Episode 02: "PUTTING A PRICE TAG ON LIFE"
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Last time, we argued about the case of the Queen versus Dudley and Stevens.
The lifeboat case, the case of cannibalism at sea.
And with the arguments about the lifeboat in mind, the arguments for and against what
Dudley and Stevens did in mind, let's turn back to the philosophy, the utilitarian philosophy
of Jeremy Bentham.
Bentham was born in England in 1748.
At the age of 12, he went to Oxford.
At 15, he went to law school.
He was admitted to the bar at age 19, but he never practiced law.
Instead, he devoted his life to jurisprudence and moral philosophy.
Last time, we began to consider Bentham's version of utilitarianism.
The main idea is simply stated, and it's this.
The highest principle of morality, whether personal or political morality, is to maximize
the general welfare, or the collective happiness, or the overall balance of pleasure over pain,
in a phrase, maximize utility.
Bentham arrives at this principle by the following line of reasoning.
We're all governed by pain and pleasure.
They are our sovereign masters, and so any moral system has to take account of them.
How best to take account?
By maximizing.
And this leads to the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number.
What exactly should we maximize?
Bentham tells us, happiness, or more precisely, utility.
Maximizing utility is a principle not only for individuals, but also for communities
and for legislators.
What after all is a community?
Bentham asks.
It's the sum of the individuals who comprise it.
And that's why, in deciding the best policy, in deciding what the law should be, in deciding
what's just, citizens and legislators should ask themselves the question, if we add up
all of the benefits of this policy, and subtract all of the costs, the right thing to do is
the one that maximizes the balance of happiness over suffering.
That's what it means to maximize utility.
Now today, I want to see whether you agree or disagree with it.
And it often goes, this utilitarian logic, under the name of cost-benefit analysis, which
is used by companies and by governments all the time.
And what it involves is placing a value, usually a dollar value, to stand for utility on the
costs and the benefits of various proposals.
Recently in the Czech Republic, there was a proposal to increase the excise tax on smoking.
Philip Morris, the tobacco company, does huge business in the Czech Republic.
They commissioned a study, a cost-benefit analysis of smoking in the Czech Republic.
And what their cost-benefit analysis found was the government gains by having Czech citizens smoke.
Now how do they gain?
It's true that there are negative effects to the public finance of the Czech government,
because there are increased health care costs for people who develop smoking-related diseases.
On the other hand, there were positive effects, and those were added up on the other side
of the ledger.
The positive effects included, for the most part, various tax revenues that the government
derives from the sale of cigarette products, but it also included health care savings to
the government when people die early, pension savings, you don't have to pay pensions for
as long, and also savings in housing costs for the elderly.
And when all of the costs and benefits were added up, the Philip Morris study found that
there is a net public finance gain in the Czech Republic of $147 million.
And given the savings in housing, in health care, and pension costs, the government enjoys
a savings of over $1,200 for each person who dies prematurely due to smoking.
Cost-benefit analysis.
Now, those among you who are defenders of utilitarianism may think that this is an unfair test.
Philip Morris was pilloried in the press, and they issued an apology for this heartless
calculation.
You may say that what's missing here is something that the utilitarian can easily incorporate,
namely, the value to the person and to the families of those who die from lung cancer.
What about the value of life?
Some cost-benefit analyses incorporate a measure for the value of life.
One of the most famous of these involved the Ford Pinto case.
Did any of you read about that?
This was back in the 1970s.
Do you remember what the Ford Pinto was, the kind of car?
Anybody?
It was a small car, subcompact car, very popular.
But it had one problem, which is the fuel tank was at the back of the car, and in rear
collisions the fuel tank exploded.
And some people were killed, and some severely injured.
Victims of these injuries took Ford to court to sue.
And in the court case it turned out that Ford had long since known about the vulnerable
fuel tank, and had done a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether it would be worth it
to put in a special shield that would protect the fuel tank and prevent it from exploding.
They did a cost-benefit analysis.
The cost per part to increase the safety of the Pinto, they calculated at $11 per part.
And this was the cost-benefit analysis that emerged in the trial.
$11 per part at 12.5 million cars and trucks came to a total cost of $137 million to improve
the safety.
But then they calculated the benefits of spending all this money on a safer car, and they counted
180 deaths, and they assigned a dollar value, $200,000 per death.
180 injuries, $67,000.
And then the cost to repair, the replacement cost for 2,000 vehicles that would be destroyed
without the safety device, $700 per vehicle.
So the benefits turned out to be only $49.5 million, and so they didn't install the device.
Needless to say, when this memo of the Ford Motor Company's cost-benefit analysis came
out in the trial, it appalled the jurors who awarded a huge settlement.
Is this a counterexample to the utilitarian idea of calculating?
Because Ford included a measure of the value of life.
Now who here wants to defend cost-benefit analysis from this apparent counterexample?
Who has a defense?
Or do you think this completely destroys the whole utilitarian calculus?
Yes.
Well, I think that once again they've made the same mistake the previous case did, that
they assigned a dollar value to human life, and once again they failed to take account
things like suffering and emotional losses by the families.
I mean, the families lost earnings, but they also lost a loved one, and that is more valued
than $200,000.
Right.
And wait, wait, wait.
That's good.
What's your name?
Julia Roto.
$200,000, Julie, is too low a figure, because it doesn't include the loss of a loved one
and the loss of those years of life.
What would be, what do you think would be a more accurate number?
I don't believe I could give a number.
I think that this sort of analysis shouldn't be applied to issues of human life.
I think it can't be used monetarily.
So they didn't just put too low a number, Julie says.
They were wrong to try to put any number at all.
All right, let's hear someone who...
You have to adjust for inflation.
All right, fair enough.
So what would the number be now?
This was 30, this was 35 years ago.
$2 million.
You would put $2 million.
And what's your name?
Wojtek.
Wojtek says, we have to allow for inflation.
We should be more generous.
Then would you be satisfied that this is the right way of thinking about the question?
I guess, unfortunately, it is.
There needs to be a number put somewhere.
I'm not sure what that number would be, but I do agree that there could possibly be a
number put on human life.
All right, so Wojtek says, and here he disagrees with Julie.
Julie says, we can't put a number on human life for the purpose of a cost-benefit analysis.
Wojtek says, we have to, because we have to make decisions somehow.
What do other people think about this?
Is there anyone prepared to defend cost-benefit analysis here?
As accurate, as desirable?
Yes?
Go ahead.
I think that if Ford and other car companies didn't use cost-benefit analysis, they'd eventually
go out of business because they wouldn't be able to be profitable, and millions of people
wouldn't be able to use their cars to get to jobs, to put food on the table, to feed
their children.
So I think that if cost-benefit analysis isn't employed, the greater good is sacrificed.
All right, let me ask, what's your name?
Raul.
Raul.
There was recently a study done about cell phone use by a driver when people are driving
a car, and there's a debate whether that should be banned.
And the figure was that some 2,000 people die as a result of accidents each year using
cell phones.
And yet, the cost-benefit analysis, which was done by the Center for Risk Analysis at
Harvard, found that if you look at the benefits of the cell phone use, and you put some value
on the life, it comes out about the same, because of the enormous economic benefit of
enabling people to take advantage of their time, not waste time, be able to make deals
and talk to friends and so on while they're driving.
Doesn't that suggest that it's a mistake to try to put monetary figures on questions
of human life?
Well, I think that if the great majority of people try to derive maximum utility out of
a service like using cell phones and the convenience that cell phones provide, that sacrifice is
necessary for satisfaction to occur.
You're an outright utilitarian.
Yes.
Okay.
All right, then one last question, Raul.
And I put this to Wojtek.
What dollar figure should be put on human life to decide whether to ban the use of cell
phones?
Well, I don't want to arbitrarily calculate a figure.
I mean, right now, I think that...
You want to take it under advisement?
Yeah, I'll take it under advisement.
But what, roughly speaking, would it be?
You've got 2300 deaths.
You've got to assign a dollar value to know whether you want to prevent those deaths by
banning the use of cell phones in cars.
So what would your hunch be?
How much?
A million?
Two million?
Two million was Wojtek's figure.
Yeah.
Is that about right?
Maybe a million.
A million?
Yeah.
You know, that's good.
Thank you.
So these are some of the controversies that arise these days from cost-benefit analysis,
especially those that involve placing a dollar value on everything to be added up.
Well, now I want to turn to your objections.
To your objections, not necessarily to cost-benefit analysis specifically, because that's just
one version of the utilitarian logic in practice today.
But to the theory as a whole, to the idea that the right thing to do, the just basis
for policy and law, is to maximize utility.
How many disagree with the utilitarian approach to law and to the common good?
How many agree with it?
So more agree than disagree.
So let's hear from the critics.
Yes.
My main issue with it is that I feel like you can't say that just because someone's
in the minority, what they want and need is less valuable than someone who's in the majority.
So I guess I have an issue with the idea that the greatest good for the greatest number
is okay because there's still, what about people who are in the lesser number, like
it's not fair to them, they didn't have any say in where they wanted to be.
That's an interesting objection.
You're worried about the effect on the minority.
Yes.
What's your name, by the way?
Anna.
Who has an answer to Anna's worry about the effect on the minority?
What do you say to Anna?
She said that the minorities value less.
I don't think that's the case because individually the minority's value is just the same as the
individual of the majority.
It's just that the numbers outweigh the minority.
And I mean at a certain point you have to make a decision and I'm sorry for the minority
but sometimes it's for the general, for the greater good.
For the greater good.
Anna, what do you say, what's your name?
Yangda.
What do you say to Yangda?
Yangda says you just have to add up people's preferences and those in the minority do have
their preferences weighed.
Can you give an example of the kind of thing you're worried about when you say you're worried
about utilitarianism violating the concern or respect due to the minority?
Can you give an example?
So well with any of the cases that we've talked about, like for the shipwreck one, I think
the boy who was eaten still had as much of a right to live as the other people and just
because he was the minority in that case, the one who maybe had less of a chance to
keep living, that doesn't mean that the others automatically have a right to eat him just
because it would give a greater amount of people a chance to live.
So there may be certain rights that the minority members have, that the individual has, that
shouldn't be traded off for the sake of utility?
Yes.
Yes, Anna?
Yangda, this would be a test for you.
Back in ancient Rome, they threw Christians to the lions in the Colosseum for sport.
If you think how the utilitarian calculus would go,
yes, the Christian thrown to the lion suffers enormous excruciating pain, but look at the
collective ecstasy of the Romans.
Yangda?
Well in that time, I don't, if in modern day of time, to value the, to give a number to
the happiness given to the people watching, I don't think any policymaker would say the
pain of one person, the suffering of one person is much, much, in comparison to the happiness
gained.
No, but you have to admit that if there were enough Romans delirious enough with happiness,
it would outweigh even the most excruciating pain of a handful of Christians thrown to
the lion.
So we really have here two different objections to utilitarianism.
One has to do with whether utilitarianism adequately respects individual rights or minority
rights, and the other has to do with the whole idea of aggregating utility or preferences
or values.
Is it possible to aggregate all values to translate them into dollar terms?
There was in the 1930s, a psychologist who tried to address this second question.
He tried to prove what utilitarianism assumes, that it is possible to translate all goods,
all values, all human concerns into a single uniform measure.
And he did this by conducting a survey of young recipients of relief.
This was in the 1930s.
And he asked them, he gave them a list of unpleasant experiences.
And he asked them, how much would you have to be paid to undergo the following experiences?
And he kept track.
For example, how much would you have to be paid to have one upper front tooth pulled out?
Or how much would you have to be paid to have one little toe cut off?
Or to eat a live earthworm six inches long?
Or to live the rest of your life on a farm in Kansas?
Or to choke a stray cat to death with your bare hands?
Now what do you suppose, what do you suppose was the most expensive item on that list?
Kansas?
You're right, it was Kansas.
For Kansas, people said they'd have to pay them, they'd have to be paid $300,000.
What do you think, what do you think was the next most expensive?
Not the cat.
Not the tooth.
Not the toe.
The worm.
People said you'd have to pay them $100,000 to eat the worm.
What do you think was the least expensive item?
Not the cat.
The tooth.
During the depression people were willing to have their tooth pulled
for only $4,500.
Now
here's what Thorndike
concluded from his study,
any want or satisfaction which exists, exists in some amount and is therefore measurable.
The life of a dog or a cat
or a chicken
consists
of appetites, cravings, desires and their gratifications.
So does the life
of human beings
though the appetites and desires
are more complicated.
But what about
Thorndike's study?
Does it support
Bentham's idea
that all
goods, all values can be captured according to a single uniform measure of value
or does the preposterous character of those different items on the list
suggest the opposite conclusion
that maybe whether we're talking about life
or Kansas
or the worm
maybe
the things we value
and cherish
can't be captured
according to a single uniform measure of value.
And if they can't
what are the consequences
for the utilitarian
theory
of morality?
That's a question we'll continue with next time.
Alright now let's take the other
part of the poll
which is the
the highest
experience or pleasure?
How many say
pleasure?
How many say
fear factor?
No you can't be serious. Really?
Last time
last time we began to consider some objections
to Jeremy Bentham's version
of utilitarianism.
People raised two objections in the discussion
we had.
The first
was the objection, the claim
that utilitarianism
by concerning itself
with the greatest good for the greatest number
fails adequately to respect
civil rights.
Today we have debates
about torture and terrorism.
Suppose
a suspected terrorist was apprehended on September 10th
and you had reason to believe
that the suspect
had crucial information about an impending terrorist attack that would kill over three thousand people
and you couldn't extract the information.
Would it be just
to torture
the suspect
to get the information?
Or, do you say no?
There is a categorical moral duty of respect for individual rights.
In a way we're back to the questions we started with
about trolley cars and organ transplants. So that's the first issue.
And you remember we considered
some examples of cost-benefit analysis
but a lot of people were unhappy with cost-benefit analysis
when it came to placing a dollar value on human life.
And so that led us to the
second objection.
It questioned whether it's possible to translate all values
into a single uniform measure of value.
It asks, in other words, whether all values are commensurable.
Let me give you one other
example
of an experience, this actually is a true story, it comes from personal experience,
that raises a question at least about whether all values can be translated without loss
into utilitarian terms.
Some years ago
when I was a graduate student, I was at Oxford in England and the men, they had men's and
women's colleges, they weren't yet mixed
and the women's colleges had rules against
overnight male guests.
By the 1970s these
rules were rarely enforced and easily violated
or so I was told.
By the late 1970s when I was there, pressure grew to relax these rules and it became the
subject of debate among the faculty at St. Anne's
College which was one of these all women's colleges.
The older women on the faculty
were traditionalists, they were opposed to change
on unconventional moral grounds.
But times had changed and they were embarrassed
to
give the true grounds for their objection
and so they translated their arguments
into utilitarian terms.
If men stay overnight,
they argued the costs to the college will increase.
How, you might wonder?
Well, they'll want to take baths and that'll use up hot water, they said.
Furthermore, they argued
we'll have to replace the mattresses more often.
The reformers
met these arguments by adopting the following compromise.
Each woman
could have a maximum of three overnight male guests each week
they didn't say whether it had to be the same one or three different,
provided
and this was the compromise, provided
the guest paid fifty pence
to defray the cost to the college.
The next day
the national headline in the national newspaper read
St. Anne's girls fifty pence a night.
Another
illustration
of the difficulty
of translating
all values
in this case a certain idea of virtue
into utilitarian terms.
So,
that's
all to illustrate
the second objection
to utilitarianism, at least the part of that objection
that questions whether
utilitarianism
is right
to assume
that we can
assume the uniformity of
all values, the commensurability of all values and translate all moral considerations
into
dollars
or money.
But there is a second
aspect to this worry about aggregating
values and preferences.
Why should we
weigh
all preferences
that people have
without assessing
whether they're good preferences or bad preferences?
Shouldn't we distinguish
between
higher
pleasures
and lower pleasures?
Now, part of the appeal of
not making any qualitative distinctions about the worth of people's preferences, part of
the appeal
is that it is
non-judgmental
and egalitarian.
The Benthamite utilitarian says
that these preferences count
and they count regardless of what people want,
regardless of what makes different people happy.
For Bentham,
all that matters,
you'll remember,
are the intensity and the duration
of a pleasure or pain.
The so-called higher pleasures or nobler virtues are simply those, according to Bentham,
that produce stronger,
longer
pleasure.
He had a famous phrase to express this idea,
the quantity of pleasure being equal,
pushpin
is as good as poetry.
What was pushpin?
It was some kind of a child's game, like kiddlywinks, pushpin is as good as poetry,
Bentham says.
And lying behind this idea,
I think,
is the claim,
the intuition,
that it's a presumption
to judge
whose pleasures
are intrinsically higher
or worthier
or better.
And there is something attractive in this
refusal to judge, after all, some people like
Mozart, others,
Madonna,
some people like ballet,
others,
bowling.
Who's to say,
a Benthamite might argue,
who's to say
which of these pleasures,
whose pleasures,
are higher,
worthier,
nobler
than others?
But, is that right?
This refusal to make qualitative distinctions.
Can we,
altogether,
dispense with the idea
that certain things we take pleasure in are
better or worthier
than others?
Think back to the case of the Romans in the Colosseum. One thing that troubled people
about that practice
is that it seemed to violate the rights
of the Christian.
Another way of objecting to what's going on there
is that the
pleasure that the Romans take
in this bloody spectacle,
should that pleasure,
which is a base, kind of corrupt,
degrading pleasure, should that even
be valorized or weighed in deciding what the
what the general welfare is.
So, here are the objections to Bentham's utilitarianism,
and now we turn to someone who tried to
respond to those objections,
a later day utilitarian,
John Stuart Mill.
So, what we need to
examine now
is whether John Stuart Mill had a convincing reply
to these objections to utilitarianism.
John Stuart Mill
was born in 1806.
His father, James Mill,
was a disciple of Bentham's,
and James Mill set about giving his son,
John Stuart Mill, a model education.
He was a child prodigy,
John Stuart Mill.
He knew Latin at the age of, sorry, Greek at the age of three, Latin at eight,
and age ten
he wrote a history of Roman law.
At age twenty,
he had a nervous breakdown.
This left him in a depression for five years,
but at age twenty-five, what helped lift him out of this depression
is that he met Harriet Taylor.
She and Mill got married, they lived happily ever after,
and it was under her
influence
that John Stuart Mill tried to humanize
utilitarianism.
What Mill tried to do was to see
whether the utilitarian calculus could be
enlarged
and modified
to accommodate
humanitarian concerns like
the concern to respect individual rights
and also to address the distinction between higher and lower pleasures.
In 1859, Mill wrote a famous book on liberty,
the main point of which
was the importance of defending individual rights and minority rights.
And in 1861,
toward the end of his life,
he wrote the book we read as part of this course,
Utilitarianism.
He makes it clear
that utility is the only standard of morality
in his view.
So he's not challenging
Bentham's premise,
he's affirming it.
He says very explicitly,
the sole evidence
it is possible to produce that anything is desirable is that people actually do
desire it.
So he stays with the idea that our de facto, actual, empirical desires are the only basis
for moral judgment.
But then,
page eight,
also in chapter two, he argues that it is possible for a utilitarian to distinguish
higher from lower pleasures.
Now, those of you who have read
Mill already,
how,
according to him, is it possible
to draw that distinction?
How can a utilitarian
distinguish qualitatively higher pleasures
from lesser ones, base ones, unworthy ones?
Yes? If you've tried both of them
and you prefer the higher one naturally, always.
That's great, that's right.
What's your name? John.
So, as John points out,
Mill says, here's the test,
since we can't step outside
actual desires,
actual preferences,
that would
violate utilitarian premises.
The only test
of whether
a pleasure is higher
or lower
is whether someone who has experienced both
would
prefer it.
And here,
in chapter two,
we see the passage
where Mill makes the point that John just described,
if two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience
of both
give a decided preference,
irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, in other words, no outside, no
independent standard,
then that is the more desirable pleasure.
What do people think about that argument?
Does that,
does it succeed?
How many think that it does succeed
of arguing within utilitarian terms for a distinction between higher and lower pleasures?
How many
think it doesn't succeed?
I want to hear your reasons,
but before
we give the reasons,
let's do an experiment
of Mill's
claim.
In order to do this experiment,
we're going to look
at three
short excerpts
of popular entertainment.
The first one is a Hamlet soliloquy.
It'll be followed by two other
experiences.
See what you think.
What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason!
How infinite in faculties!
In form and moving, how express and admirable!
In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!
The beauty of the world!
The paragon of animals!
And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?
Man delights not me.
Imagine a world where your greatest fears become reality.
Each show, six contestants from around the country battle each other in three extreme stunts.
These stunts are designed to challenge the contestants both physically
and mentally.
Among six contestants,
three stunts,
one winner.
Fear Factor.
Hi Diddley-Ho, pedal to the metal-o-philes!
Landers, since when do you like anything cool?
Well, I don't care for the speed, but
I can't get enough of that safety gear.
Helmets, roll bars, caution flags. I like the fresh air and looking at the poor
people in the infield.
Dang, Cletus, why'd you have to park by my parents?
Now, honey, it's my parents too.
I don't even have to ask which one you like most.
The Simpsons, how many like The Simpsons most?
How many Shakespeare?
What about Fear Factor?
How many preferred Fear Factor?
Really?
People overwhelmingly
like The Simpsons
better
than
Shakespeare. All right, now let's take the other
part of the poll.
Which is the
the highest
experience or pleasure?
How many say
Fear Factor?
No, you can't be serious. Really?
All right, go ahead, you can say.
I found that one the most entertaining.
I know, but which do you think was the worthiest, the noblest experience? I know you found it the most entertaining.
If something is
something is
good just because it is pleasurable, what does it matter whether you have sort of an abstract
idea of whether it is good by someone else's sense or not?
All right, so
you come down in the straight Benthamite side.
Who's to judge?
And why should we judge?
Apart from just registering and aggregating de facto preferences. All right, that's fair enough. What's your name?
Nate, okay.
All right, so
how many think that Simpsons is actually,
apart from liking it,
is actually the higher experience?
Higher than Shakespeare?
All right, let's see the vote for Shakespeare again.
How many think Shakespeare is higher?
So, why is it?
Ideally, I'd like to hear from someone, is there someone
who thinks Shakespeare is higher than Shakespeare?
All right,
ideally I'd like to hear from someone, is there someone
who thinks Shakespeare is highest
but who preferred watching
The Simpsons?
Like, I guess just sitting watching The Simpsons, it's entertaining because they make jokes and they make us laugh, but like
someone has to tell us that Shakespeare was this great writer, we had to be taught how to read and how to
understand and we had to be taught how to
kind of take in Rembrandt, how to analyze a painting.
So let me, what's your name?
Anisha.
Anisha, when you say someone
told you that Shakespeare is better,
are you accepting it on blind faith? You voted that Shakespeare is higher only because the culture
tells you that or teachers tell you that, or do you
actually agree with that yourself?
Well, in the sense of Shakespeare, no, but
earlier you made an
example of Rembrandt.
I feel like I would enjoy reading a comic book more than I would enjoy kind of analyzing
Rembrandt because someone told me it was great, you know.
Right, so some of this seems to be you're suggesting a kind of
cultural convention and pressure, we're told
what books, what works of art
are great.
Who else?
Although I enjoyed watching The Simpsons more in this particular moment in Justice,
if I were to spend the rest of my life considering
the three different
video clips shown,
I would not want to spend
that remainder of my life considering
the latter two clips.
I think I would derive more pleasure
from being able to
branch out in my own mind,
sort of considering more deep pleasures, more deep thoughts.
And tell me your name.
Joe.
So,
if you had to spend the rest of your life on a
farm in Kansas with only
with only Shakespeare
or the
collected episodes of The Simpsons,
you would prefer
Shakespeare?
What do you conclude from that
about John Stuart Mill's test?
That the test of a higher pleasure
is whether
people who have experienced
both prefer it?
Can I cite another example briefly?
In biology, neurobiology last year we were told of a rat
who was tested
a particular center in the brain
where the rat was able to stimulate its brain and cause itself intense pleasure repeatedly.
The rat did not eat or drink until it died.
So the rat was clearly experiencing intense pleasure.
Now if you ask me right now if I'd rather experience intense pleasure
or have
a full lifetime of higher pleasure, I would consider intense pleasure to be low pleasure.
I would right now enjoy intense pleasure.
But,
yes I would.
But over a lifetime, I think
I would think almost a complete majority here would agree
that they would rather be a human with higher pleasure than be that rat
with intense pleasure
for a momentary period of time.
In answer to your question, I think
this proves that, or I won't say proves,
I think the conclusion
is that
Mill's theory that when
a majority of people are asked
what they would rather do,
they will answer
that they would rather
engage in a higher pleasure.
So you think that this supports, you think Mill is onto something here? I do.
Alright, is there anyone
who disagrees with Joe and who thinks that our experiment
disproves
Mill's
test?
Shows that that's not an adequate way
that you can't distinguish higher pleasures within the utilitarian
framework.
If whatever is good is truly just whatever people prefer, it's truly relative and there's no objective
definition then
there will be some society where people prefer Simpsons
more.
Anyone can appreciate the Simpsons but I think it does take education to appreciate Shakespeare as much.
Alright, you're saying it takes education to appreciate higher
things.
Mill's point is
that the higher pleasures do require
cultivation and appreciation and education.
He doesn't dispute that.
Once having been cultivated
and educated
people will see
not only see the difference between higher and lower
pleasures
but will actually
prefer
the higher
to the lower.
You find this famous passage from John Stuart Mill
it is better
to be a human being dissatisfied
than a pig satisfied.
It is 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 side of the question.
So here you have
an attempt
to distinguish
higher from lower
pleasures.
So going to an art museum or being a couch potato and swilling beer watching television
at home.
As Mill agrees we might
succumb
to the temptation
to do the latter,
to be couch potatoes.
But even when we do that
out of indolence
and sloth
we know
that the pleasure we get
gazing at Rembrandts
in the museum
is actually higher
because we've experienced both.
And it is a higher pleasure
gazing at Rembrandts because it engages our higher human faculties.
What about Mill's attempt
to reply to the objection about individual rights?
In a way he uses the same
kind of argument
and this comes out in chapter five
he says I dispute the pretensions of any theory which sets up an imaginary
standard of justice
not grounded on utility
but still
he considers
justice
grounded on utility
to be what he calls the chief part
and incomparably the most sacred and binding part
of all morality.
So justice is higher
individual rights are privileged
but not for
reasons that depart from utilitarian assumptions.
Justice is a name
for certain moral requirements
which regarded collectively
stand higher in the scale of social utility
and are therefore
of more
paramount obligation
than any others.
So justice is sacred, it's prior, it's privileged, it isn't something that can easily be traded
off against lesser things.
But the reason
is ultimately
Mill claims
a utilitarian reason
once you consider
the long-run interests
of humankind
of all of us
as progressive beings.
If we do justice and if we respect rights
society as a whole
will be better off in the long run.
Well is that convincing?
Or is Mill actually without admitting it
stepping outside
utilitarian considerations
in arguing
for qualitatively higher
pleasures
and for sacred
or especially important
individual rights?
We haven't fully answered that question
because to answer that question
in the case of rights and justice
it will require that we explore
other ways
non-utilitarian ways
of accounting for the basis of rights
and then asking
whether they succeed.
As for Jeremy Bentham
who launched
utilitarianism
as a doctrine
in moral and legal philosophy
Bentham died in 1832 at the age of 85
but if you go to London you can visit him today
literally.
He provided in his will
that his body be preserved
embalmed and displayed
in the University of London
where he still presides
in a glass case
with a wax head
dressed in his actual clothing.
You see before he died
Bentham addressed himself
to a question consistent with his philosophy
of what use
could a dead man be to the living?
One use he said would be to make one's corpse available
to the study of anatomy.
In the case of great philosophers however
better yet
to preserve one's physical presence
in order to inspire future generations of thinkers.
You want to see what Bentham looks like stuffed?
Here's what he looks like.
Now
if you look closely
you will notice
that
the embalming of his actual head was not a success so they substituted a waxed head
and
at the bottom for verisimilitude
you can actually see his actual head
on a plate.
You see it?
Right there.
So
what's the moral of the story?
The moral of the story
by the way they bring him out during meetings of the board at University College London
and the minutes record him as present but not voting.
Here is a philosopher
in life and in death
who adhered
to the principles
of his philosophy.
We'll continue with rights next time.
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