Apples and oranges – part II: Is Utilitarianism unfit for purpose?

koenfucius

Sep 2

Utilitarianism receives a great deal of criticism. Is it a useless tool for making decisions, or are the detractors overstating their case?

Imagine a business – say, a bakery – that has an opportunity to expand its production. Their customers want to buy both more bread and more pies. There is unused space at their premises, but it is not large enough to accommodate both bread and pastry production. How should they decide which product to focus on? It makes sense for the company to be guided by the amount of net profit they can expect from either option – the difference between the cost of making the goods, and the revenue they will generate.

The cost will include things like financing, raw materials, energy and labour, while the revenue will depend on the selling price of a loaf or a pie, and the number actually sold. The fact that there are so many different elements that contribute to the overall profit is not a problem, because there is a single unit in which each one can be expressed: dollars, pounds, euros, or whatever the currency unit is in which the bakery operates. Plugging in the facts for both bread and pastry will quickly and easily show which of the two options will deliver the highest profit.

What looked like a difficult problem, with lots of complexity, can really quite elegantly be resolved. So, if benefits and costs are the stuff of business decisions, could we adopt a similar approach for all human decisions, and consider the pleasure and the pain of the available options to work out which is the best? This is the basis of utilitarianism.

More of one, or of the other? Utilitarianism to the rescue! (image via DALL·E)

But making that leap is not quite straightforward. Russ Roberts, an economist and polymath, scrutinizes utilitarianism in a series of four posts which read like a comprehensive catalogue of the criticisms that are regularly levelled at the philosophy. Can – and indeed, should – utilitarianism be salvaged?

Utilitarianism without measure?

In the first post, Roberts discusses perhaps the single biggest fundamental weakness of utilitarianism: we cannot really compare the 'apples and oranges' of the multifarious influences that give us pleasure and pain, because we have no way of quantifying them.

Many of the things that matter to us – from the excitement of seeing our offspring take their first steps and the joy of meeting with an old friend after more than 20 years, to the distress of feeling unappreciated at work or the regret of having left behind close family when emigrating – are very disparate. But does that mean we cannot compare them? I am not so sure. We don't need a measure to determine whether an evening at home with our loved one will give us more pleasure than a formal dinner with prospective clients, or to decide that taking the grandchildren to the playground is more pleasant than staying at home and mowing the lawn (though the latter does need doing today). Our most distant ancestors survived and prospered – and managed to procreate, ultimately leading to our very existence – because they could compare apples and oranges. They could distinguish nutrients from toxins, and more nutritious from less nutritious environments, shelter from danger, and safer from less safe environments – all without having access to any measures. Even before our less remote ancestors invented mathematics and adopted the first precursors to our present-day money, they were able to determine which hunting or – later – agricultural strategy was better than the other.

This problem is developed further in the second post, in which Roberts makes a robust argument against the alleged utilitarian practice of dealing only with what can easily be quantified, while conveniently ignoring that which cannot, the immaterial and intangible. "If we are not careful, what gets measured is all we manage," he writes. Does that really happen all that often? We are perfectly capable, for example, of looking beyond the (quantifiable) price of a gift to a friend, and the (immaterial) pleasure we expect it to give them (and indirectly, us!). Yes, some people may judge a charity on the basis of how much of their income goes towards overheads, rather than on how much they contribute to the good cause. But that seems less a problem with utilitarianism per se, and more a case of inadequate application of utilitarianism – just like a cost-benefit analysis that ignores part of the costs or benefits would be. Moreover, this argument seems to trip over its own feet. If utilitarianism is about weighing up pleasure and pain, and if, as is argued, these cannot be measured, how can an approach that focuses only on what can be counted or measured even be utilitarianism?

Sometimes a spurious scalar is simply made up to capture a complex constellation of influences, pretending to quantify pleasure and pain. I share Roberts' criticism of this practice, but this too seems to me to be poor use of utilitarianist thinking, not a flaw in the underlying principles.

The flaws of the founder

The foundations of utilitarianism were, if not invented, then certainly first firmly laid down by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham at the end of the 18th century. He started from the notion of pleasure and pain ("pain and pleasure are the key to understanding human behavior and morality", writes Roberts in the third post), and posited the notion of utility, to keep score of good and bad impacts. That we cannot really measure this doesn't bother Bentham, who suggests this simple method: "Sum up all the values of all the pleasures on the one side, and those of all the pains on the other. The balance, if it be on the side of pleasure, will give the good tendency of the act upon the whole, with respect to the interests of that individual person; if on the side of pain, the bad tendency of it upon the whole." This reads like serious overreach – even it were possible to quantify utility, making this kind of aggregate sum would be impossible to calculate.

Utilitarianism, a little too literal? (photo: Chris Pastrick/Pixabay)

Problematic as it is, the assumption naturally leads to the conclusion that we can discover the combination of choices that produces maximum utility. This too is illusory. Even at a personal level, we could not possibly actively consider every possible way we can spend every penny or every second we have at our disposal, and work out how we can maximize our utility.

It may be presumptuous to dismiss these ideas of the very founder of utilitarianism as misguided folly, but to do otherwise would be to fall foul of a combination of appeal to authority and the halo effect **. Taking Bentham's elegant insight (that the choices we make are by and large driven by pleasure and pain) to such absurd extremes is deeply flawed – even if it is Bentham himself doing so. Sorry, Jezza!

Utilitarian thinking may be unfit for the purpose of discovering an all-encompassing solution to all our decisions, but that doesn't mean it is not useful for weighing up a manageable number of options, in a particular context, in terms of pleasure and pain – which bottle of wine to buy, what charity to donate to, or whether to turn a blind eye to one of the children sneakily nabbing another biscuit. Amid his relentless challenges, Roberts would appear to agree: "there are indeed parts of life where we are utilitarian in this way".

Even if it's about others, it's about us

For utilitarians, everything is about utility – individual pleasure and pain – and that is too limited, the criticism goes. There is friendship, and family, and community. There are social norms, and rules of conduct that urge us to subdue our own self-interest.

But are these alleged 'out of scope' aspects not in fact about individual pleasure and pain? Do we not feel pleasure in friendship, and in caring for our family? Do we not experience pain when they suffer, and indeed when we fail them in some way? Do we not find joy in being a respected member of the many communities we are part of, and do we not feel some inner discomfort (or worse) when we disregard the values that correspond with their norms and rules? It would seem that – along more direct, physical pleasure and pain – such more ethereal aspects totally deserve a definite place in utilitarian thinking.

We derive pleasure from going out with our beloved and seeing that he or she is enjoying him- or herself, from our child (or grandchild!) uttering its first word. To deny this is really misrepresenting utilitarianism and how it embraces utility. Can 'subduing our self-interest' give us utility? It can be a superb example of a win-win. When we make a sacrifice for someone else (drop a banknote in a beggar's hat, give someone a lift that takes us out of our way, spend time and effort baking a birthday cake for a sibling), we are just as much increasing our utility by doing so, as we would by buying a new shirt, attending a Bruce Springsteen concert, or enjoying a glass of single malt.

Doing something right, and doing the right thing increase our utility, and perfectly fit within the utilitarian thinking framework. How else would we decide to pick up our spouse from the station so she or he does not have to walk for 15 minutes in the rain, rather than stay on the couch with a glass of wine, watching Netflix?

I'd gladly give her a lift, even i fit means a large detour for me (image via DALL·E)

The pleasure we experience almost always comes at a cost (or pain) – whether or not the pleasure is direct, or indirect through the pleasure we give to others. The conflict suggested here is false, and the deeper satisfaction that we might get from doing what we feel is right is categorically indistinguishable from more fleeting pleasures.

A good approach, poorly applied

In the final part of his critique, Russ Roberts zooms in on how the calculus of well-being, the totting up pleasure and pain, can mislead us. Any approach can mislead when it is used incorrectly, for example because we provided it with selective inputs, or when we use it beyond its scope of applicability. Utilitarian thinking is very well capable of providing guidance beyond the material, the commercial and the easily measurable. When we decide whether or not to rent or buy a particular home, or whether or not to babysit the grandchildren next weekend, we can call on utilitarianism for direction. Is the home light and airy, is it not too noisy, and in a nice neighbourhood? How large is our son and daughter-in-law's need for an evening on their own and our own desire for a quiet few days? We work it out by evaluating how we feel about the choices – yes, indeed, in terms of the pleasure and pain we derive from the immaterial, the non-commercial and the immeasurable.

If we only look at what can be quantified, we inevitably may end up making the wrong call. And if we take Bentham's assertion for reality, that utilitarian thinking can objectively, scientifically and precisely draw the line between decisions that make the world a better place, and decisions that don't, we not only expect too much from the method, we also seek to abdicate our own responsibility for making good decisions to it.

The irony is that a utilitarian approach that only looks at numbers cannot give us much guidance, if any at all. We know that one hundred is more than three, but that doesn't mean that one hundred pinches of salt is better than three, that one hundred slaps to the face is better than three, or that a house with a one hundred acre garden is better than one with a three acre one. Utilitarianism only works when we can interpret whether something is better than something else – whether it gives us more (or less) pleasure (or pain) than something else. It is rare for numbers to do that on their own.

Utilitarianism is also not capable of optimizing our life. A life well-lived is an emerging phenomenon, not something that we can pursue in its own right. It is a life that is the result of all the decisions we have made over our lifetime, great and small. It is with those individual decisions that utilitarian thinking can help, not by telling us what to do, but by informing our judgement.

It is, however, not the only instrument we should use to make good choices. There is more, but that is for part III.

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