Reason and Utilitarianism

The last attack on Hume I wish to consider follows naturally from Nagel. As I have noted, one of the serious drawbacks of Nagel’s normative realism is that, in practice, it leaves us mired in a subjective world while claiming that in some normative realm there are ‘real’ and ‘true’ answers.

But if one leaves aside Nagel’s demand for objectivity, can there be an impersonal moral theory which does not turn out to be a type of intuitionism? It appears that there can. Any strong form of utilitarianism in which the assessor refuses to give any one person’s values (including his own) priority over another’s, and merely opts for the majority value as the ‘real’ or ‘true’ value, results in a non- subjective standard⁴⁶ which at the same time is not objective in the intuitionist sense.

More importantly, such a strong form of utilitarianism might seem, prima facie, to undermine Hume’s negative claim that moral distinctions are not derived from reason. Imagine an adherent of full- blooded utilitarianism, Mr. Bentham, having to opt between two courses of action, option A and option B. It would be Humean broad­sense reason that determined the preferences of all other people by absorbing what they say, looking for clues, calculating what is more likely, in short gamering all the factual information. It would also be broad-sense (and perhaps narrow-sense) reason that counted up the various preferences. Only as regards Mr. Bentham’s own preference could reason be said to be silent. But since Mr. Bentham counts himself for no more than anyone else it will be rare indeed when his own preference is decisive. From Mr. Bentham’s perspective, that of a man who, let us suppose, always makes moral distinctions in accordance with the above process, it would seem that in at least one sense moral distinctions are derived from Humean reason. That being the case I now want to examine in greater detail this third challenge to Hume’s negative conclusion.

The utilitarian position, in a variety of guises, has been widely held and argued. Hume himself in the Enquiries grounds his artificial virtues more on utility rather than on convention as in the Treatise f Of course Bentham is the most well-known, rigorous and hard-headed exponent of utilitarianism. Others include Honderich, J.S. Mill and R.M. Hare to name a sampling. My intention in this book is not to review the substantive merits of utilitarianism generally or in any particular form. I simply concentrate on the possibility of challenging Hume’s negative conclusion about a rationalistic morality by way of some form of utilitarianism. As such, in my handling of the utilitarian challenge to Hume’s anti-rationalism, I will use extreme preference-utilitarianism, as it is the most clearly non-subjective version — there being no assertions about true, or higher, satisfactions or happinesses.

Does any utilitarian critique undercut Hume’s negative conclusion that reason alone cannot be the source of moral distinctions? Certainly utility is a reason-based theory, at least in so far as the method by which each of its adherents looks for the preferred responses of others and the subsequent totting up of those responses (be it without pre-judging those responses, as per Bentham, or with an in-built weighting for ‘higher’ pleasures). In effect utilitarianism advocates a strictly impersonal morality, to continue with Nagelian terminology. It also provides, if not a standard against which to measure values, at least a guide⁴⁸ to help reach that standard. But the utilitarian standard of right and wrong is not objective, not in the way an intuitionist’s standards would be or even in the way Nagel seems to suggest his values are objective. Utilitarianism does not suggest or posit that there are values in the fabric of the universe or that there are real, true values which can be seen from the external standpoint. Rather it says that the cumulatively favoured value preference which emerges from any particular group of people is to be the standard of right. This is quite clearly not a robust objectivism but instead what I might call an inter-subjectivism or perhaps a quasi­objectivism built upon a community-wide subjectivism. It is clear to me that the inter-subjective value ultimately adopted through utilitarianism cannot be anything but temporary. Given a shift in tastes, sentiments and preferences within the group the standard of rightness may change.

But I do not take issue with the essential subjectivity, and indeed the attempt to reach an inter-subjective standard, which is a part of utilitarianism. As I shall argue, this is a main characteristic of the positive Humean morality, albeit beginning from different premisses and being differently constructed. My concern here, however, is specifically with the seeming rationality of utilitarianism.

To do this let us turn back to our Mr. Bentham, but now imbue him with greater speed and accuracy in his broad and narrow-sense reasoning abilities. Determinations that may have been impractically slow and involved are now quite easy for him (so that it cannot be said to be infeasible to fashion one’s moral distinctions, actions and responses in this way). He can efficiently make all sorts of causal inferences, collect and store information about preferences, and thus calculate in any particular instance the standard of right conduct of the majority or greatest number.⁴⁹ But even having attributed to Mr. Bentham such super-Humean reasoning capacities, one can see that moral distinctions for the utilitarian are still not derived solely from reason. Not only is the assessor’s own preference areasonable; so too is everyone else’s. To do or to want anything, all of us require an areasonable desire component. As I argued in chapter one, Humean reason is impotent and cannot alone create desires and so any individual’s conduct preference is not derived solely from reason. What the utilitarian approach does in effect is to admit there are no higher standards than the cumulative total of these individual, subjective and contingent responses, and as such to count each response equally. Then reason does enter in to perform the instrumental work of inferring causally what other people’s preferences are as well as determining what the sum of those preferences is. This is, certainly, a major role for reason — more than the intuitionist, for example, would assign to it — but it is nonetheless a subservient role. Firstly, reason does not determine the preferences of any individual. Secondly, reason does not determine where to draw the line as far as those beings whose interests are to count are concerned. (For example, ought one to count just living Americans, all Asians, future generations, other species? This again depends partially on areasonable desires.) Thirdly, reason does not demand that others’ responses be counted equally.

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