The Rational Foundations of Ethics

T. L. S. Sprigge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000072884
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Originally published in 1988, this landmark study develops its own positive account of the nature and foundations of moral judgement, while at the same time serving as a guide to the range of views on the matter which have been given in modern western philosophy. The book addresses itself to two main questions: Can moral judgements be true or false in that fundamental sense in which a true proposition is one which describes things as they really are? Are rational methods available in ethics which can be expected to produce convergence on shared moral views on the part of those who use them intelligently?

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

Utilitarianism

1. We are concerned with three main questions in this work: Do moral judgements possess objective truth or falsehoood? Is there a rational means of testing their acceptability? Is this means calculated to bring congruence on ethical matters among those who use it properly?

A theory which, in its classic form, gives a pretty positive answer to at least the first two of these questions is utilitarianism. This is the doctrine – to put it roughly – that actions are right or wrong according as to whether they increase or decrease the amount of happiness in the world. Such judgements are supposed to be true or false in a fairly straightforward way, and to be testable by empirical enquiry or perhaps appeal to the common experience of the human race. In answer to the third question, the utilitarian might suggest that there is at least as great a tendency to convergence on these bases as pertains to any of the social sciences (which may not be saying much).

The utilitarian need not insist that these are the correct answers for all uses of ethical language or types of moral judgement. He may prefer only to claim that they apply once ethical language and judgement are understood in the way he recommends. Thus he may admit that words like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ can be, and and often are, understood in a non-utilitarian fashion, perhaps simply to express ill considered emotions in statements incapable of rational testing or of being true or false. This, however, seems to him the condemnation of such uses of the words and such forms of moral judgement. As against the chaos, or alternatively the uncritical archaism, of such moral thought, he recommends that we tidy up our ethical language so that the words have a firm utilitarian sense. They are then used to support recommendations concerning the organization of society and personal conduct resting on straight matters of fact, or at least the best available opinion on matters of fact, of the one kind around which clear minded people can expect to rally as a basis for human cooperation. If the utilitarian looks at it in this way, he takes it as a criterion for an acceptable use of ethical words, and way of understanding moral judgement, that it should give them a factual content which is the only one which it is sensible to expect people in general to endorse as a sensible guide to acceptable conduct. Thus Jeremy Bentham, the great legal and social reformer, said that when interpreted according to the principle of utility ‘the words ought, and right and wrong, and others of that stamp, have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none’ (Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Chapter One, §10).

Bentham (1748–1832) is properly regarded as the founder of utilitarianism. Although various thinkers before him had formulated much the same basic principle of utility as basic to ethics none had used it so systematically as the basis for rethinking all moral and social arrangements. It will be well, therefore, to start with his version of it.

According to this principle, as Bentham understands it, the ideal method for determining whether an individual’s action, or a legislative enactment, is right or wrong would be through evaluation of its total tendency to promote happiness, on the one hand, and to promote unhappiness on the other; if the former predominates the action is right, if the latter it is wrong. To clarify this, Bentham lists seven so-called dimensions of pleasure and pain: (1) intensity; (2) duration; (3) certainty or uncertainty; (4) propinquity or remoteness; (5) fecundity; (6) purity; (7) extent.

Of these (1), (2) and (3) are those of prime importance. If we knew all the pleasures and pains liable to be produced by an action, and could assign a degree of intensity, a duration, and a probability (represented as a fraction of one) to each, then the multiplication of these by each other, treating pleasure as a positive and pain as a negative quantity, would give the total positive or negative value of the action’s consequences, and it would be a good or right act if the result was positive, bad or wrong if it was negative.

Duration and probability, at least considered in the abstract, are relatively straightforward, but what is a pleasure’s or pain’s degree of intensity? The answer is that it is simply the degree of an experience’s pleasantness or painfulness taken at a moment, or its average pleasantness or painfulness over a period. If we conceive of the least pleasant experience which is still a pleasure, then one way of quantifying its intensity would be by characterising the number of times more pleasant a pleasure is at a particular moment than that. Perhaps the slightest pleasure of which I can conceive is that of sucking a boiled sweet. Then listening to Beethoven’s fifth symphony, well performed, and when one is in the mood to enjoy it, might be – let us say, on the average, taken moment by moment – one thousand times more pleasurable. Similarly, we should evaluate pains as so many times worse than a minimal pain.

Of the other dimensions, purity, in Bentham’s special sense, means the chance of a pleasure not leading to pains, or a pain not leading to pleasures, while the fecundity is the extent to which a pleasure breeds or leads to other pleasures or a pain to other pains. The idea is that we may know that some pleasures or pains have a generally high or low degree of purity or fecundity without its being practicable on a particular occasion to specify and evaluate specifically the precise further pleasures or pains which are likely to ensue from them. Thus the pleasures of heroin can be dismissed summarily as counting against, rather than for, the action of taking heroin, if we can say that it is a highly impure pleasure (liable to lead to much wretchedness later). Extent is the number of people who will have the pleasures or pains, and it will be invoked when we are thinking in terms of some average effect on persons affected rather than of named individuals. As for propinquity it seems that he included this mainly because his theory of value was closely linked with his theory of motivation, and it is psychologically true that we are more influenced by thoughts of the more immediate than the more remote future. It seems better not to include it as a criterion of value, once it is clearly distinguished from probability.

We are not only to include pleasures and pains liable to be produced by an action in estimating its rightness or wrongness, but pleasures and pains liable to be prevented by it. Pains prevented, given a value in accordance with the same dimensions of intensity, duration, probability, extent count along with pleasures produced, in favour of an action, while pleasures prevented, count along with the pains produced, against it. Many have thought it an objectionable feature of utilitarianism, in its classic formulations, that pleasure and pain are supposedly set off against each other in this simple way. This seems particularly objectionable when pleasures and pains prevented come into account, for one may well think it worse in an action to produce pain than merely to hinder a corresponding amount of pleasure occurring. However, it is a problem to find an alternative approach. It will not do to adopt a so-called negative utilitarianism, once advocated by Karl Popper, for which all that matters is the prevention of pain. That seems to favour mass killing of all who are liable to feel pain at all.

It is no real objection to Bentham that we can only look for an approximation to the truth about these matters of pleasure and pain. It would be a more serious objection if there were no real truth there at all to which we can hope our judgements may approximate. There are at least two reasons for thinking this may be so. First, it appears that there may be no truth as to how many times more pleasant or painful one experience is than another. Second, there may be no one truth as to what is probable and to what extent. Moreover, there are difficulties in knowing how to relate different sorts of probabilities such as those which concern the degree of credit to be given to a judgement and those which are of a statistical nature. There are, however, some indications that Bentham did not think there was a precise truth to these matters, but that a certain free play left by the facts did not matter too much in practice.

2. Sometimes Bentham is represented as having held a significantly different view from that just described, according to which an action which it is right for me to do at any moment is either one which produces a greater surplus of pleasure over pain than any alternative action then open to me (in which case it is the one right action) or produces as great a surplus as any alternative (in which case it is a right action), while all actions not thus right are wrong. We may call this the rigorist interpretation or version of utilitarianism.

The requirement implied in this formulation, that I am always morally obliged to do the best I can, is accepted as reasonable by some commentators, while it is thought of as unreasonably demanding by others. (Samuel Scheffler has recently examined this matter in an especially interesting way.) Take, by way of example, a devoted nurse who is quite exceptionally sensitive to patients’ needs. Her nursing activity would be right on our first less rigoristic formulation of the Benthamite view, for it does good by way of lessening pain and promoting pleasure and either does no harm at all, or none that is significant. However, on the second, more rigorist, view, her action would turn out to be wrong, should it be true that with even more effort she could have relieved still more suffering, or caused just a little more happiness (without countervailing harm). This implication of rigorism seems a bit absurd.

It is sometimes thought that rigorism can take adequate account of what seems troubling here by recognizing that if we ask too much of ourselves we damage our power to do good by becoming worn out or embittered. But it remains problematic whether the utilitarian should condemn as wrong all actions which are not the very best, or equal best. In favour of rigorism, there is the apparent reasonableness of saying that if one fails to do all one can to promote happiness (and, in particular, to reduce suffering) one has not done the best one could do, and that must be wrong. To allow people to comfort themselves that less than the best (or equal best) is good enough, is, it may be said, just a recipe for idle complacency. Against rigorism, is the sense that it is rather absurd to lump all who are not utilitarian saints with actual wrongdoers.

Actually, the debate between rigorism and our original less rigorist version of utilitarianism has a morally earnest character alien to Bentham. However, the issue is a lively one today, since some contemporary utilitarians adopt a highly rigorist outlook (arguing, for example, that not to have done all one personally might to feed the starving in far off places is as bad as murder) which other moral philosophers see as the reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. (See GLOVER and SINGER.) Since Bentham’s position is usually assumed to be rigorist, it is worth pointing out that his main formulations, such as we have described above, seem to be non-rigorist. Undoubtedly, he would think an action the better the more it augmented happiness, but it seems that it is only wrong, for him, if it actually augments unhappiness.

However, one feature of his formulations does suggest the rigorist view. For we have seen that the bad consequences of an action are supposed to consist not just in pain, but also in loss of pleasure, and the good consequences of an action consist not just in pleasure, but in pain prevented. He is bound to say this, indeed, for if we considered only the positive consequences of an action, and not those which would have occurred if it had not been done, one could not count in the suffering which an action prevented in its favour, which would be absurd. However, once started on this track it may seem difficult to keep clear of rigorism, for it is unclear how the good one might have done but did not can be discounted from the things prevented by what one did instead.

It seems reasonable, however, to distinguish between two different types of thing which might or would have happened if the agent had not done an action. First, there are things which might or would have happened as consequences of some other action which he might have done instead. Secondly there are things which would have occurred, if he had not acted thus, but not as consequences of some alternative action of his. One can then say that it is only things of the second sort which count as things his action prevented, when one is calculating its good and bad effects, and thus distinguish Bentham’s criterion of rightness and wrongness from a rigorist one. It stands as the view that an action is wrong if its consequences, in terms of pain promoted and pleasure prevented, outweigh its consequences in terms of pleasure promoted and pain prevented, and that other actions are right, even if not the best possible.

Yet this formulation still has an implication which Bentham would not really have accepted. It implies that if one achieves a desirable end (in terms, say, of pain prevented) but at a greater cost of suffering than was necessary for it, one’s act was right, though not the best, even if one could have achieved that end by a less drastic means. This goes against Bentham’s insistence that one must always use the means least costly in terms of distress caused. To meet this point I think one must say that Bentham’s view was, in effect, that a right action must not only do more good than harm, but must also be such that neither the particular good it does, nor any other comparable good which might have substituted for it, could have been achieved at less cost in terms of harm done.

That utilitarianism needs some such additional clause to be in the intended spirit of Bentham is beyond doubt. However, the addition is almost as problematic as it is important. Consider the dispute over fox hunting and suppose it agreed that the pleasure of men, hounds and perhaps horses, outweigh the pain of the fox. Or consider, similarly, the cruelty of the Roman circus and suppose that there are enough happy spectators to outweigh the pain of the victims. Surely Bentham would want to say that they should have sought their pleasure in other ways which would, in fact, have been equivalent, but it is quite a problem to say what is meant by ‘equivalent’ here. Still, without returning on our tracks and urging the rigorist position (that one must always do as much good as possible), there must be some kind of requirement that one do as little harm as possible, in terms of actual pain (though not perhaps in terms of pleasure prevented) in order to achieve the good one does.

This formulation still allows it to be a justifiable ground for causing pain that it will promote a ‘greater’ pleasure, when no equivalent pleasure can be obtained otherwise. One may well object to this, but perhaps not on grounds which can be called Benthamite. However, a theory which was recognizably utilitarian in spirit might seek to give priority in some way to the prevention of suffering over that of the promotion of happiness.

3. Bentham combined his utilitarian ethical theory with a hedonistic psychological theory according to which each of us necessarily seeks to maximise his own happiness. This is usually thought a highly problematic combination. What point has an ethical directive to pursue the general happiness addressed to beings who will necessarily seek only their own?

This is not a problem for most contemporary utilitarians since they usually hold no such psychological theory. But whatever difficulties attach to Bentham’s particular position, an ethical outlook which, like that of some more recent utilitarians, is not associated with some theory of human motivation is also somewhat unsatisfactory. Surely an ethical theory is not much use without some view as to what may induce humans to live by it. So it will be worth while considering briefly how Bentham saw the relation between ethics and psychology.

When someone does something we can ask (1) what he actually did; (2) what he intended to do; (3) what his motive was. What he actually did was right or wrong according to the criteria we have discussed, while his intention was right or wrong, on Bentham’s view, according as to whether his action would have been right or wrong if things had turned out as he expected. His motive is the kind of pleasure for himself (or pain avoided) at which he was ultimately aiming. Bentham tries to show that on no useful classification of motives can one divide them into those which are always good or bad. Take, for example, the motive of becoming rich or winning admiration. This is neither good nor bad in itself, it is simply a normal bit of human psychology, operating more or less strongly in different people. To regard motives themselves as good or bad is idle; they are simply the raw material of human psychology with which the legislator or social engineer must deal. The important thing is to create a society in which the motives people actually have will operate so as to generate good intentions, such as will normally produce good actions, that is, ones which augment happiness.

But what part does the moralist, as opposed to the legislator or social engineer, play in Bentham’s scheme? Curiously he comes out as another kind of social engineer who tries to show people that granted their fundamental motives (to obtain a range of pleasures and avoid a range of pains) they will do best to act rightly (in terms of the general happiness). But what if it is untrue that this is so? Then the moralist had better keep quiet on the matter, while turning to the social engineer to modify the social situation so that ‘moral goodness’ becomes ‘the best policy’.

Thus many usual sorts of moral concern are simply absent from Bentham. People are what they are, but some acts are good, others bad, and legislators, reformers and ‘moralists’ should aim at organizing society so that human beings as they really are find themselves in circumstances where they tend to do the former. This obviously poses the problem: what motivates the moralists, social engineers, and legislators, who must be Bentham’s main intended audience?

Bentham’s views on this shifted. Originally he thought of his main audience as consisting in enlightened rulers who happened to have power and who with sufficient for themselves already, sought their main further pleasure in seeking the happiness of their subjects. His mature view is of more interest to us today. It was something like this. We virtually all take some pleasure in the pleasure of others and find pain in their suffering. Where we are not dealing solely with our own affairs but forming general preferences as to the kind of society we would like to live in, the main pleasures and pains we are concerned with are precisely these pleasures and pains of sympathy. Thu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Note
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Bibliography
• Index