J. J. C. Smart

Utilitarianism: A critique of utilitarianism

If we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how . – Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that. Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols Introductory This essay is not designed as a reply to Smarts. It has been written after it, in knowledge of it, and from an opposed point of view, but it does not try to answer his arguments point for point, nor to cover just the same ground. Direct criticism of Smarts text is largely confined to parts of section 6, where I have tried to show that a certain ambiguity in Smarts defence of act-utilitarianism, as against other sorts, arises from a deep difficulty in the whole subject. I have not attempted, either, to give an account of all the important issues in the area, still less a critical survey of the major items in the literature; I have pursued those questions which seemed to me the most interesting and have deliberately left out a number of things which are often discussed. Like Smart, I have very largely treated utilitarianism as a system of personal morality rather than as a system of social or political decision, but I have tried to say something, very much in outline, about political aspects in section 7.

Realism v . Idealism

It is characteristic of realists to separate ontology from epistemology and of idealists to mix the two things up. By ‘idealists’ here I am mainly referring to the British neo-Hegelians (‘objective idealists’) but the charge of mixing up ontology and epistemology can be made against at least one ‘subjective idealist’, namely Bishop Berkeley, as his wellknown dictum ‘esse ispercipi’ testifies. The objective idealists rejected the correspondence theory of truth and on the whole accepted a coherence theory. The qualification is needed here because H. H. Joachim, in The Nature of Truth, found the coherence theory unable to deal with the problem of error.

‘Looks Red’ and Dangerous Talk

This paper is partly to get rid of some irritation which I have felt at the quite common tendency of philosophers to elucidate (for example) ‘is red’ in terms of ‘looks red’. For a relatively recent example see, for example, Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, ‘An Objectivist′s Guide to Subjectivism about Colour’. However rather than try to make a long list of references, I would rather say ‘No names, no pack drill’. I have even been disturbed to find the use of the words ‘looks red’ that I am opposing ascribed to me by Keith Campbell in his useful article ‘David Armstrong and Realism about Colour’. I am not saying that such talk is necessarily wrong. Talk of ‘looks red’ may be a way of harmlessly referring to the behavioural discriminations with respect to colour of a human percipient. Where it is dangerous, at least to those of us who wish to argue for a broadly physicalist account of the mind, is that it may have concealed overtones of reference to epiphenomenal and irreducibly psychic properties of experiences. Moreover even if it does not do so it may be fence sitting on this issue and liable to misinterpretation.

Utilitarianism and Punishment.

Utilitarianism is the view that the rightness of an action depends entirely on expected utility, that is on the sum of the utilities of its consequences weighted by their various probabilities. I shall distinguish two forms of utilitarianism: hedonistic utilitarianism and preference utilitarianism. In hedonistic utilitarianism it is just a matter of pleasure and its opposite, unpleasure. Often utilitarians have used ‘pain’ instead of ‘unpleasure’, but this has the disadvantage that ‘pain’ can suggest ‘a pain’, and ‘a pain’ is not the opposite of ‘a pleasure’. If I annoy you I give you the opposite of pleasure but I do not necessarily give you a pain. In preference utilitarianism we take value to be satisfaction of desires or preferences. It is a difficult theory to work out in so far as we have to take ‘preference’ here to be intrinsic preference, and so need a clear distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic preferences.

Ethics and Science

It has frequently been lamented that while the human species has made immense progress in science it is nevertheless ethically backward. This ethical backwardness is all the more dangerous because the advanced state of scientific knowledge has made available a technology with which we are able to destroy ourselves—indeed a technology which may have got so much out of hand that we may not even have the capacity to prevent it from destroying us.