The Enlightenment Tradition: Part I
A short overview of The Enlightenment Tradition, with my opinions blended in.
The Enlightenment Tradition was a 17th to 18th century movement that fundamentally recast what people thought about every walk of life. Not just politics - as we will to be focusing on, but philosophy, art, literature, science, everything that shapes the intellectual universes within which we operate.
Professor Ian Shapiro
If you could get inside a Happiness Machine that would produce infinite happiness, would you do that?
Most people wouldn’t. We'd like happiness, but we want it to be authentic. That’s also why you probably look down on people who’re perpetually stoned. This does sound a little problematic though - if life is all about gaining pleasure, surely we should want to enter this machine?
This perhaps shows that life is not about gaining pleasure - we’d also like it to be authentic. The Truth, yay. This isn’t satisfying either - because what if someone told you that life as you know it is actually a VR? Would you remove the plug to return to the authentic life?
Again, most people wouldn’t. This shows that perhaps we prefer inertia - we’d rather have the devil we do know than the angel we don’t.
Anyway, it’s with this question that Professor Shapiro starts off the Enlightenment Tradition in his course The Moral Foundations Of Politics. 19th-century political philosopher Jeremy Bentham seems to take a less nuanced view, it seems to me - he insists that all that we do and all that we ought to do are governed by two the sovereign masters of pain and pleasure. All personal and public policies should be based solely on whether utility - that’s his fancy term for happiness - is increased generally. The greatest happiness of the greatest number, he famously said.
We discuss this for a while - but I’m afraid this was during the first few days of my degree project (that I’ll be writing on shortly), and my notes are rather patchy. I do feel, however, that Bentham was an extremist (I use the term objectively - he was a person who, relative to normal positions, was rather extreme in his ideas). Indeed, the Professor admits that Bentham does take this idea as far as he can, far more than most people would.
Three main problems emerge with Bentham’s ideology, which is utilitarianism in its classical form. First, can we measure and compare happiness? Bentham insists that we can - he calls this interpersonal comparisons of utility. However, he fails to explain how exactly we could do it, and it’s all pretty muddling. Second, utilitarianism can lead to dangerous consequences - if the utility of the majority population is increased by committing ethnic genocide of a minority, according to these laws, we’d have to approve the genocide. Disturbing, hey?
Far more pleasing to our moral senses is the third point: his ideas on redistribution. The background for this is this economic concept that actually applies to a lot of life: diminishing marginal returns. The idea is that the more you value you add to anything, the less useful each unit of your value is. It’s relatively very easy to score very well in tests - but you’d probably have to put in five or six times that effort to consistently score a full mark. Your first Ferrari is awesome - by the time you get to your tenth, the tenth one gives you decidedly less pleasure than the first one did. With each addition of time or money or an item, it becomes less valuable.
Awesome: you’ve finally figured out an economic law that explains one of the most frustrating things of life! Anyway - for the homeless guy, giving him one dollar is going to immensely increase his utility. Taking one dollar away from a billionaire is probably not gonna affect his utility at all, as we see from the DMR principle. So Bentham says: take the dollar from the billionaire and give it to the homeless guy.
Is the billionaire going to lose more utility by giving a second dollar than the homeless guy gains by getting it? No - so give the second dollar, says Bentham. And the third, and the fourth. Where can we stop? We don’t stop, according to Bentham, until perfect equality is attained. Sounds awesome (if you’re below the national average, that is. If you’re above it: well, you can understand why Bentham wasn’t very popular among rich folks).
Bentham doesn’t actually say this: he realizes that it’s somewhat stupid, because most billionaires, by our beautiful human nature, would rather destroy that wealth than see it go to somebody else. Less dramatically, the higher you tax rich people, the less incentive they have to work, and the less society benefits (because accept it or not, the work of billionaires are crucial for society). Bentham proposed that redistribution should happen until this line, in which “the pie itself would start shrinking”. That sounds good, but where do you place this line? There's no clear answer - especially as the size of the pie is determined by so many other factors.
This leads us to neo-classical utilitarianism. Let’s first discuss the economic and philosophical developments that preceded this. In philosophy, the big deal was that after a string of philosophers working on the texts of their predecessors, Charles Stevenson declared that there is no such thing as morality. Stevenson asks: what on earth is ethics? It's nonsense - fancy rhetoric meant for persuasion - the "hurray-boo theory of morality". What he means is that something is “correct” is society applauds it, and “wrong” is society doesn’t. Another very tickle-y argument - and I look forward to learning more about this.
Economically, Pareto (the revered polymath behind the famous 80/20 principle) strongly disagreed with interpersonal comparisons of utility - he didn’t see any logical way of comparing happiness between different situations. Pareto introduced indifference curves - along with a few further developments, including Edgeworth’s neat diagram, are fancy graphs that I found a little hard to understand. The big idea was this, though: there is no scientific basis to redistribution, according to Pareto. Superior transactions - when both people benefit - are ideal. But when some benefit and some lose, neo-classical utilitarian philosophers say that there is no scientific reason for choosing whether or not to to complete the transaction. This makes neo-classical utilitarianism far less dangerous to rich people than classical utilitarianism, as it more or less maintains the status quo.
John Stuart Mill took all of these and formulated his ideas. The idea of his which the Professor focuses on here is the Harm Principle. Mill says that people are free to do whatever they like - so long as they don’t harm others. Put in another way, Mill states that nobody can coerce another person - that means threatening them with harm in case they don't follow through - for any reason other than self protection. Protecting the social fabric doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is the individual right to do whatever they like without harming anybody else. You can’t also coerce other people while claiming to be helping them. Drug abuse, then, is fine - but if, for example, you don't take care of your dependents, the state will take them away, but feel free to use drugs.
Difficult, huh? I think that will probably be a main takeaway from this course: how hard it is to formulate ideas, and how almost every idea has huge drawbacks. I thought I already knew that, but taking just six weeks of this course has shown me how little I actually know about this.
Although both Mill and Bentham are major utilitarian thinkers, there are huge differences between them. Mill believes increase in utility is the long term goal that can only be achieved through accepting the rights of a progressive man - while Bentham is more concerned with day to day utility. Mill differentiates between types of pleasure - happiness vs. just contentment - and considers moral and intellectual pleasure to be above physical pleasure, something that Bentham fails to speak about. I really loved this quote. Mill, in short, was far more nuanced than Bentham, and it seems to me that his values have more practical chances in the world.
It's better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig is of a different opinion, it's because they know only their own side of the question.
Why does Mill speak so much about freedom while he should be speaking about increasing utility? It turns out Mill believes in an invisible hand argument: things are done by themselves - or more accurately, by something indirectly. When people act selfishly in a market, the net effect is actually good. Thus, freedom is led to utility by an invisible hand due to “the promotion of truth”.
I loved Mill’s defense of freedom of speech. It’s a three part argument. 1) Any opinion you silence might be correct, and to deny this is to assume infallibility. 2) Even if it is incorrect, most incorrect ideas have some grain of truth - it is only by colliding adverse opinions can we build the most perfect form of truth. 3) Even if one is completely right, you has to be right through the correct process. Is someone who cheated on a test to get a full mark smart? Nope - he just cheated. Similarly, if you don’t follow the correct process of collision of many opinions to obtain the truth, you aren’t really on the truth.
Another thing I really agreed with Mill in was his fallibilism. Unlike previous philosophers, Mill thinks there is no such thing as an empirical truth. Scientists come up with hypotheses and try to falsify it - if they can't, that gives it some grain of truth, but we can never say anything is certain for sure. Every claim of knowledge is fallible.
Is Mill perfect? Unfortunately, no. First, we have ambiguity. Mill says you shouldn’t coerce anybody to not do something unless it is "calculated" to bring harm upon someone else. What does that mean? Intent? Or is it some third party evaluation of whether someone else is harmed - if so, who's the third party and how do they analyze it?
Harm itself is very ambiguous. For example, the death penalty and "just wars", people do get hurt - but this harm is generally excluded from public opinion. This is intentionalist - intent is very important for us to critisize this type of harm. However, as the Professor shows in a beautiful diagram, most of us are pretty hypocritical on this issue: we have a wide spectrum of harm and we don’t always consider intent to be important.
It’s also conservative in a way that irks most people. Mill holds that people who go in front a mob outside a corn-dealer's house and incite crowds against that corn dealer, claiming that they are starving the poor, should be punished for intending to bring harm to somebody. In other words, unless you can convince the corn dealer to feed his workers, there is literally no way to solve the problem using this principle. You can plead or whatever when someone doesn't help harm being stopped, but you can't force them.
At the end of the first week covering the Enlightenment tradition, we’re left with one message: you can't wring politics out of politics. Enlightenment thinkers with their scientific answers just can't succeed.