Utilitarianism is a philosophy simple enough that they can talk about it in the New York Times, and that, as they say, is all the news that’s fit to print. Simple philosophies are for simpletons, and this one’s about on Ayn Rand’s level: perfect for people who want an “ethical” justification for things they were going to do anyway, but not one that makes them think too hard. Or, alternately, trolley problems: conversation starters for the workplace and the home!
That said, the real puzzle about utilitarianism is why anyone who doesn’t write for the Times takes it seriously. I’ve met academic philosophers who identify as utilitarians; they’re usually perfectly smart people until they start talking about their work. How do they manage not to notice that they’ve dedicated their lives to an intellectually vacuous project?
Let’s start with the basics. Fifty-plus years ago, Elizabeth Anscombe identified the biggest unsolved problem of utilitarian philosophy (which she then took to be dead in the water) as that of pleasure. In its nature, pleasure is at least largely unobservable; it often grows or shrinks in anticipation and recollection, making it a shaky basis on which to choose actions for the future; and no perspicuous account can be given of how someone else’s pleasure, as such, could produce practical maxims binding on me, which is what utilitarianism requires to be the case. For all these reasons, the house of utilitarianism is rotten at the foundations. Rearranging the furniture on the second or third floor, which is what most academic philosophers now working on the topic do, is pure wasted effort.
What if all these basic failures were supposed to be features, not bugs? Then, of course, it would be wrong to call utilitarianism a philosophy, but we could still understand it as a rhetoric – one whose deeply flawed account of pleasure might still prove effective in some circumstances.
Utilitarian rhetoric depersonalizes pleasure in two key ways. First, it desubjectivizes pleasure: in a utilitarian accounting, “infinite” desires – like those that govern, for instance, Iroquois gift exchange or the plots of Greek tragedy – simply have no place. Generally, the same thing is going to make two similarly-situated people equally happy; or, if not, then someone will be able to give a reasoned account as to why one of the parties is going to get more pleasure than the other out of the good in question. Second, utilitarianism aggregates pleasure such that it can become an object of planning notionally for the common good and without self-interest.
For both these reasons, utilitarian rhetoric is extremely well-suited to serve for a language of political debate in a liberal democracy like that of the United States, where collective decisions have to be taken usually in the absence of shared norms to guide them. Utilitarianism is a way of balancing interests without giving self-interest the chance to put its fingers on the scale.*
Utilitarian rhetoric of this sort is, of course, tremendously vulnerable to corruption and manipulation, and it tends to obscure divisions that may later, and to the common detriment, explode. Take, for instance, the much-repeated claim that intensified global trade benefits the country. This is true if, as is usually done, we take money as a proxy for happiness; as a collective, the country then appears to enjoy more happiness because of global free trade. As we know, though, the payoffs were unevenly enough distributed that a substantial minority of Americans have actually suffered from the expansion of free trade even as a handful of people have benefitted enormously. The utilitarian rhetoric that was used to justify dropping trade barriers, and the people who were being screwed by this turned out to be the ones who, for whatever reason, voted for Trump. How’s the hedonistic calculus working out on that one?
As much as it would be possible to multiply examples like the preceding, I have to give credit where credit’s due: utilitarian rhetoric was hegemonic in the American public sphere through the period of relative (domestic) peace and prosperity that extended from the end of the Great Depression through the end of the Clinton presidency. “Better dead than red” aside, arguments about public policy in that era all had to code themselves in terms of the greatest good for the greatest number. However bad the results of those arguments may have seemed at the time (I’m looking at you, Reagan), the alt-right alternative we’re now seeing looks much worse. There’s a lot you can sell with utilitarian rhetoric, but at least you can’t sell ethnic cleansing.
I don’t say this in order to defend utilitarianism, even qua rhetoric, in any absolute sense. As I’ve suggested, I think its limits and flaws are largely responsible for our current situation, where we’ll be lucky if we’re allowed to use any rhetoric at all in a few year’s time. I’m going to devote the rest of this post to a theory about how we got here.
Like all rhetorics, the utilitarian one is enthymemetic; the audience has to believe certain things, to be a certain way, or else the rhetoric won’t work. The ideal object for a utilitarian appeal is not necessarily selfless, but s/he does have to be devious: s/he has to be willing to see selfish goals articulated in language that makes no reference to him/her in particular, either as an individual or as a class of individuals. The audience for utilitarianism is one that doesn’t need to see aspects of its identity explicitly reflected in the mirror of national politics.
You might be expecting to to turn now to a critique of so-called “identity politics,”** but actually nothing’s further from my mind. The first sign that something had gone deeply wrong on this score – that utilitarian rhetoric was about to go off the rails – came in the weeks following 9/11, when news anchors and politicians started to find that not even mentioning the word “America” at every opportunity was enough to satisfy the public’s ravening thirst for identity-reflection. That was when everyone started wearing flag pins, not – as people mistakenly thought – to testify to their patriotism, but to articulate that word, “America,” at every moment in a visual idiom, so that they could go back to talking about other things.
The problem, then and now, is honor. We’d been attacked physically, sure, but the real problem was that our national honor had been besmirched. Why else would a bunch of Middle Americans who couldn’t have cared less about 3000 dead New Yorkers and whoe own hometowns could in no possible world become the targets of terrorism have gotten excited enough in the wake of 9/11 to launch us into (now) 15 years of disastrous, fruitless war?
If you’re mad at someone, you get them by any means necessary: maybe you bribe Osama bin Laden’s chef to poison his french onion soup, say. If your honor’s at stake, you still want to get them, but even more important is that they know it’s you what got’em. That, and not concern about possible treachery, was why we couldn’t tell Pakestan that bin Laden was hiding there and politely ask them to put him under arrest. Americans had to do the deed themselves: honor is only satisfied with public revenge.
Put that way, it’s a sad story. We wasted ten years and tens of thousands of lives just to do publicly what we could almost certainly have done faster and with less bloodshed if we’d been willing to employ covert means. Unfortunately, that story ended up becoming the type-narrative for a newly honor-driven national politics. The Tea Party insisted on being recognized and served explicitly by its representatives as a group deserving of special privilege and power; what got them so mad – irrationally, to our eyes – was an act of legislation, the AHCA, that by its very ambition to help everyone denied that such special groups exist. In the face of charges that they were applying violence in racist and unjustified ways, police throughout the country insisted on being recognized publicly as a special group of individuals who have the privilege of applying violence wherever they see fit and deserve our thanks for it – so, instead of much-needed controls on policing, we have legislation in many states that makes assaulting a cop a hate-crime. Then came Trump, who not only spoke a language of honor that appealed to our nation’s most vile constituencies but actually embodied their self-image. Of course they were going to elect him president.***
Montesquieu took honor to be a character trait that thrives under monarchy and withers under democracy. Though he had no reason to consider a state of affairs like the present one, I doubt it would surprise him. Democracies, he’d say, can also die through the corruption of their citizens.
* From within this rhetoric, since consideration of values other than pleasure has been excluded a priori, any principled stance at all will end up looking like self-interest.
** And if you were excited about my doing that, you’re a villain. This blog isn’t for you; go read the Weekly Standard, supposing you can afford to get past the paywall.
*** The reason that all the examples I’ve cited of malignant honor politics come from the right of the political spectrum is that that’s where the examples live. Right-wing commentators have gotten so accustomed to speaking this language over the last 15 years that they now misinterpret left-wing movements, like Black Lives Matter, as being about group honor in the same way as most Republican politics now is. Only thus can the response of right-wingers, “all lives matter,” be understood: they took the protesters to be demanding privileged protection for black lives, when in fact BLM only wanted the same defense against arbitrary, extrajudicial execution that everyone’s supposed to enjoy in this country. Not that the “all lives matter” crowd would be prepared to grant them even that, since even equality with black people would appear to them as an attack on their honor.