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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: This is Philosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
This is Political Philosophy is an accessible and well-balanced introduction to the main issues in political philosophy written by an author team from the fields of both philosophy and politics. This text connects issues at the core of political philosophy with current, live debates in policy, politics, and law and addresses different ideals of political organization, such as democracy, liberty, equality, justice, and happiness. Written with great clarity, This is Political Philosophy is accessible and engaging to those who have little or no prior knowledge of political philosophy.
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Seitenzahl: 538
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
PREFACE
Part I: CORE VALUES IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
1 HAPPINESS
Doing Political Philosophy
Happiness, Welfare, and the Aims of Government
If You’re Happy Do You Know It?
The Pursuit of Happiness
Happiness and Government
Happiness and Public Goods
Free Riding and Small Contributions
Should We Evaluate Political Institutions According to their Ability to Make People Happy?
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
2 FREEDOM
The Meaning of Freedom
The Fundamental Question
What Is Freedom? And Who Is Free?
Paternalism, the Harm Principle, and Moralism
Conclusion
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
3 EQUALITY
Introduction
How Unequal Are People in the United States?
Against Equality: A Politics of Procrustes?
Unequal Treatment and Discrimination
Equality as a Baseline?
Equality of Resources and Luck Egalitarianism
Equality of Opportunity
Inequalities in the Real World
Inequality or Deprivation?
Is Sufficiency Enough?
Complex Equality
Race, Gender, and the Social Construction of Inequalities
Affirmative Action
Conclusion
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
4 JUSTICE
Justice: A Brief Introduction
Rawls’s Theory of Justice
The Libertarian Critique: Individual Liberty Restricts Redistribution
Utilitarian Critique: An Alternative Rationale for Redistribution
Feminist Critique: The Public–Private Distinction and Power Relations
Communitarian Critique: Alternatives to Individualism
Cosmopolitan Critique: The Demands of Global Justice
Conclusion
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
Part II: PROBLEMS OF AUTHORITY AND LEGITIMACY
5 DEMOCRACY
Democracy and Political Self‐Governance
What Is Democracy?
Who Gets to Participate?
Constitutional Democracy and Rights
Benefits of Democracy: The Instrumental Case
Is Democratic Self‐Governance Intrinsically Valuable?
Is There a Right to Democratic Self‐Governance?
What Are the Implications of a Right to Democratic Self‐Governance?
Voting and Representation: Interests or Ideals?
Does Democracy Rest on a Paradox?
Deliberative Democracy as a Solution?
Distorting Democracy: Persistent Minorities and Electoral Inequalities
Do Democracies Decline and Fall?
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
6 THE OBLIGATION TO OBEY THE LAW
Breaking the Law
Breaking the Law: A “How to” Guide
Do We Have an Obligation at All?
Conclusion
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
7 POLITICAL VIOLENCE
Umkhonto we Sizwe
What Is Violence?
When (If Ever) Is Violence Justified?
Pacifism
Ius ad bellum
: “Just War” and the Justification of Large‐Scale Violence
Testing Just War Theory
Ius in bello
: Justice in the Conduct of War
Cultural Conflicts and the Laws of War
Pushing the Limits, I: Preemptive War
Pushing the Limits, II: When Are Captured Combatants “Prisoners of War?”
Pushing the Limits, III: Torture, “Enhanced Interrogation,” and Ticking Bombs
Punishment
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
Part III: SPECIFIC TOPICS
8 WHO COUNTS?
Who Gets Justice?
The Guano Ring
Animals
Moral Standing and Moral Personhood
Degrees of Moral Standing? The Constitutive View
Comparative Moral Standing: The Constitutive View
Comparing Characteristics and Abilities
Objections to the Constitutive View
Hard Case I: Fertilized Ova and Fetuses
Hard Case II: Childhood and Disability
Hard Case III: Distant Peoples and Future Generations
Hard Case IV: Posthumans?
Hard Case V: Ecosystems and the Natural World
Upshot
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
9 RELIGION AND POLITICS
Religion and Politics
Is Religion Special?
Multiculturalism
Is Religion Suspect in Politics?
Conclusion
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
10 MONEY, LIES, AND POLITICAL CORRUPTION
Lying Politicians
Bribery and Corruption
Conclusion
References and Further Reading
Online Resources
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
List of Tables
Chapter 01
Table 1.1 Distribution of happiness.
Chapter 03
Table 3.1 Percentage of the total wealth owned by US citizens.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 03
Figure 3.1 Actual, estimated, and preferred distributions of wealth in the United States (with related
video
).
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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THIS IS PHILOSOPHY
Series editor: Steven D. Hales
Reading philosophy can be like trying to ride a bucking bronco—you hold on for dear life while “transcendental deduction” twists you to one side, “causa sui” throws you to the other, and a 300‐word, 300‐year‐old sentence comes down on you like an iron‐shod hoof the size of a dinner plate. This Is Philosophy is the riding academy that solves these problems. Each book in the series is written by an expert who knows how to gently guide students into the subject regardless of the reader’s ability or previous level of knowledge. Their reader‐friendly prose is designed to help students find their way into the fascinating, challenging ideas that compose philosophy without simply sticking the hapless novice on the back of the bronco, as so many texts do. All the books in the series provide ample pedagogical aids, including links to free online primary sources. When students are ready to take the next step in their philosophical education, This Is Philosophy is right there with them to help them along the way.
This Is Philosophy: An IntroductionSteven D. Hales
This Is Philosophy of Mind: An IntroductionPete Mandik
This Is Ethics: An IntroductionJussi Suikkanen
This Is Political Philosophy: An IntroductionAlex Tuckness and Clark Wolf
Forthcoming:
This Is Metaphysics: An IntroductionKristopher McDaniel
This Is Epistemology: An IntroductionClayton Littlejohn
This Is Philosophy of Religion: An IntroductionNeil Manson
This Is Modern Philosophy: An IntroductionKurt Smith
This Is Bioethics: An IntroductionUdo Schuklenk
THIS IS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
AN INTRODUCTION
ALEX TUCKNESS AND CLARK WOLF
This edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Names: Tuckness, Alex Scott, 1971– author. | Wolf, Clark, 1962– author.Title: This is political philosophy : an introduction / Alex Tuckness and Clark Wolf.Description: Chichester, UK ; Malden, MA : John Wiley & Sons, 2016. | Series: This is philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016013762 (print) | LCCN 2016015926 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118765951 (cloth) | ISBN 9781118765975 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781118766040 (pdf) | ISBN 9781118766002 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Political science–Philosophy.Classification: LCC JA71 .T83 2016 (print) | LCC JA71 (ebook) | DDC 320.01–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013762
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
There is no consensus in political philosophy about the order in which to introduce topics; and we realize that the order we have chosen may diverge from the order that some instructors will prefer. For this reason, the chapters in our book are designed to be substantially independent and can be used in any order. Although we occasionally refer to arguments from previous chapters to help students see connections, these references are not necessary in order to understand the material. Our goal is to create a flexible tool that can be used in a variety of different ways. Some may teach straight through. Others may want to pair this book with classic texts or case studies.
There is, however, a logic to the order of the chapters. Part I (Chapters 1–4) examines four core values that represent goals, or potential goals, of government: happiness, freedom, equality, and justice. In Part II we look at topics related to the nature of political authority: democracy and the conditions for legitimate government , the obligation to obey the law, and the legitimacy of political violence (including the topics of war and punishment). Part III (Chapters 8–10) looks at more specific questions: Who counts (Chapter 8) explores questions regarding who deserves justice, for example questions about animal rights, environmental ethics, and abortion. Chapter 9 looks at the relationship between religion and politics, including a discussion of multiculturalism. Chapter 10 addresses problems in political ethics.
Our overall approach is to try to move from examples and cases to philosophical investigation of the questions those examples and cases raise. Our hope is that the book will prepare students to have more thoughtful responses when the issues are discussed in class. Our goal is to introduce the central issues in political philosophy in ways that students will find both engaging and challenging.
PREFACE
Politics and philosophy initially seem a strange pairing. Philosophy is logical, rational, and abstract. Politics is often thought to be about power, connections, and persuading people however you can, regardless of whether the arguments are logical (or even true) or not. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Imagine the following conversation:
JUSTIN:
SOPHIE:
JUSTIN:
SOPHIE:
Political arguments don’t normally proceed like this, because merely asserting your wants is not a very persuasive way to explain your political views. In the real world, Justin is more likely to say something like: “Because affirmative action promotes justice and equality.” When he merely says what he wants, there is not much to argue about. When he makes a claim about justice and equality, there is plenty to argue about. He must persuade us that justice and equality are good things and that affirmative action does in fact support them.
Political philosophy is about taking seriously the reasons people give for claiming that political positions are good, right, or true and asking whether the reasons they give are good ones. Are they better than the reasons for thinking the opposite? Perhaps we are all sometimes persuaded by bad arguments. But most of us like to think that we know the difference between a bad political argument and a good one. We don’t like to think that people are manipulating us successfully with bad arguments. In this sense, studying political philosophy is like studying self‐defense. People often throw around terms like “justice” and “equality” without defining clearly what they mean by them, without explaining why we should value them, and without considering their implications. By arming yourself with philosophical understanding, you can avoid being misled.
We think that the best way to introduce political philosophy is to begin with real political debates and to show how philosophy sheds light on those debates. For this reason we begin each chapter with a political discussion between Justin and Sophie. We picked these names because Sophie is related to the ancient Greek word for wisdom (sophia) in the word “philosophy,” which means “love of wisdom.” The name Justin comes from the Latin word for justice (iustitia), arguably the most important term in political philosophy. As you watch them argue, you will see political philosophy in action. In the book as a whole we will try to use examples and illustrations to make the ideas clear and interesting.
Part ICORE VALUES IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY
1HAPPINESS
SOPHIE
JUSTIN
SOPHIE
JUSTIN
SOPHIE
JUSTIN
SOPHIE
JUSTIN
SOPHIE
JUSTIN
SOPHIE
JUSTIN
SOPHIE
JUSTIN
SOPHIE
JUSTIN
SOPHIE
Doing Political Philosophy
1.1 In this dialogue Justin and Sophie are discussing an issue in political philosophy. One of the most important questions is what values governments should promote. Is the point of government to increase happiness? What if promoting happiness conflicts with promoting freedom? In Aldous Huxley’s book Brave New World people are happy and content, but the contentment comes from a society where people are genetically modified and brainwashed so that they will happily accept a life with very little liberty. Bouts of boredom or anxiety are remedied through easy access to psychedelic drugs. People live lives of comfortable, meaningless amusement. There is more happiness and less pain in a world like that than in ours, but would we really say that such a world is better? In this chapter we will explore debates about whether the purpose of government is to increase happiness.
Happiness, Welfare, and the Aims of Government
1.2 Political philosophers look for ways to evaluate political institutions and the behavior of the people who shape those institutions. Are presidents better than kings? Is it better when governments leave people free to organize their own lives, or should governments constrain people’s freedom, so as to prevent them from making mistakes?
1.3 Whether it is institutions or actions that we evaluate, it is natural to consider whether they make people happy or unhappy. It is hard to conceive that a government could be good if it caused widespread suffering and misery. In the same spirit, it seems that any nation in which citizens are all happy and content must be doing something right. This chapter will examine the view that the goal of government is to make people happy. We will also consider the closely related view that the goal of politicians should be to promote the happiness of people who are affected by their choices.
1.4 To some philosophers, the view that government should promote people’s happiness has appeared to be so obviously true that it hardly seemed necessary to provide reasons for it. But happiness is more complicated than it might initially seem: what is it for people to be happy? Can we be wrong about our own happiness? Is it possible to know in advance which institutions will promote happiness? How should happiness be measured? If we can’t gauge happiness directly, are there other standards we should use to measure well‐being?
If You’re Happy Do You Know It?
1.5 If political institutions are better when they make people happy, then we need some way of judging whether people are happy. But we are often bad judges of other people’s happiness. Worse, we may not even be reliable judges of our own happiness. If you think you’re happy, could you be wrong? Those who advocate a subjective view of happiness say that you can’t possibly be wrong about your own state of happiness. If we define happiness in terms of experiences like pleasure or satisfaction, a person who is experiencing these things knows it. Suppose a person’s body were wasting away because of a terrible disease, but the pain medications were so good that she reported feeling happy. (Perhaps the medicines also keep her from realizing what is happening to her.) On the subjective view, she is happy.
1.6 Those who advocate an objective view of happiness, by contrast, would claim that people are sometimes wrong about whether they are truly happy. Suppose that a person is content to live a life devoted to video games. When asked, he honestly and sincerely says he is happy. Then he leaves virtual reality for actual reality and decides that having friends he sees with his own eyes is far better than his life before. He then looks back on his previous life and no longer sees it as a time of happiness. In principle, the same judgment could be made by someone else, that he is not happy even though he thinks he is. If a slave claims to be happy, should we believe her?
The Pursuit of Happiness
1.7 Philosophers often distinguish between things that are valued intrinsically and things that are valued instrumentally. A thing is valued intrinsically just in case it is something we want for its own sake. If you want something instrumentally, you want it because you can use it in order to get something else you want—perhaps something you want for its own sake. For example, suppose Sophie wants to be rich. If she wants money for its own sake, then she values it intrinsically. If she values money because she can use it to get things she wants, then she values it instrumentally. We might also ask whether money has intrinsic value—that is, whether it should be valued for its own sake—or whether its value is essentially instrumental.
1.8 Happiness, one could argue, is something that everyone wants. Even people who like depressing movies may go to them because they enjoy the sadness. An important school of thought in political philosophy, utilitarianism, takes the claim that happiness is the highest good as its starting point. In fact utilitarians would claim that nothing is good unless it is part of a person’s happiness, or unless it contributes to a person’s happiness. According to utilitarianism, happiness is the only thing we should value intrinsically. Everything else has only instrumental value.
UTILITARIANISM: Actions and policies should be judged according to the aggregate amount of happiness or well‐being they produce. Actions are morally better the more happiness they produce.
According to utilitarianism, we should seek to maximize happiness. It is a popular theory: most economic theories of policy choice assume that the goal of policy is to promote the happiness or well‐being of the people who are governed by them.
The view that we should promote happiness is sometimes associated with a very different view: the view that people do pursue happiness, but their own happiness, not the happiness of everyone. This view is often called
PSYCHOLOGICAL EGOISM: People exclusively pursue their own happiness in all their voluntary actions.
1.9 Psychological egoism claims that each person acts on the basis of what she thinks will bring her the most happiness. She may be wrong, but even foolish things are done for the sake of what we think will bring us happiness. Notice that this is a claim about human psychology and motivation, while utilitarianism is a normative theory—a theory about what people should do. Some philosophers have tried to put these two views together. The nineteenth‐century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham defended them both. But if psychological egoism were true, then utilitarianism would seem to be irrelevant. Why would we develop theories about what people should do if these people are already determined to act in a certain way anyway?
Whose happiness?
1.10 Subsequent philosophers have noted other problems that arise if one tries to combine utilitarianism and psychological egoism. What I think will bring the most happiness to me is different from what will bring the most happiness to everyone. If I can steal something and get away with it, I might admit that the happiness I get is smaller than the pain others will feel but still think that stealing will maximize my happiness. If promoting my own happiness and promoting the happiness of everyone conflict, then the psychological claim and the normative claim are also in conflict.
1.11 There are different strategies for reconciling these claims. One is to note that human beings have not only self‐interest but also sympathy. Sympathy (or empathy; for present purposes we use them interchangeably) causes us to feel pain at the pain of others or pleasure when others feel pleasure. Through education and other forms of socialization we can encourage people to develop this sympathetic faculty. So pursuing your own happiness will often involve doing things that are good for other people too. While this strategy can reduce the gap between what is good for me and what is good for the world, it does not bridge it completely.
1.12 Scientists who study human motivation reject psychological egoism: human motivation is much more complicated than this simplistic theory would imply. Utilitarians reject it too: many contemporary utilitarians say that, while people generally do pursue their own happiness (including the happiness of those they are sympathetic to), this is not an ironclad rule. What is central to utilitarianism is the normative claim about what people should do, not the psychological claim about what people’s motives are.
1.13 Utilitarianism gets its name from the word “utility,” which comes from the Latin word for “usefulness”: utilitas. This seemed to be an apt name, because utilitarians say that we should choose things because they are useful for bringing about happiness. According to utilitarians, happiness is the only intrinsic good. Everything else is only instrumentally valuable.
Can you measure pleasure?
1.14Jeremy Bentham, one of the first utilitarian philosophers, thought that utility is happiness and that they both can be reduced to pleasure. According to Bentham, pleasure is the only thing that is good in itself. Other things may be instrumentally good, but only if they bring pleasure. This view is sometimes called hedonism, a word based on the Greek word for “pleasure”: hēdonē. Hedonism is one answer to the question of what human well‐being consists in. Utilitarianism can be described as maximizing utility, maximizing happiness, or maximizing pleasure (and minimizing pain). Bentham sees all of these as meaning the same thing.
1.15 In Bentham’s version of utilitarianism, there is a clear sense in which the ends always justify the means. I can’t know if lying or stealing are wrong until I first figure out whether, in a given case, lying or stealing will increase or decrease overall pleasure. One potentially confusing aspect of Bentham’s terminology is that, instead of only talking about utility as that which is useful for bringing about pleasure (or happiness), he also used “utility” and “happiness” as synonyms. So for Bentham maximizing utility and maximizing happiness are the same thing.
1.16By identifying happiness with pleasure, Bentham meant something fairly specific. He was targeting the sensible experience of pleasure. He also included, as part of utility, the avoidance of pain, by which he meant, again, an internal subjective experience. His idea was that we could add up the pleasures, subtract the pains, and then arrive at an estimate of the total amount of utility that a decision would likely produce.
1.17 This may sound odd. It is obvious how you add up numbers, but how do you add up pleasures? Bentham’s strategy was to quantify them, or at least treat them in a way similar to the way we treat numbers. For any given pleasure or pain we can, at least roughly, assess its intensity.
Imagine someone asking: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much does this hurt? OK, now how much does this hurt? OK, 58 more of these and we will have the scale calibrated.”
We can also measure its duration. We can add or multiply these together to get an estimate of how much pleasure or pain something would bring.
1.18 There are many assumptions implicit in Bentham’s view: not only does he assume that we can assign numbers to pleasures and pains, so that the numbers reflect the value or disvalue of these experiences, he also assumes that one person’s pain or pleasure is the same as another’s and that it makes sense to add up or multiply different people’s numbers in a grand total. As later utilitarians have insisted, these are controversial assumptions.
1.19 Other difficulties with this view are associated with uncertainty: we’re never certain what the consequences of our choices will be. But if we’re not certain, how can we know which of our actions will maximize utility or happiness? A common strategy is to say that we should maximize expected utility. That is, for any action, we should qualify the value of that action by the probability that it will bring about the good results we hope for and by the corresponding probability of bad results.
1.20 To get an idea how expected utility works, consider what happens when I buy a lottery ticket. I might win, but I am much more likely to lose. If I want to determine the expected utility (or expected value) of buying the ticket, I should figure out the pain of buying a losing ticket times the high probability that I won’t win, added to the pleasure of winning multiplied by the (very low) probability that I will win. If the expected utility of buying a ticket is positive (perhaps this is unlikely?) then I should buy the ticket.
1.21 Focusing on expected utility means that, just because something produced good effects, it does not follow that I acted rightly. I might have done something foolish and just gotten lucky. Similarly, things might turn out badly even though I did the right thing, perhaps I was just unlucky. If you chose the action with the highest expected utility, there is at least a case for the view that you did the right thing.
Future happiness
1.22 Bentham also thought that pleasures or pains that are in the future should count less than ones that are more immediate. Suppose that there are two pleasures that are equal in certainty, duration, and intensity but that one will happen tomorrow and the other will happen in three years. Most people would choose the present pleasure over the future one. This is sometimes called discounting. You might think that we value now over later because there is some chance (even if it is very small) that the delayed pleasure will not happen (perhaps we will die unexpectedly before then!). But this is not what Bentham means. We might discount for the uncertainty of future events, but that is separate from discounting for the very fact that they are future. Bentham’s view is that, when we have done the math, even after discounting for the fact that things in the future are often more uncertain, we should also discount them simply because they are future.
1.23 Critics of discounting worry that it leads to undervaluing the lives of future generations, which can be important in calculations in areas such as environmental policy. Why should the welfare of future people matter less, merely because their suffering will take place in the future? Proponents note that there are many possible future generations. They worry that their happiness will always outweigh ours unless we discount, and that we might make ourselves miserable in the present while trying to improve the lives of people who don’t yet exist. Critics of discounting note that we might be indifferent to future disasters if we discount future costs and benefits. Can it be just to take trivial present benefits for ourselves, at great cost to future generations? If we discount, such a choice might make sense; but perhaps that shows why discounting is a problem. These considerations are important for discussions of global climate change and for policies designed to mitigate change. Should we adopt climate policies that may involve present costs, when those who will benefit from them are our distant descendants— people we can never even meet?
1.24 Utilitarians also have to consider how to sum up pleasures and pains across future events. Pains and pleasures are often part of a chain of events. To assess them, you have to look at the whole chain. The exercise and healthier eating necessary to get in better shape may bring you less pleasure in the short run than lounging on the couch watching TV and eating chips, but it may well bring more pleasure and less pain in the long run. Some things produce pain in the short run and even more pain in the long run. Some pleasures do the same. In other cases pain now may bring pleasure later, or pleasure now may bring pain later. For example, utilitarians would say that you have to look at more than just the pleasure that casual sex brings, you have to look at all of the long‐term effects. The Center for Disease control estimates that half of sexually active young people in the United States will have a sexually transmitted disease (STD) by the age of 25. That is part of the utilitarian calculation.
Pleasure and pain
1.25 Utilitarians often recommend that we both maximize happiness and minimize misery or unhappiness. Are these different goals? Are there contexts where the positive utilitarian requirement to “maximize happiness” will come into conflict with the negative requirement to “minimize misery”? If some people are badly off, we might maximize happiness by improving their situation. Or we might instead provide benefits for other people who are already quite well off. If the well‐off people are more efficient at creating happiness and the badly off people would only be made a little less miserable with our help, we might maximize happiness by devoting ourselves to those who are better off instead of those who are worse off. But many people think that this would be just the wrong thing to do: we should work to improve the situation of those who are badly off before we add extra benefits for people who already are well off. Some people take this to be a decisive objection to positive utilitarianism.
1.26 While most utilitarians assume that you can cancel out pains with pleasures and vice versa, negative utilitarians argue that we should minimize misery instead of maximizing happiness. This view has the advantage of focusing our attention on the elimination of suffering, about which there is arguably more consensus than there is about what is pleasant. It has the unfortunate implication that destroying the entire planet instantaneously would be commendable since it would ensure that there is no more pain in the world. Some people regard this as a decisive reason against negative utilitarianism. Others, including Karl Popper and Judith Shklar, have argued that the elimination of pain, suffering, and humiliation should be the first goal of politics. Still others argue that the negative consequences of our choices should be given more weight than the positive consequences. Few philosophers defend negative utilitarianism as a complete theory of morality or political choice.
1.27 But perhaps the negative utilitarian view becomes more plausible if it is qualified by other principles. For example, we might consider a mixed view that requires (1) that people’s rights must be respected; and (2) that, with that constraint, we should minimize misery. But if we add rights to the mix, have we left utilitarianism behind?
Is happiness fulfilling your desires?
1.28 A different approach is to identify happiness with desire satisfaction: on this view, happiness consists in satisfying your desires. People who define happiness this way point out that human beings often do desire things that don’t seem to be connected to pleasure. Human beings are complex and have a wide range of desires. Sometimes they seek beauty, at other times friendship, at other times knowledge. It is overly simplistic to say that we only want these things as a means to pleasure. Sometimes we want things for their own sakes:
Suppose that Erica and Allie are friends. Erica asks Allie why she chose to be her friend and Allie replies: “I find your sense of humor entertaining.” Erica responds: “So if I quit being funny you would quit being my friend?” Allie says, coldly and without sarcasm: “Definitely.”
Allie thinks of herself as a seeker of pleasure. Her commitment to the friendship is only as deep as the pleasure it brings her. This seems to be a shallow view of friendship. Friends value each other and value their friendship for its own sake.
1.29 Desire fulfillment, like hedonism, starts with the subjective perspective of each person. Both are nonjudgmental in that, if a person wants something or finds pleasure in something, then, all else being equal, all of us have a reason to help them get it even if we think it is a bad idea. Just as hedonists must find a way to compare pleasures, so desire fulfillment theorists need a way to compare the fulfillment of desires. Many of the same considerations apply: a person’s well‐being may depend more on the satisfaction of one big desire than on satisfying many small desires.
1.30There are a number of objections to the desire satisfaction approach as well. The hedonist will respond that what people desire will often bring them great pain. Perhaps it is better to give people what they don’t want, if that will spare them pain or bring them pleasure in the long run. A child may desire the chance to play in the busy street, but satisfying that desire is a bad idea. Desire theorists respond by noting that a child who is killed by a car will give up a whole lifetime of desire fulfillment opportunities, and that desire theory justifies thwarting some desires so that even more desires can be fulfilled over the long term.
1.31 A different version of the desire satisfaction theory says that we want to satisfy people’s informed desires, not their actual desires. By informed desires we mean that people understand the basic facts of what will happen if they go down a particular path. Suppose I prefer eating the steak to eating the chicken, but, unbeknownst to me, the steak contains food poisoning. In that case my informed preference would be different from my current preference. Perhaps, in that case, the best way to promote my happiness would be to give me what I believe to be my second choice. But is it right to prevent people from getting what they want, because we know or think we know better what would be good for them? Such a line of thinking might work best if we could be confident that a person’s preferences would change with new information. Can we ever be confident about such a change in judgment?
1.32 Some versions of utilitarianism talk about satisfying the preferences of as many people as possible as an alternative to talking about pleasure and pain. This allows them to talk more easily about the fact that sometimes people have a preference for sacrificing their own pleasure for the good of others.
1.33Virtue theorists hold that people should act in accordance with good qualities of character (virtues) like courage, compassion, justice, and others. Virtue theorists would point out that preference satisfaction approaches have the same problem that pleasure theories do: if people are of poor character, then it might not be good to satisfy their preferences. Some people cultivate a love of dog fighting and prefer to watch animals inflict pain on each other. Aren’t we justified to prevent the satisfaction of bad preferences like this one?
1.34 Lastly, critics of desire satisfaction theory argue that it gets things backward. We desire things because we already think they are good in some way. Desire theory puts it the other way around. It claims that things only become good because we desire them. This makes it mysterious or arbitrary why we desire some things and not others.
Do the ends justify the means?
1.35 Utilitarianism’s claim that one should maximize happiness (or well‐being, etc.) implies that the means of achieving happiness are not intrinsically important, only the outcomes are. Critics claim that that there are some cases where the end—the goal pursued—doesn’t justify the means used to achieve it. In Dostoyevsky’s classic novel The Brothers Karamazov, one of the characters says:
Tell me yourself, I challenge you—answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that child beating its breast with its fist, for instance—in order to found that edifice on its unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?
(Dostoyevsky, 1958 [1880], p. 226)
What would you say? Those who emphasize the public good often argue that the good of the whole outweighs the good of the few. Utilitarianism in particular would say that in this case the happiness of a whole society outweighs the happiness of a single child. Perhaps the knowledge that a child is suffering would make it impossible for people to enjoy their utopia, but human beings are often quite accomplished at ignoring the suffering of others when they are having a good time.
1.36 In Dostoyevsky’s case, the tradeoff is between the welfare of one child and the welfare of the rest of the society. In other situations, the conflict is between welfare (the public good) and some other value. Let’s take a moment to examine potential conflicts between the public good and some of the other values.
Nozick’s experience machine
1.37 Robert Nozick, in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, came up with a famous example designed to test whether what we value is the subjective experience of desire satisfaction or something more objective. It can be paraphrased thus (cf. Nozick, 1974, p. 42):
Suppose that you had the opportunity to hook up your brain to an experience machine that would cause you to experience an entire lifetime of incredibly pleasurable sensations. You would spend the rest of your life hooked up to the machine, but you would think you were living a great life with lots of pleasures, minimal frustrations, and satisfied desires. Whatever life you desire or value most, the experience machine would make it seem to you that you were living it: If it you wanted a rich life that includes some poignant longings, the machine could include them. If you value a life of creative achievement, that’s the life the machine would seem to provide for you. You might experience writing a great novel, followed by public acclaim. You might experience the pain of training for an Olympic gold medal followed by the pleasure of winning the gold! Of course, you would not actually do any of these things, but it would seem to you that you were doing them.
Would you plug yourself in if you were sure that it would work as advertised? If Bentham were right about our psychology, it would be irrational not to do so. If the best life is a life of satisfied desires, then the person in the experience machine would be living the best life. Many people, however, think that there would be something very wrong about hooking ourselves up to such a machine.
1.38 If you would not enter the machine, why not? Is the problem that you would be living a lie? You wouldn’t know it, so the fact that none of the experiences is actually happening would not detract from your pleasure. Nozick suggests that we shouldn’t enter the experience machine because it matters to us that we actually achieve things, not that we seem—even to ourselves—to achieve them. A parent who entered the machine might enjoy the experience of watching her children flourish and grow. But good parents don’t want it to seem that their children are flourishing. They want their actual children to flourish! Where others’ happiness is concerned, we want to actually bring happiness to others, not just to think that we are doing so. That question brings us back to the tension in utilitarianism between maximizing one’s own happiness and maximizing everyone’s happiness. If you would not enter the experience machine, perhaps this is because of something objective that matters to you, something beyond the subjective experiences you suffer or enjoy.
Happiness and virtue
1.39 Perhaps happiness is not really about adding up pleasures and pains. Perhaps it is about something the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia. This word is sometimes translated “happiness,” which can give the impression that Aristotle, who wrote much about it, was a utilitarian. Many philosophers prefer the translation “flourishing.” A flourishing plant is an excellent example of its kind. Human flourishing requires action, not just experiences.
1.40 According to Aristotle, the virtues are whatever properties make an excellent person excellent. A flourishing human being is an excellent example of a human being. Aristotle’s idea is that we find our happiness not in seeking pleasure but in becoming the sort of person who acts virtuously. And our greatest happiness, he recommends, is living a life that involves the exercise of these virtues. Part of virtue consists in becoming the sort of person who takes pleasure in things that are objectively good. Another part is developing character such that you act in virtuous ways because you value the good for its own sake.
1.41 Aristotle agrees that we all want happiness. But some objectives are difficult to achieve directly, when we are expressly aiming at them. Consider an insomniac, so intent on trying to fall asleep that she keeps herself awake. Or imagine two people who both go to an art museum. The first person is constantly thinking, “Which painting will bring me the most pleasure?” The second person is just looking for quality art because he loves good art. The second person, paradoxically, may end up having a better time. It may be better to think of pleasure, like Aristotle, as a byproduct or side effect of pursuing the right things in the right way instead of thinking about it as the actual goal of our lives.
1.42 Aristotle argues that people want to have flourishing lives and that the best way to flourish as a human being is to cultivate a virtuous character. The virtues, according to Aristotle, are qualities of character that are necessary to support our ability to make good choices. In order to flourish, we need to make good choices, but we also need to make them for the right reasons.
1.43 One way to test this theory is to ask yourself: “What is most essential to human flourishing?” Certainly there are some kinds of external things that we need: water, clothing, food, and shelter. If we can’t live, it is hard to flourish. But some people manage to live flourishing lives with relatively little, while others, who have great wealth, don’t flourish at all. Virtue theorists hold that people’s character is more important than their circumstances.
1.44 Aristotle offered a specific list of virtues—characteristics that make good people good, and without which (he thought) people could not be truly happy. Some utilitarians are reluctant to provide such a list, since it involves taking a stand on what virtue actually consists in, something about which reasonable people disagree. Instead utilitarians often focus on political questions about how to change the circumstances of life: provide more money, better jobs, better healthcare, and so on. Virtue theorists will argue that all of this is insufficient. Without good character people who have all of these things will not flourish. Not only that, but utilitarianism, given its overemphasis on pleasure, may actually make it harder to become the sort of person who has the right sort of character.
1.45 A few years ago, New York City tried to ban extra large sodas on the grounds that they’re not healthy. The rationale was straightforwardly utilitarian: smaller sodas lead to less obesity, which saves on healthcare costs. Aristotle might suggest a different rationale for the same policy: the law will help people learn to be more self‐controlled. What starts out as merely complying with the law might over time become a new way of living, which the person consciously and consistently embraces. As we will see, still others might regard such laws as an inappropriate intrusion on liberty.
The case of John Stuart Mill
1.46 John Stuart Mill, born in 1806, was raised by his father, James Mill, to be a utilitarian. His father was a friend of Bentham’s and an accomplished scholar in his own right. John Stuart Mill was homeschooled by his father and learned an enormous amount, but then had a mental breakdown in his twenties. In part, he felt that the utilitarian philosophy he had been taught to believe in couldn’t make sense of the real world. For example, he denied that all pleasures have the same value. According to the earlier theory, the pleasure you get from watching a trashy TV show is similar in quality to the pleasure you get from reading a great novel or spending the week with your best friends on the beach. The pleasures might differ in quantity because they differ in intensity or duration, but pleasure is pleasure. This means that a certain number of TV shows would eventually be equal in value to a certain number of great novels or to a certain amount of time spent with friends.
1.47 Mill thought this was wrong. Pleasures differ in quality as well as quantity.
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are [of] a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
(Mill, 1979 [1861], p. 12)
Perhaps human beings are often less satisfied than happy pigs. (This is not to imply that most pigs are happy!) Our ability to desire things routinely exceeds our ability to satisfy them. But Mill thinks that none of us would want to be a pig, no matter how good the slop or how comfortable the mud. There is no amount of merely animal pleasures that are equal to the distinctively human pleasures of rational thought and creativity.
1.48 Mill used this line of thinking in his political philosophy. He was a staunch defender of freedom of speech and argued that people should be able to live their lives as they desire so long as they do not harm others (see Chapter 2). The problem is that people can use freedom of speech in ways that cause unhappiness to others. People can make choices that will destroy their lives. It is not clear that utilitarianism will always favor liberty in these cases. Mill wrote: “I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” (Mill, 1978 [1859], p. 12).
1.49 Mill’s vision of a truly happy person is of someone who grows and develops in using his capacities for creativity, thought, and originality. It is someone becoming more like Socrates and less like a fool. Because the freedom to think and to criticize is so important to a person’s ultimate happiness, the law must protect those freedoms: in the end we will be happier.
1.50 But when Mill argues for this view, has he left utilitarianism behind? Some readers interpret Mill as having become a virtue theorist in spite of himself. The virtue theorist has a particular version of what a flourishing human life looks like and wants laws and policies that help people become that sort of person. Mill is doing something very similar: his particular version of human flourishing emphasizes individual autonomy—but it is a vision of human flourishing nonetheless. He is willing to accept a world where there is more pain and more unsatisfied preferences, if it is populated by people who are creative and original and are autonomously in control of their own lives.
Capabilities
1.51 Another alternative to utilitarianism is the capabilities approach. We can think of it as a goal to be maximized, like utilitarianism. Also like utilitarianism, it arises from a concern for whether people’s lives go well. Nonetheless, there are important differences. This approach owes much to the work of Amartya Sen. Sen developed the Human Development Index, which provides a rough measure of the quality of people’s lives.
1.52 Suppose we want to ask ourselves how well a country is doing. We could start by asking how many people have most of their preferences satisfied. The capabilities approach would instead ask specific questions: how many people can read? At what level? How many people are able to work? How many people are in good health? How many people have enough access to transportation to move around easily? Rather than taking a poll of utility, the Human Development Index looks at factors such as literacy rates, infant mortality, and nutrition in order to determine the quality of life.
1.53 Martha Nussbaum has developed Sen’s suggestion with a list of basic human functional capabilities that can, she believes, serve both as a target for development and poverty reduction and as a way to compare the relative positions of different people in a given society. Here is Nussbaum’s list:
Nussbaum’s list of basic human functional capabilities
LIFE.
Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length, not dying prematurely, or before one’s life is so reduced as to be not worth living.
BODILY HEALTH.
Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to have adequate shelter.
BODILY INTEGRITY.
Being able to move freely from place to place, to be free from violent assault, including sexual assault and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction.
SENSES, IMAGINATION, AND THOUGHT.
Being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason—and to do these things in … a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training. Being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing works and events of one’s own choice, religious, literary, musical, and so forth. Being able to use one’s mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech, and freedom of religious exercise. Being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid nonbeneficial pain.
EMOTIONS.
Being able to have attachments to things and persons outside ourselves; to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence; in general to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger. Not having one’s emotional development blighted by fear and anxiety. …
PRACTICAL REASON.
Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about planning one’s own life. …
AFFILIATION
. (A) Being able to live for and to others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another. … (B) Having the social bases of self‐respect and nonhumiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. This includes provisions of nondiscrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion, national origin.
OTHER SPECIES
. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animal, plants, and the world of nature.
PLAY
. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities.
CONTROL OVER ONE’S ENVIRONMENT
(A)
Political
: Being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life; having the right of political participation, protections of free speech and association. (B)
Material
: Being able to hold property, and having property rights on an equal basis with others; having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having freedom from unwanted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition. (Nussbaum, 2011, pp. 33–34)
Nussbaum writes:
My claim is that a life that lacks any one of these capabilities, no matter what else it has, will fall short of being a good human life. So it would be reasonable to take these things as a focus for concern, in assessing the quality of life in a country and asking about the role of public policy in meeting human needs.
(Nussbaum, 1995, p. 85)
Utilitarians argue that we should maximize happiness or well‐being. But Nussbaum argues that, rather than maximizing people’s capabilities, justice requires that we bring everyone across a threshold of capability. The first priority is to bring people across the threshold beneath which, as she says, people’s lives cannot properly be human lives at all. According to Nussbaum, people who are severely deprived, unable to exercise any of these fundamental capabilities, are living a life that is so impoverished and constrained that no human being should ever have to endure it. The second priority is to bring people over the threshold that enables their lives to be good human lives—once again, as measured by their ability to exercise basic functional capabilities. She writes:
A commitment to bringing all human beings across a certain threshold of capability to choose represents a certain sort of commitment to equality: for the view treats all persons as equal bearers of human claims, no matter where they are starting from in terms of circumstances, special talents, wealth, gender, or race.
(Nussbaum, 1995, p. 86)
There are several important advantages to a capabilities approach:
