Browsing by Subject "Utilitarianism"

This dissertation provides an answer to what I call the central question of moral philosophy: what, if anything, is moral value? The answer, I argue, is that moral value is the relational property of eliciting a suitable response from a properly informed, rational, benevolent and otherwise minimal spectator. I call this theory the response-dependent benevolent ideal observer theory or BIORD.

Although the way in which I express and argue for BIORD is original and unique, the core of the theory is old. In chapter 1, I explore these historical roots. The notion that moral value depends, in some sense, upon the reactions of an idealised spectator stretches back at least to Adam Smith and, I argue, to his tutor Francis Hutcheson. I explore how a natural connection between ideal observers, benevolence and utilitarianism has often been assumed without being explicitly argued for.

In chapter 2, I lay out certain crucial meta-theoretical assumptions that help to motivate BIORD. I argue against the methodology of conceptual analysis and in favour of a revisionary approach sometimes called ‘conceptual ethics’. I explore the theoretical aims that ought to guide the conceptual ethicists’ project before arguing in favour of a response-dependent metaethics, in contrast to other sentimentalist theories such as fitting-attitude accounts. The response-dependent schema states that an object is morally valuable if and only if a particular agent would have a particular reaction to it (in certain circumstances).

In chapter 3, I argue that the agent that ought to fill the response-dependent schema is a properly informed, rational, benevolent and otherwise minimal spectator. I define benevolence as a final care directed towards the welfare of conscious creatures and thus argue in favour of welfarism: the view that welfare is the only essential moral value.

In chapter 4, I discuss which of the benevolent observer’s reactions are best thought of as relevant, and which objects are best thought of as the bearers of both essential and non-essential moral value. I suggest that any attitude which lacks the property of being ‘truth-oriented’ is relevant. Arguments concerning the objects of value leads to a discussion of Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, which BIORD entails. I argue that we ought to embrace it. Lastly, I discuss the objects of non-essential value, showing how BIORD can capture some intuitions that value pluralists might otherwise use against it.

Finally, in chapter 5, I discuss how accepting BIORD would impact our moral discourse, arguing in favour of a radical eliminativist proposal in which deontic language is abandoned in favour of comparative value-talk. I then discuss how BIORD can provide us with a theory of reasons.

“The Complete Bentham: Rationality’s Afterlife in Victorian Literature,” focuses on one of the nineteenth century’s most contentious attempts to imagine the social good in quantitative terms: Jeremy Bentham’s proposal to measure and manage “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” The last time literary studies took Bentham seriously, the guiding assumption was that his Panopticon prison trained individuals in the routines of self-policing that liberal government required, and that the novel carried that disciplinary training to the reading public. I show that this argument considers only a small part of Bentham’s massive corpus and so misses both the radical reformulation of liberal government that he was proposing and the aesthetic possibilities that his utilitarianism opened up as a result. The Victorians certainly thought there was something caustic in Bentham’s system of cost-benefit analysis, a worry expressed in charges that Bentham was an emotionally deficient thinker who would, like Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind, “weigh and measure any parcel of human nature and tell you what it comes to.” This critique, I argue, has its basis in the Victorian recognition that Bentham’s logic challenges liberalism’s normative commitments including the individual’s right to own property and the primacy of the family as the fundamental unit of society. When Bentham asserts that the only way to manage a population of rational individuals is to maximize pleasures and minimize pains, no matter their source, he imagined a form of cost-benefit analysis that makes any particular right or social norm expendable in the name of producing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Rather than show how the novel appropriates Bentham’s panoptic apparatus to reinforce the norms of liberal society, I argue that Bentham’s excessive reason is the means by which nineteenth-century literature found its way outside those norms. When Victorian novelists join liberal thinkers in chastising Bentham for translating qualities of life into quantities of pleasure and pain, they also memorably preserve the perverse implications of utilitarian rationalism and imagine new qualities of life. Even so obvious a caricature of Bentham as Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind offers a vision of a life passionately animated by the compulsion to calculate.

In order to see what became of utilitarianism’s calculating rationality in the Victorian cultural imagination, each chapter of my dissertation considers how a different novelist takes up one aspect of Bentham’s multi-faceted theory in order to contemplate its radical consequences. My first chapter, “Calculating Pleasure,” begins with Bentham’s assumption that individuals who imagine future pleasures and pains can be governed by means of a carefully calibrated threat of future punishment. Shelley’s Frankenstein takes up this calculating logic in order to reverse it: the more Victor and his creature imagine their futures, the more ungovernable they become as their disappointment and hope lead them to increasingly antisocial behaviors. In my second chapter, “Expanding Bureaucracy,” I show how Dickens enacts a different reversal when considering the universal suspicion that motivates Bentham’s plans for a universal bureaucracy. While Bentham, ever distrustful of government functionaries, insists on layering one level of government inspectors on top of another until the whole population is involved in monitoring bureaucratic institutions, Dickens’s late city novels (no less suspicions of government functionaries) see these bonds of mutual surveillance as the basis for forming bonds of trust and mutual aid. My third chapter, “Panoptic Economics,” returns to Bentham’s famous Panopticon prison in order to argue that even as it establishes the protocols for disciplining individuals it also imagines an alternative socialist economy that would care for and manage all unemployed people. While Wilkie Collins’s detective fiction has often been read in terms of totalizing panoptic surveillance, a revised understanding of the Panopticon allows us to see that these novels also imagine a utopian condition of full employment where everyone becomes the possessor of potentially valuable information no one can be dismissed as part of a disposable surplus population. My final chapter, “Sexual Irregularities,” considers the queer potential of Bentham’s utilitarianism. I show that Bentham’s little-known defense of homosexual, bestial, and necrophilic acts joins the aestheticism of Walter Pater in promoting pleasures that belong, not to the reproductive future of the bourgeois family, but rather “give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” Taken as a whole, my dissertation offers us a way of seeing the word “utilitarian” as something other than the catch-all term of derision for a practical, depoliticized, and unaesthetic education that sometimes appears in op-eds bemoaning the “Death of the Humanities.” By returning to Bentham’s contentious place in the Victorian cultural imagination I hope to show just how impractical, political, and aesthetic utilitarianism can be.