Bentham on the Brain
Right now, I’m looking at Richard Layard’s Happiness. He’s an unreconstructed Benthamite, and his view seems to be that evidence on the neurological reward system provides an account of objective utility. And because there’s a neurological correlate to utility, we should think of utilitarianism as the most scientifically respectable of all moral theories, and use it as a guide to social policy, in just the way Bentham intended.
This got me wondering: is the reward system unitary, with a single architecture, or is the reward system implicated in different ways by different cognitive programs or difference kinds of decision tasks. (One possibility is that pleasure/benefit is determined by different systems than pain/costs, and so it may not be that units of plan and units of pleasure trade off in any simple on-to-one sort of way.)
In this article from Nature Reviews, neuro-ethicist Bill Casebeer argues that a virtue-theoretic approach best captures what’s going on in the brain. Moral judgment and motivation is not in all (most?) cases driven by judgments of utility. For example “hot” judgments in social contexts activating theory-of-mind systems probably don’t implicate systems that would calculate either individual or collective expected utility.
This may be important for a number of reasons. The most interesting to me has to do with possible conflicts social policy that is designed to maximize expected social utility and the affective/motivational systems that actually drive behavior. Rawls’s argument against utilitarianism, in a nutshell, is that it is inconsistent with our “sense of justice” and thus utilitarian principles will not gain our willing compliance, and will therefore fail to establish a stable social order. The utilitarian can retort that motivational dispositions are a constraint that utilitarianism must take into account. But then it seems that the principles of utility basically end up mirroring the principles that underlie actual human motivation, which will be doing all the work. At which point it seems otiose to say that what we’re trying to do with policy is maximize happiness, when it would just be more accurate to say that we’re trying to come up with principles people take themselves to have a reason to endorse, where those reasons are only sometimes reasons of utility. The fact that the dopaminergic system or whatever lights up whenever we do whatever we do has nothing interesting to do with what we take to be valuable, or what we should be shooting for socially.
I guess I’m trying to say something to the effect that nothing about the brain actually helps a utilitarian like Layard justify a Benthamite approach to social policy. The reasons for rejecting utilitarianism were never that we don’t know where utility is in the brain, but that it wreaks havoc with native moral judgment and cuts against the grain of our motivational dispositions. Brain science helps us understand why this is the case. We are natural-born Aristotelians (or maybe Humean sentimentalists) unlikely to be moved by comprehensive schemes of utility maximization. Does anyone who might know think the evidence supports this argument?
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It appears that the primary reason that broad utilitarian ethical arguments don’t fit with our intuitive moral reasoning has to do with the fact that we reason quite differently about “personal” and “impersonal” ethical dilemmas. This, at least, is what the work of Joshua Greene has shown. In his experiments, he presents people with dilemmas that involve some personal contact with a victim (e.g., you’re driving down the road and you come upon a severely injured person) or no personal contact (e.g., you receive a letter from a charity about starving children in South America). The dilemmas with which you’re faced in the personal and impersonal situations are otherwise highly similar, and from a utilitarian perspective, they are identical. Yet people will all say they should help in the personal situation, but that helping is optional in the impersonal situation.
While this does show that we don’t think like good utilitarians, it certainly doesn’t argue against utilitarian ethical theories. I certainly wouldn’t want to make any theoretical decisions about how we ought to act in those situations based on people’s intuitions. Greene himself argues that the argument from the science of moral reasoning to ethical theory is a non sequitur, and I agree.
Thanks, Chris. I met Greene last week, and he’s a smart guy, although he was exceedingly indelicate in his own inference from “there is no soul and we don’t need it to assign moral responsibility” to “we’d be better off if people didn’t believe in a soul.” I agree with the first part. But I have no idea if the second part is true, and neither does he. But that’s off topic.
I agree that, “This is how we reason morally, therefore this is what we ought to do” is a non-sequitur. However, I think it remains that the way we reason morally puts a pretty hard constraint on what moral theory we can accept, for “ought implies can” sorts of reasons, among others. I do think that Greene’s experiments are data against utilitarianism.
First, something has to fix the range of theories that count as a moral theories, and that something is going to have to be something like our actual dispositions of moral judgment. Utilitarianism either fails to codify our moral judgments (as Greene conclusively shows), or it is just adjusted ad hoc to fit the curve of our moral judgments, but any theory can do that.
Second, a moral theory is supposed to be authoritative and to guide action. If the theory prescribes actions that are not consonant with our capacities of moral judgment and our moral motivational dispositions, then real moral agents will not find these prescriptions authoritative, and won’t be motivated to comply with them. If we think it would be immoral to do what “morality” prescribes, then that’s most likely a problem with the theory of morality, not us.
I happen to think that utilitarianism is a vulgar absurdity, and it is mysterious to me why it is even taken seriously. Maximizing the amount of happiness in the world strikes me as only slightly more appealing than maximizing the square footage of surface painted purple. Why one would fixate on this at the expense of every other morally relevant consideration is totally inexpicable to me. Yet very smart people whom I admire continue to fixate away.
I’m no ethicist, and I’m certainly not qualified to judge between different ethical theories, so I can’t really say how vulgar and absurd utilitarianism really is. However, the fact that we generally don’t think in a way consistent with utilitarianism (or as Greene’s data actually shows, only think that way under certain circumstances) really is irrelevant. To see why, consider your two points:
1. Ought implies can. Certainly, but nothing about the neurological or behavioral data implies “can’t” about anything with regard to utilitarianism. We can reason like utilitarians, and we can even act on that reasoning (that reasoning can influence our behavior). Perhaps in certain contexts we don’t automatically do so, but then again our automatic judgements/behaviors in many contexts are downright unacceptable (consider racism and other forms of discrimination as examples). What is automatic, and what is possible (and even internalizable) are not coextensive. Nothing about the data implies that utilitarianism is impossible, or even all that difficult.
2. Authority. Your second point loses its force when the first one does. It is true that, at least for American psych/neuro experimental subjects, utilitarianism isn’t the default way of thinking in impersonal situations. However, neither are many of the rules of various religious, social, and civil institutions, which many see as authoritative without any difficulty. The point is, inconsistency with our innate dispositions doesn’t necessarily make some trait or behavior pattern difficult to acquire, or difficult to see as authoritative. Just ask vegetarians.
Fair points. Although I predict that we literally can’t think and act like utilitarians in lots of cases, not just that it’s hard.
Anyway, I think the proper emphasis for social principles is questions of coordination. If acting according to a certain principle is too HARD, even if not impossible, enough people will be deterred to often cause a breakdown in the desired pattern of coordination. Compliance matters to stability. And the margin matters to compliance. So I guess I’m defending, at least for broad social principles, ought implies can without too much trouble.
Will writes:
“Maximizing the amount of happiness in the world strikes me as only slightly more appealing than maximizing the square footage of surface painted purple.”
What other end than happiness should human beings possibly strive to obtain? People might disagree about which means most effectively achieve that end (for instance, whether the purchase of expensive, nonessential consumer items really makes people happier) but to disagree that happiness ought to be what we aim to maximize — that I just don’t understand.
John,
My point was about aggregate happiness, the summ of all happinesses. I think that’s a very strange animal, and it’s weird why anyone would care about it.
Individuals will of course care about their own happiness, but there are many other values that they might also care about.
Try: knowledge, beauty, love, truth, honor, achievement, spiritual attainment, friendship, integrity, fidelity, creativity, exploration, adventure, charity, kindness, health, wisdom, etc., etc., etc.
You might want to argue that these things are worthwhile only because they contribute to happiness. But I won’t believe you.
I, too, was talking about happiness in the aggregate. And I don’t think it is weird that someone would care about that. You concede that individuals care about their own happiness. Well, in the aggregate, society is a collection of individuals. So it seems reasonable to be interested in aggregate happiness. (Yes, there are distributional concerns that I am not addressing here, but they don’t pose overwhelming problems for this type of argument.)
As for the many things that you list, I believe they are worthwhile primarily because they allow people to lead fuller, happier lives. You could argue that they contribute to other ends — and even that they are goods in themselves. But if you ask people why they value achievement, friendship, health, etc., most people will say, because those things makes me happy. I think that’s a perfectly reasonable response.
People care about their own physical attractiveness, but wouldn’t it be weird to care about aggregate physical attractiveness?
I don’t think so. If I care about my physical attractiveness, it makes sense that other people would care about theirs too — which clearly has an effect on why people might value the aggregate.
Might it not still be true that, while utilitarian reasoning may not motivate in this or that case, it gives us good reasons for changing the motivations that we now have? Put differently, can’t we view utilitarianism as a good way to motivate changes in our intuitive ethical evaluations?
We should probably want some guide to changing our intuitions, and utilitarianism, at least in some versions, strikes me as a good sort of theory to use.
What sort of utilitarianism? Does anyone have much time for act utilitarianism? Clearly I’m motivated by my goals/interests, but your goals/interests don’t (necessarily) motivate me. And certainly not the goals/interests of people I don’t know about (unless I ‘feel’ for everyone, everywhere. In which case I belong in an institution. Either academic or mental).
The aggregate happiness should motivate someone from an original position point of view. If I don’t know who I’m to be (Rawls), or have an equal probability of being just anyone (Harsanyi), then I would be interested in aggregates precisely because of expected utility theory. The more aggregate utility/happiness, the more likely it is that I would fall in a category that gets greater utility/happiness. From *that* position (and only from that position?) should aggregates make a difference.
Wait: if we’re looking at legislators, we’ll want them to think a little bit about aggregate happiness levels as well.
Oh, and couldn’t we make a distinction between utilitarianism and antidisutilitarianism (neologism alert)?
Maybe greater utility for others doesn’t motivate me, but is it possible that avoiding greater disutility would? I take it that Hume is more inclined to think of us as sympathizing with people who are doing really poorly, rather than with people who are doing really well.
I suspect that this would meet the requirement of stability (which I totally approve of and think is the yardstick to measure morality and policy against) only if I’m right about our natural sympathies extending to those doing poorly, *and* this sympathy motivates us to action.
Hey Will,
I started to make a really long comment, but ended up putting my comments here.
Okay, the html tags didn’t work. Here’s the link:
http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2005/06/utilitarian-retooling.html
Will,
I have trouble with Layard’s arguments from the git-go. If utility is really measurable on a ratio scale (or at least an interval scale), no one’s been able to figure out how to do it. I’m actually inclined to doubt that there there is a single dimension of “happiness” or utility at all. In any event, very little work that’s being done in psychology today requires the assumption of such a single dimension.
What kind of neurological evidence does Layard take as decisive?
Robert Campbell