Utilitarianism and Politics

Reading comments on my recent post on implications of different versions of utilitarianism I was struck by the number of commenters who identified utilitarianism with central planning, assumed that anyone who took utilitarianism seriously must be in favor of the government ordering people around, redistributing income, controlling the society. Utilitarianism is the view that individuals should act to maximize total (or average) utility. To get from that to a political position requires a theory of what political institutions maximize utility. If centrally planned socialism works to give everyone a good life a utilitarian should be a socialist, if anarchocapitalism works, an anarchist. My most recent post offered, for six different issues, arguments for a libertarian position all of which could have been put in utilitarian terms, as reasons to believe the libertarian position would produce greater utility than alternatives.

In that post I wrote:

Declining marginal utility is a utilitarian argument for transferring money from rich, for whom a dollar is of little value, to poor, to whom it is of greater value. One common way of avoiding that conclusion is to deny the possibility of interpersonal utility comparisons.

Comments on the previous post provided evidence for that interpretation of the argument’s motives, multiple commenters who interpreted utilitarianism as support for political views they rejected and attacked it on the grounds that interpersonal comparisons of utility were impossible. At least some interpreted my offering arguments against their position as implying that I must be a utilitarian.

Commenters rejecting the possibility of interpersonal utility comparisons responded to my pointing out that we routinely make them by arguing that even if I could and did make interpersonal utility comparisons on a small scale, decide which friend would get most happiness out of what gift or whether to do something one child or the other preferred according to how happy I thought it would make each, I could not do it in the large, could not know enough about eight billion strangers to measure their utility.

That version of the argument about the impossibility of utilitarianism depends on assuming that nothing is worth doing unless it can be done perfectly. That is not a standard we apply to other parts of our lives. Nobody I know believes that you should never get on an airplane unless you know everything relevant to how safe it is, including how much sleep the pilot got the night before, never propose to a woman unless one knows for certain every detail of her life that might affect how well the marriage will turn out. Yet multiple commenters on my post seem to believe that one could not choose actions on the basis of their effect on world utility without knowing and being able to compare their effect on everyone in the world.

I am neither God nor world-dictator, am not running the lives of eight billion strangers, only my own. If I were a utilitarian I could decide what to do by the effect of my actions on the people they most directly affect, most of whom I know. I could even, since I live in a market society, use signals I get through the price system to provide information about indirect effects of my actions. I can, for example, be reasonably sure that buying something does not lower the utility of the seller since if it did he wouldn’t sell it to me.

Historical Evidence

Judging by its influence in the past, utilitarianism is a better argument for freedom than against it. Jeremy Bentham, who invented the philosophy in the late 18^th century, had an odd mix of ideas and enthusiasms, but more nearly libertarian than socialist:

(Bentham) advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and (in an unpublished essay) the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment, and physical punishment, including that of children.

…

In the 1780s, for example, Bentham maintained a correspondence with the ageing Adam Smith, in an unsuccessful attempt to convince Smith that interest rates should be allowed to freely float.(Jeremy Bentham, Wikipedia)

Classical liberalism, the 19^th century version of libertarianism, was largely the work of utilitarians.

The central concept of utilitarianism, which was developed by Jeremy Bentham, was that public policy should seek to provide "the greatest happiness of the greatest number". While this could be interpreted as a justification for state action to reduce poverty, it was used by classical liberals to justify inaction with the argument that the net benefit to all individuals would be higher.

Utilitarianism provided British governments with the political justification to implement economic liberalism, which was to dominate economic policy from the 1830s. Although utilitarianism prompted legislative and administrative reform and John Stuart Mill's later writings on the subject foreshadowed the welfare state, it was mainly used as a justification for laissez-faire. (Classical Liberalism,Wikipedia)

Economics, Utilitarianism and Libertarian Conclusions

Economics is the academic field most friendly to libertarian ideas, if not as friendly as libertarians would like. The founder of the main line of neoclassical economics, Alfred Marshall, was a utilitarian, as was Ludwig von Mises, a leading modern figure in the Austrian school of economics. The concept of economic efficiency, the nearest thing modern economics offers to a way of evaluating economic outcomes, is built on Marshall’s definition of an economic improvement, offered by him as a proxy for a change that increases total utility.

One reason economists are more likely than philosophers or sociologists to be libertarians is that economics provides the best defense for the workability of decentralized coordination, an argument sketched in an earlier post, shows how it is possible, even in an interdependent economy, for each individual to control his own life. Arguments against price controls, minimum wage law, tariffs are generally constructed in economic terms by economists. One reason to reject arguments for government tweaking the market system to make it work better is public choice theory, economics applied to the political market, as I tried to show in a book chapter¹ arguing that the conditions that produce market failure are the exception on the private market, the rule on the political market, hence that moving a decision from the former to the latter is more likely to create market failure than to prevent it.

In order to argue for or against things one needs some criterion by which to judge them. Utilitarianism does not perfectly match my views, which is why I am not a utilitarian, but it represents a substantial part of what I, and most people, value, which makes it useful for arguments that do not depend on first convincing people of libertarian philosophy.

---

My web page, with the full text of multiple books and articles and much else

Past posts, sorted by topic

A search bar for past posts and much of my other writing

1. Also multiple talks, of which this is one, for those who prefer arguments in that form.