Pure Pedantry

Second, it is a good thing that people are not entirely utilitarian. There are three major critiques that I would make of utilitarianism as a moral philosophy.

• 1) For those of you who know me, you know that one of my favorite authors is Ayn Rand. In Atlas Shrugged and her other works, Ayn Rand offers a substantial critique of utilitarianism as a moral principle because it denies the individual. Basically -- at least according to my interpretation -- if you accept utilitarian principles completely, you accept a moral premise that states that under certain circumstances you are dispensable. For example, if you are on the life raft trying to decide who stays and who goes, if you accept the idea that you might be the person who has to go. Not only do you accept it, you morally validate it as the right thing to do. Rand states that no rational being can deny their existence in this manner; she argues that this form of altruism results in "self-immolation."

  
  Here are two quotes to exemplify her ideas on the subject:

  The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value. Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice - which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction - which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.

  -- "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World," Philosophy: Who Needs It

  When 'the common good' of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.

  -- "What is Capitalism?" Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal




• 2) Utilitarian principles make the practical matter of moral calculus difficult or impossible. Because they enunciate the greatest good for the greatest number is a good, you have to take into account every individual that is likely to be affected by an action before making that action. How do you know that you have them all? Further, how do you determine how good or bad a particular action is for someone else? I finished reading a book a couple months ago called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. One of his arguments is that human beings can barely predict what makes themselves happy over long periods much less other people. Happiness is not transitive; it cannot be converted from one person to another. In essence, utilitarianism is an impractical because it paralyzes one to act.
• 3) Utilitarian principles have been used to justify every major expansion of government, and they can justify nearly any expansion of government. When the cost to individual taxpayers is small, how can a substantial benefit to a key group not be justified on utilitarian grounds? Bureaucrats and politicians must have been high-fiving each other right and left when utilitarianism came around because it makes no logical limit on government policy. This is, however, largely an argument for another day.

For those of you who take issue with my indictment, I would respond that there are alternative moral systems. For example, rights-based moral principles do not require self-denial and make moral judgment extremely quick. Simply ask, does this action violate the rights of anyone present? Neither is Kant's statement that people are ends in themselves, not the means to other people's ends.

To summarize, it appears that the human brain has enshrined (or perhaps more accurately embodied) the idea that there is something wrong with utilitarian logic. I have argued that 1) this is not surprising and 2) this is not bad. Perhaps, Rand was right in one key regard: on a core level we deny utilitarianism because we recognize that to accept it fully is to deny ourselves.