Utilitarianism and deontic norms

I just read Bentham’s ‘An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation’.  Not the world’s most engaging book, if I’m honest (not that it has any obligation to be, of course) – but it’s gotten me thinking about utilitarianism.  I’m sure I read some utilitarian philosophy as an undergraduate, so this isn’t based wholly off of Bentham – but of course, given utilitarianism’s massive influence on economics as a discipline, I ought to read more widely in the tradition.  Be that as it may.  In this note-taking type post, I want to comment on three different elements of the utilitarian story, which I think can be usefully unbundled.

First element: the idea that we are all motivated by pain and pleasure, at the end of the day.  When he makes this claim, Bentham isn’t committing himself to a crassly selfish model of the human animal.  Bentham is clear that we have sympathy for others – and, moreover, that we take pleasure in esteem, and this love of reputation may lead us to take actions that seem highly contrary to the actions that would be motivated by immediate physical pleasures and pains.  Nevertheless, Bentham claims: when you get right down to it, the twin motives of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain (really just the positive and negative elements of a single motive) explain all our actions.

To be blunt, this strikes me as basically correct.  You can argue that it’s tautologous – but I’m not sure it is, really.  You can also argue – perhaps with more justice – that it only becomes true if you’re willing to ‘retcon’ your assessment of what people regard as pleasurable, in conformity with actual behaviour.  But even here, I’m not persuaded that this is too serious a problem.  The influence of this dimension of Bentham’s work, I think, can be traced not just through the apparatus of utility-calculus economics, but also through the apparatus of Freudian psychoanalysis.  And – as I’ve said before on the blog – although these same kinds of accusations are directed (sometimes with real justice) at psychoanalysis (i.e. – it’s irrefutable because it can always reconstitute its categories to be consistent with any given behaviour, etc.) I still think that this kind of psychological analysis just does capture something.  In short, I’m happy to endorse this element of the Benthamite utilitarian apparatus, in some sense.

Second element: Bentham argues that the meaning of (what he regards as) ‘fictitious’ concepts such as rights and obligations can be ‘translated’ (by the process of ‘paraphrasis’) into the real substance of those concepts – pleasure and pain.  Here I disagree with Bentham, and (unsurprisingly) I agree with Brandom.  I think you can’t do this kind of reductionist ‘translation’ – the kind of ‘object naturalism’ I discussed in a previous post on Huw Price – to concepts like ‘obligation’.  Rather, we should endorse something closer to a ‘subject naturalism’ – in which the meaning of categories like ‘obligation’ can be explained (via the complex Brandomian apparatus) as instituted by naturalistically-analysable social practices.  (Here of course we need to be a little bit careful about what we mean by ‘naturalistically-analysable’ – but I’m fiating for now that these sorts of difficulties can be ironed out.) Those social practices – if we follow the Benthamite account in point one – can then in turn be explained as motivated by pleasure and pain.  But this is a different claim from the claim that the semantic content of obligation-talk can be translated into pleasure-and-pain talk.

Third and final element: Bentham argues that we have a substantive obligation to attempt to maximise pleasure and minimise pain across individuals.  This is the doctrine that one thinks of when one thinks of utilitarianism.  Obviously this doctrine has been subject to a large number of critiques.  One such critique is: you can’t quantitatively compare pleasure and pain across individuals.  This critique is what motivates economists’ preference to talk in terms of Pareto optimality rather than straight-up aggregate utility maximisation.  Another such critique is: even if you could quantitatively compare pleasure and pain across individuals, it’s easy to construct scenarios in which seemingly ethically monstrous actions are justified by a net utility gain – so something must be amiss here.  A third such critique is: actually our ethics should be based on obligations and rights, not on utility maximisation, so this whole approach can be rejected out the gates.  And of course there are other critiques too.

I don’t want to go into these first-order ethical trenches here now.  My main point here is just the following: this substantive ethical principle can be detached from the other two elements of Bentham’s philosophy.  One could, in principle, reject both of the first two principles (arguing that 1. we are motivated by things other than pleasure and pain, and 2. we cannot translate obligation-talk into pleasure-and-pain talk) and still claim that the obligations that fall out of our alternative, non-Benthamite meta-ethical apparatus are, in fact, utilitarian obligations.  Alternatively, you could accept point one (about motivations), reject point two (about paraphrasis), and then still leave open the question of whether you accept point three (utility-maximisation as a first-order ethical principle).

That last sentence is broadly where I am.  I don’t think I really want to be a first-order ethical utilitarian; but I definitely want to leave the option available, for now – if for no other reason than its great influence within economics.

What I’m most interested in, though, is the way in which the positions I’m recommending on points one and two can be used to reconcile two apparently incompatible approaches to thinking about human action and reason.

On this blog, as I’ve said before, I’m pursuing two parallel, related projects – one in neopragmatist philosophy, and the other in political economy.  One of the tensions between those two projects, is different concepts of reason and action in their metatheoretical frameworks.

A large amount of political economy – basically the great bulk of formal mathematised economics, or at least microeconomics – works within a theoretical framework in which preference functions (clearly and directly descended from utility functions) guide agents’ actions.  The kind of ‘rationality’ associated with ‘rational’ economic actors is an instrumental rationality – agents take the decisions that make most ‘rational’ sense, according to some specified decision function, given their preference function.  This element of utilitarianism can be endorsed even by an economics that fundamentally rejects the substantive third point itemised above – ethical utilitarianism.  So, for example, significant twentieth century social-contractarian thinkers – both Rawls and Buchanan, in their different ways – treat agents as instrumentally maximising their own welfare given plausible decision functions, and use this ‘behavioural utilitarian’ premise as a core element in the derivation of anti-utilitarian normative frameworks.

So you can use this element of utilitarianism as a behavioural model to understand agents’ actions even if you don’t endorse ethical utilitarianism.  Now.  What I want to argue is that this same basic move can be made with respect to the Brandomian apparatus.  Brandom, of course, has a fundamentally non-instrumental concept of rationality.  Brandom is interested in reason in the sense of the ‘space of reasons’, the game of giving and asking for reasons, and so on.  When Brandom talks about rational, sapient creatures, then, he is not in the first instance thinking of instrumental rationality, but of normative rationality – the kind of rationality that is associated with being bound by norms.

As part of that argument for normative rationality, Brandom is extremely keen to rebut the entire family of arguments represented by Bentham’s account of ‘paraphrasis’.  Brandom wants to argue that obligations are not ‘fictitious’ entities, which can be explained in terms of pleasure and pain, which are in turn best understood in terms of instrumental rationality.  Brandom wants to argue that norms are real, and obligations are real – albeit socially instituted – and that instrumental rationality, if anything, falls out of this account.

The move I want to make (in this post and more broadly) is to grant all of that – but then to bring in ‘behavioural utilitarianism’ (point one above) at the level of analysing the motives for the practices that institute these norms.  If we do this, I want to say, then we can potentially reconcile the instrumental and normative senses of rationality that are operative in the two different halves of the project I’m pursuing here.  We are sapient creatures bound by norms.  Those norms are instituted by our social practices.  Those social practices are driven by our own psychological motive structures – which can be usefully analysed (in Benthamite or psychoanalytic terms) as governed by pleasure and pain, in some sense.  This move (I want to claim) doesn’t reduce normative to instrumental reason, because we can take pleasure and pain in things that themselves carry semantic content – and semantic content is instituted by those normative practices.  So this is not a reductionist argument, it is an argument about the mutual co-constitution of instrumental and normative reason.  (And this makes sense, because one of the other big critiques of the formal apparatus of utilitarian behavioural modelling is that it always presupposed a semantic content it hadn’t entitled itself to.)  But it gives instrumental reason – and some version of the utilitarian calculus – a more central role in our story than is perhaps typical in Brandomian approaches.

Note, as well, that this is a more complex philosophical story than some of the prominent efforts within economics to explain the emergence of norms in terms of utilitarian instrumental reason.  In the approach I’m recommending, normativity is not simply understood as ‘cooperation’ – the question is not “how can we explain the emergence of cooperation from self-interested action?”  (Here I’m thinking about the vast and extremely sophisticated game-theoretic literature that develops out of Axelrod’s ‘The Evolution of Cooperation’.)  Rather, the question is “how can we explain the emergence of genuine normativity – the bindingness of norms in the sense of practice-transcending semantic content – out of practices that are themselves analysable in terms of the developed, formal, broadly utilitarian apparatus used within disciplines like economics for modelling instrumental rationality?”

I think this is a potentially fruitful line of thought, and I want to pursue it further on the blog, time and life permitting.