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Utilitarianism Now and Then

As the Introduction implied, the possibilities for utilitarian selves and ways of living being tentatively defended in this work are critical of, not based on, the desiccated selves of formal utility theory and the hollow consumerist lifestyles associated with neoliberal notions of affluence and the good life. No one should admire “Davos Man” or the antics, both absurd and dangerous, of billionaires and aspiring billionaires described in Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.1 In the whirl of ever enhancing smartphones and big screens, the affluent world’s sustained assault on kindness and meaningful relations is felt by many but tragically downplayed by elites and tech lords. Epidemics of loneliness, isolation, anxiety, depression, anger, resentment, dread, and nature-deficit disorder – masked by thin and uninformative measures of happiness and health – with so many people wondering why they should feel good about struggling just to keep up, working in “bullshit jobs” or being part of the “precariat,” have produced widespread pain and deaths of despair.2 As Angus Deaton puts it:

An insightful opinion piece in the New York Times adds: “Tens of millions of Americans are suffering pain. And chronic pain is not just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families.”4 Much of the pain has no identifiable physical cause, and the old, the middle-aged, and the young are all suffering.

And this is not to mention the more overt forms of violence, such as the gun violence that in the US is a telling symptom of how deeply disturbed society really is, making proclamations of societal “happiness” seem like a very sick joke. The same can, of course, be said of police violence and the prison-industrial complex; violence against women (as in the shocking numbers of missing and murdered Native American women); violence against migrants, Asian communities, LGBTQ+ peoples, and on and on, as described so vividly in The Red Deal. And, of course, there is the pervasive, inescapable background of violence against non-human animals, the painful and unnecessary deaths of billions of creatures through factory farms and other parts of the systems of food production and land “development” that have, with the complicity of governments, exacerbated environmental crises and generated any number of health problems – heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and more.5

It appears that all the genocidal depredations of colonialism, settler colonialism, and imperialism only succeeded in producing worlds that no one should want or admire, even in the metropoles of empire. Yes, indoor plumbing and antibiotics, etc., are wonderful, but they are clearly not enough of a bribe in a world of massive, structural, negative externalities. The legitimation crises, long overdue, dotting supposedly affluent countries around the world, from Japan and South Korea to Israel to the UK, France, and the US, sit uneasily with triumphalist rhetoric about national greatness. “Lying flat” or dropping out makes perfect sense to so many young people because it is so very unclear whether the strains of a consumerist modern life, in schools and workplaces, are truly worth it.6 They probably are not. The “smart” society is too smart for its own good, a constant assault on the ordinary person’s sense of adequacy:

It is puzzling that such a world could ever be deemed a realization of the utilitarian dream, given the utilitarian theme of reducing pointless suffering and needless pain. Societal addiction to opioids, and to the lethal capitalism that pushed them, should not be taken as sound utilitarian policy. They are appalling even by the standards of “classical” Eurocentric utilitarianisms, and the century that produced the Opium Wars8 – indeed, even by the standards of Adam Smith, who thought deference to the rich and powerful a delusion.9

Still, too many utilitarians, dead and living, have had trouble recognizing and owning up to damning problems and policies at home and abroad, and the “greatest happiness” principle should always come with a warning label and list of instructions for safe use. This chapter and the next two will tell some familiar stories about the development of modern utilitarianism, particularly in the work of the patriarchs Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick, but with some twists and more critical attention to their roles, often complicitous and oblivious, in the expansion of the British Empire. Illuminating the conflicting meanings of utilitarianism, even in its Eurocentric varieties, will help to facilitate the decolonizing project. So, there is a centering here, meant to facilitate the de-centering. It is in the tensions, reversals, and inversions of contending utilitarianisms that one can find some useful tools for at least escaping from, if not dismantling, the master’s house, to adapt some words from Audre Lorde.

Another Cautionary Note

It is not easy to do justice to utilitarianism, even in its familiar Eurocentric and Anglo-American trajectory. The differences between such canonical figures as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill – or the latter and Henry Sidgwick – were deep and intractable. What, then, of the differences distinguishing such figures as Richard Cumberland, David Hume, Edmund Burke, William Paley, William Godwin, Harriet Taylor Mill, James Fitzjames Stephen, Herbert Spencer, G. E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell, all of whom have been classed as utilitarians? Realists, immaterialists, and idealists, empiricists, intuitionists, and rationalists, believers, agnostics, and atheists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, and anarchists have all at times adopted the label after their own fashions, or been awarded it by others, and often enough utilitarianism’s better practitioners have not labeled themselves as such at all.

Admittedly, in the familiar narratives, and at a high level of abstraction, there are some unifying threads – primarily the notion that the top normative standard of individuals, social practices, and institutions should be to achieve the most ultimate good by somehow maximizing, or at least ambitiously promoting, the happiness (or well-being, or pleasure, or preference satisfaction, or beneficial life quality) of all beings or entities capable of experiencing it, present and yet to come (and perhaps past as well, if the belief system in question allows the possibility of making the ancestors or others in earlier generations better off).10 Right and wrong are to be determined by the best (or better) and worst (or worse) consequences of actions, rules, social practices, institutions, or whatever the key foci are taken to be (acts versus rules being only one of the relevant controversies). A consequentialist, teleological framework defining right versus wrong in terms of maximizing the aggregate good (or optimizing, or satisficing), and rejecting the notion that anything – except perhaps violating the utilitarian principle itself – could be absolutely wrong, wrong “whatever the consequences,” is perhaps the brightest thread. Broadly put, utilitarians are wary of dogmatic absolutism, in religion, ethics, economics, or politics, unless there are good consequentialist reasons to refrain from doubting. And bluntly put, they are given to pressing the question: what gain from the pain?

To be sure, some of the early English utilitarians assumed that decent ordinary people could best advance the general happiness by for the most part prudently tending to their own piece of the felicific calculus, their own individual happiness and that of their families and friends, given their superior knowledge of their own condition and the limited and uncertain means at their disposal for helping distant strangers. Arguably, in many times and places, people just do want to (or have to) get on with their lives without being in a state of perpetual anxiety and doubt about whether they are really doing the right thing. The interests of self and other, if not harmonized by God or theological considerations (as they were often taken to be by the religiously minded), were often...