From utilitarianism to economics
Henry Sidgwick’s (1838-1900) The Methods of Ethics (1874) has been influential in the clarification of important features of utilitarianism and as regards some developments of the marginalist literature in economics.
First, he shows that utilitarianism can resolve any conflicts of values or rules, at least under the principle that an ethical agent must be impartial between one person’s pleasures and another’s. Sidgwick, though, made an important case for criticizing the hedonist approach in utilitarianism: a problem of “dualism of practical reason” occurs when it seems better on utilitarian grounds to sacrifice one’s own interests for others’. Some economists, notably Jevons (1871), and more recently Skyrms (1996) among many others, have answered this problem by defending the claim that utility was made a moral norm through socio-evolutionary explanations of the emergence and reinforcement of utilitarian rules, so that the existence of a link between the normative and the positive approaches to utility does not seem implausible. Second, Sidgwick discusses the impact of time and population on utilitarianism. He tackles the problem of the sacrifice of a present pleasure for a greater one in the future, seeing this as parallel to the sacrifice of a person’s own pleasure for somebody else’s. Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845-1926) assumed that natural units of pleasure and pain can in principle be ascertained and aggregated over varying populations and time horizons. The population issue later came to be the subject of extensively study (Blackorby et al. 2005). In modern utilitarianism, social welfare is optimized when the sum of individual cardinal utilities is maximized. Derek Parfit (1984) showed that sum utilitarianism was exaggeratedly populationist, because it implies what he called “the repugnant conclusion”: that a numerous and miserable population is to be judged better off than a sparse and happy one. Conversely, average utilitarianism would be Malthusian because new inhabitants provide a distinct value according to whether they are more or less happy.Third, Sidgwick stressed the need for developing formal models of a utilitarian calculus under ideal conditions so that the implications of quantitative hedonistic utilitarian reasoning could be clarified. The utilitarian economists have gone beyond his original intentions. They have assumed that the utility numbers are known with precision, which allows them to compute properly interpersonal comparisons of utilities and the sum of utilities in every situation. An issue is thus raised as to who shall be responsible for performing and enforcing the utilitarian calculations. Edgeworth and others have considered it best to trust a utilitarian elite for this delicate task. Along the same line, Sidgwick made a point of insisting that the utilitarian theory should not be publicized, because uneducated people, those incapable of moral reflection, may misuse it. Utilitarian rules should thus rather be applied by educated people, while the laymen should be content to be governed by the utilitarian elite. This corresponds to the colonial elitism of Sidgwick’s times, which Bernard Williams (1973) derisively called “Government House Utilitarianism”. It is hard to deny that utilitarianism in this sense utterly contradicts individual sovereignty, at least that of allegedly uneducated persons.