find an "element of consciousness quite neutral in respect of desirability" (p.398). The second holds that it is not states of consciousness alone that matter but rather the "objective relations" implied in the notions of truth, virtue, and beauty. What matters is the objective relation between one's mind and the world or one's will and the ideal to which one aspires. In opposition he contends that after sober reflection "these objective relations of the conscious subject, when distinguished from the consciousness accompanying and resulting from them, are not ultimately and intrinsically desirable" (pp.400-401); we can only 2 justify to ourselves "the importance that we attach to any of these objects by considering its conduciveness ... to the happiness of sentient beings" (p.401). Rashdall attacked both of Sidgwick's conclusions. He accepts that only states of consciousness possessing some pleasure have value, but that virtue (loving and promoting the good), intellectual and aesthetic activities, various kinds of affection (e.g. love) have intrinsic value, and therefore play a role in determining the value of a state of consciousness (Ethics, Rashdall, 1913, p.70). To establish his claim about virtue he relies heavily on the following argument against Sidgwick (The Theory of Good and Evil I, see Rashdall, 1907, vol. 1, pp.57-9; Ethics, 1913, pp.63-5). Sidgwick holds that each is morally required to maximize net aggregate pleasure, that in rational agents recognition of this fact produces a desire to do so, that acting morally will sometimes come at a cost to the agent's own greatest pleasure, and that this sacrifice has no intrinsic value. Rashdall argues that it is psychologically impossible or at least extraordinarily rare to hold these propositions. The difficulty is that by accepting hedonism and thus rejecting the claim that loving and willing the good has intrinsic value we undermine the motivation to sacrifice our own pleasure for the good of others. Therefore, we should reject hedonism. In order that agents are motivated to produce maximum aggregate pleasure, we must accept that virtue is the highest good. In reply, one might argue that if acceptance is the problem, the hedonist should simply refuse to promulgate the doctrine and instead promote whatever doctrine maximizes her favored end. Rashdall's other arguments are more persuasive. Common sense holds that some pleasures lack value, e.g. pleasure taken in cruelty, and that some pleasures are intrinsically better than others, e.g. intellectual pleasures. That virtue and intellectual activity have value explains these intuitions. The fact that we condemn infanticide even for those incapable of living well and admire parental affection suggests that we value the emotion of humanity or kindliness of feeling and affection for one's children. However, the hedonist could maintain that vicious pleasures are good for the agent, especially if (like Sidgwick) she is plausibly read as offering the view as an account of happiness or well-being, 3 but that promoting the objectionable pleasures will likely not produce maximum aggregate pleasure on balance over the long run. She could further argue that favouring higher pleasures and certain emotions or affections will produce more aggregate pleasure on balance in the long run. Rashdall attempts another argument against classical utilitarianism's commitment to hedonism. He suggests that ideal utilitarianism is superior to classical utilitarianism because it has practical implications that are more palatable to common sense. The latter view, for example, permits too much inveracity: "there would be no reason why we should resist that tendency to say (in matters of no importance), at any expense to Truth, what would be agreeable to the hearer" (TGE I, 1907, vol. 1, pp.192-3). This is a hard case to make. Classical utilitarians typically argue for the same exceptions to veracity that Rashdall defends (e.g. that it is permissible to lie to save a life and to protect state secrets). This might be a case in which they fail to see the implications of their own view, but nothing that Rashdall says conclusively establishes the case. He even appears to undermine his own argument by dubbing Sidgwick a "Kantian rigorist" in the context of their dispute about clerical veracity. Sidgwick appears to permit fewer lies than Rashdall in the context of taking religious oaths and reciting creeds. Finally, it is not clear that it should worry the hedonist (or anyone) if the lies occur in cases of "no importance". Moore appears to accept something resembling the second view that Sidgwick rejects. He relies on several arguments against hedonism. He opines that it would be rational to choose to produce a beautiful world rather than a "heap of filth" even if no one ever could experience it (Principia Ethica, Moore, 1993, pp.135-6). This argument did not garner support among critics, and it is far from clear that it is a mark against the classical utilitarian to say that we are not morally obliged to produce the former world. Fortunately, Moore did not force the issue. It is anyway inconsistent with his view that no whole is valuable unless it contains some feeling and some other form of consciousness (Ethics, 2005, p.129). He attempts two other arguments. In a review of Rashdall's The Theory of Good and Evil (1907), he contends that "it is...very doubtful whether the greatest quantity of pleasure, wholly 4 unaccompanied by any other result whatever, would be at all worth producing" (p.450; also Ethics, 2005, p.129). It is difficult to determine precisely what Moore has in mind here. However, the hedonist might argue that there is nothing implausible about favoring situation A (the consumption of a pleasure pill) over situation B (lack of a pleasure pill) simply because A involves more pleasure (and nothing else) for animals or humans. By far Moore's most plausible argument against hedonism involves the appeal to his principle of organic unities, according to which the value of a whole is not equivalent to the sum of the value of its individual parts considered alone (Principia 1993, pp.79, 233). He targets Sidgwick's second intuitive argument above. Sidgwick thinks that if you remove the pleasure from a whole that includes both the contemplation of beauty and pleasure, you are left with nothing of value. He wrongly infers from this that the value of the whole is due exclusively to, and therefore is proportionate to, the value of the pleasure alone. According to Moore, this simply does not follow. It might be that the whole has much greater value than the value that the pleasure and the contemplation of beauty have alone (pp.144-5). Moore's view is that the greatest goods are certain states of consciousness involving ideal relations: "the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects" (p.237). His defense of this view relies on the principle of organic unities. One worry about it is that it is mysterious that two things that have little value when considered alone can combine to form something of much greater value. Another worry is that perhaps the increase in value is due to the fact that the new combination is not contemplation of beauty and pleasure, but a certain sort of robust pleasure, pleasurein-beauty. This explains why the value of the whole is greater than the value of contemplation of beauty and pleasure taken separately. The ideal utilitarians rejected hedonism but retained the deontic element of classical utilitarianism. In its defense, Rashdall, Moore, Johnson, and Ewing all declare that it is self-evident that we ought to do the impartial best. In Ethics, Moore asserts that "it seems ... self-evident that knowingly to do an action which would make the world, on the whole, really and truly worse than if we had acted 5 differently, must always be wrong" (2005, p.94). Johnson declares that if anything in ethics is selfevident, it is self-evident that we ought always to do the impartial best (1953, p.604). Ewing maintains that "it seems very difficult to resist the conviction that it must be wrong deliberately to produce less [impartial] good when I could produce more" (1948, p.103). But Prichard and Ross disagreed. Suppose, Prichard argues, that a natural disaster strikes a town and all but one of its members is injured. Utilitarianism says that if the unharmed person could produce maximum impartial good by "concentrating on one sufferer, to do so would be his duty". (2) Prichard demurs: "we all think that, as a matter of justice, all the others have claims on him in varying degrees and that he ought to distribute his help without mere reference to the total result" (2002, p.2). Ross raises the worry using the example of promising. Suppose that you have promised to meet X but that helping Y to whom you have made no promise realizes slightly more benefit all things considered (including both the immediate and long-term results of your action, especially its impact on mutual confidence). The utilitarian says that you ought to break the promise. Ross argues that this is not the view of common sense: "to make a promise is not merely to adapt an ingenious device for promoting the general well-being [or good]" (1930, p.38). In reply, Ewing and Johnson reply to this argument that they are able to capture the commonsense judgment by simply expanding the list of goods to include the acts of justice and promise keeping. The reason that the unharmed man ought to distribute his help more equitably is that justice is a good. The reason you should keep the promise is that promise-breaking is an evil and therefore the act of keeping it realizes more net impartial good than breaking it. There are two worries about this position. First, the reason that ideal utilitarians insist on pluralism about the good and monism about the right is that doing so avoids the implication that it is sometimes right to produce less than the impartial best. This may not move their critics. For it is not clear why, if capturing common-sense morality is the aim, this should matter much. There seems to be little advantage to being so open to common-sense intuitions about the good but not about the right, and 6 there is a cost: morality loses its critical power. Second, classical utilitarianism gained its plausibility in part from the fact that it focused exclusively on the happiness of sentient creatures. By aiming at things other than happiness ideal utilitarians, like their non-utilitarian foes, seem to permit the sacrifice of happiness to certain ideal goods (e.g. virtue). This may mean, implausibly, that under ideal utilitarianism, the happiness of sentient creatures diminishes over time: the very thing that makes one chary of accepting deontological views. Bibliography Ewing, A.C. "Utilitarianism," Ethics, 58, no. 2 (1948): 100-11. Johnson, Oliver A. "Rightness, Moral Obligation, and Goodness," Journal of Philosophy, 50, no. 20 (1953): 597-608. Moore, G.E. Principia Ethica, 2 nd edn., ed. Thomas Baldwin (1903; Cambridge, 1993). −− Review of Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, Hibbert Journal, 6 (1907-08): 446-451. −− Ethics, ed. William Shaw (1912; Oxford, 2005). Prichard, H. A. "What is the Basis of Moral Obligation?," in Jim MacAdam, ed., Moral Writings (Oxford, 2002), pp.1-6. Rashdall, Hastings. The Theory of Good and Evil, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907). −− Ethics (London, 1913). Ross, W. D. The Right and the Good (Oxford, 1930). Sidgwick, Henry. The Methods of Ethics, 7 th edn. (1874; London, 1907). Further Reading Skelton, Anthony. "Ideal Utilitarianism: Rashdall and Moore," in Thomas Hurka, ed., Underivative Duty: British moral philosophers from Sidgwick to Ewing (Oxford, 2011), pp.45-65. 7 Anthony Skelton The University of Western Ontario See also Alfred Cyril Ewing; Rashdall Hastings; Happiness; Hedonism; George Edward Moore; Pain; Pleasure; Harold Arthur Prichard; Sir William David Ross; Henry Sidgwick; Value Theory. [2146 words]