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Is Act-Utilitarianism the `Ethics of Fantasy'?
GEOFFREY SCARRE
abstract Act-utilitarianism is often criticised as an unreasonably demanding moral philosophy
that commits agents to a life of ceaseless and depersonalizing do-gooding. In this essay I argue in
Sidgwickian vein that the strenuousness of act-utilitarianism has been greatly exaggerated, and
that the practical demands of the doctrine in the contemporary world are closer to those of common-
sense morality than such critics as Derek Parfit and Brad Hooker allow.
I
Act-utilitarianism (henceforth `AU') holds that an action is right if and only if it can
reasonably be expected to produce at least as much utility as any alternative feasible action.
Such a doctrine, as many writers have noted, seems to commit moral agents to a life of
unremitting do-gooding in which all their private projects, commitments and relationships
are subordinated to the goal of maximizing the public good. Responses to the apparent
strenuousness of AU morality vary. A few philosophers think that AU is right to be sodemanding. They point out that it is of the essence of morality to require us to take an
impartial view of our own and other people's good and not to seek our own advantage
simply because it is our own. Once this impartiality requirement is combined with the
prima facie plausible principle that we should always promote the good as fully as possible,
then AU is the consequence. These authors conclude that the problem is not with AU for
demanding too much from agents but with other moral theories for demanding too
little [1].
But many philosophers have seen things differently. For instance, Mackie holds that
even if AU is construed as `supplying not the motive but only a test of right actions' (so
that the AU agent is not required constantly to keep in mind the maximizing goal), itremains unreasonable to judge the morality of individuals' actions by their propensity to
maximize the general good [2]. Some simply deny that our moral obligations are as
extensive as AU would have us believe. Thus Narveson suggests that I am not duty-bound
to save a starving man from starvation unless his plight is the result of my previous
activities; if it is not, then I may choose to help him if I wish, but no blame attaches to me
if I refuse [3]. AU is also said to fail to take seriously the psychology of real people. No
one, it is claimed, can care about the interests of total strangers as keenly as he does about
his own and those of his nearest and dearest, for actual lives are driven by a variety of
private and personal concerns that make them worth living from their subjects' point of
view. So no real agent is likely to act in a way that fully satisfies the AU criterion and AU is
an impractical philosophy for agents whose actions `will not only not be motivated by a
desire for the general happiness but also will commonly fail the proposed test of being
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such as to maximize the general happiness.' AU is nothing better than the `ethics of
fantasy' [4].
How just is this indictment? In my opinion, not very. AU is a fairly demanding
philosophy, but not, I shall contend, so onerous as to be an unliveable, soul-destroying
morality for human beings. In the world as it is (and is likely to remain), living by the AUstandard requires less moral athleticism than conventional wisdom supposes, and agents
who measure up to it need not be characterless, self-disregarding moral fanatics with a
hyperbolical sense of duty. Indeed, not only is AU not the `ethics of fantasy' but in
practice its demands are not so far removed from those made of us by that pre-theoretical
form of morality that philosophers engagingly ascribe to `common sense.' As no one
claims that common-sense morality is fantastical, or fit only for aliens or archangels, it is
therefore time, I shall argue, to give a kinder reception to AU.
II
Much of the debate about the demandingness of AU has focused on the question of
charitable action. Many people in the world are worse off than those of us who live in the
affluent West. Middle-class citizens of countries like the USA and Britain have a far
higher material standard of living than most people in the Third World. If we spent less
on luxuries for ourselves and our families and donated the money instead to organizations
like Oxfam and UNICEF, utility would seem to be much more effectively promoted.
Take a single statistic, cited in Peter Unger's recent clarion-call to charitable action
Living High and Letting Die: in each of the last thirty years over 10 million children in the
developing world have died of readily preventable diseases [5]. Shouldn't AU agents dotheir best to prevent these preventable deaths? If our money would help save the lives and
alleviate the hardships of children and adults in poor countries, aren't we duty-bound to
send what we can after satisfying our own essential needs? Thomas Carson suggests that
American professionals could afford to give half their income to charitable causes and still
remain, by world standards, comparatively well off; yet very few give of their plenitude
more than a few percent [6]. Oughtn't they to feel guilty about their meanness?
Peter Singer has famously argued that the affluent should transfer wealth to the poor
until they have reduced themselves to the level of marginal utility [7]. One might certainly
suppose it to be an AU principle that (in Brandt's words) `a given individual should give
of his own income so much that if he gives more, the benefit to the (optimal) recipientwill be less, or at least no more, than the benefit to him of not giving more' [8]. Similar
utility calculations can be made concerning an agent's disposal of his time and labour.
Thus Shelly Kagan asserts that since `the pleasure [I] could bring in an evening visiting
the elderly or the sick quite outweighs the mild entertainment I find in the movies,' AU
requires me to give up my evenings to these kindly activities' [9].
Of course, there are psychological limits to the extent to which real human beings can
assume the role of utility maximizers, if this means divesting themselves wholly or largely
of their special interests, projects, commitments and relationships. But it is not
psychologically impossible for most of us, if we try, to become more generous than we
are with our time, energy and resources and to broaden the scope of our practical
concern. Perhaps if we paid closer attention to our basic moral values and less to our
selfish desires we would find the needs of the suffering more motivating than we normally
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do [10]. It is scarcely the ethics of fantasy to hold that we could, and therefore should,
moderate our tastes for expensive luxury items and send the money saved to charity
instead. Even if we cannot be moral saints, we can at least be more philanthropical than
most of us are. However, AU's critics assert that AU implies that each time we act in a less
than optimific way we are not merely falling short of a saintly ideal but committing apositive fault; and this, for many people, is the sticking-point. If AU requires moral
sainthood, then it fails to observe the principle that ` ``ought'' implies ``can'' '.
But is it really true that to obey AU's maximizing injunction we would have to strip
ourselves of our personal concerns (or put them more or less permanently on ice) and
dedicate ourselves heart and soul to helping the neediest people we can find? There is a
powerful tradition of utilitarian writing that holds otherwise. Mill and Sidgwick
suggested that effective optimization, far from forbidding the pursuit of private projects
and commitments, actually requires it. This idea is grounded on a realistic appraisal of the
psychological facts. The more an agent abstains from any other than universal concerns,
the less fulfilling his life will be for him. Saints lack the satisfactions which ordinary peoplederive from their intimate relationships, from creating themselves as distinctive
individuals, and from developing and pursuing their own cultural and recreational tastes.
The saint's only real pleasure in life comes from his sense of doing his duty. Admittedly, if
fully-fledged sainthood is impossible, the aspirant saint will sometimes succumb to the
lure of more private and individual concerns. Yet when this happens his pleasure will be
seriously tempered by uneasiness of conscience; he will condemn himself for following
interests that are pettily personal. Slaves of duty are not only doubtfully happy
themselves, they are also unlikely to spread much sweetness and light to people around
them. To his family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, the selfless optimizer appears
as cold, unloving, remote, cheerless and (paradoxically) narrow-minded. He is thehusband who fails to buy flowers for his wife's birthday, the father who refuses a toy to his
own child while children in Africa are hungry. Whatever good he may do abroad, he tends
to do less at home than more `self-centred' people; in fact, by disappointing conventional
expectations he may even do harm.
Mill proposed that `the notion of a happiness for all, procured by the self-sacrifice of
each, if the negation is really felt to be a sacrifice, is a contradiction' [11]. He thought that
by forgetting, or neglecting, to live our own lives, we lose a major opportunity to enhance
the world's utility. The abandonment of the private spaces in which individuals naturally
live and move and have their being promises to hinder, rather than promote, the cause of
utility; so if AU issues a self-denying ordinance, it simply obstructs its own objective.Likewise, Sidgwick claimed that no one would be motivated to enhance another's
utility if he were not allowed to enhance his own. In his view the `specialized affections'
we have for our family and friends are the source of much more happiness, to ourselves
and to them, than could ever flow from the mere `watery kindness' we feel for the rest of
the world. Since our capacities for doing good are finite, the most effective benevolence is
that which is stimulated by close personal relationships; moreover, we have a more
accurate idea of the needs of the people we love than of those of perfect strangers [12].
Sidgwick also feared that over-lavish charity would encourage idleness and improvidence
among the beneficiaries (he shared the orthodox Victorian view that people should be
made to stand on their own two feet). While utilitarianism sometimes requires a degree of
self-sacrifice in the service of others, Sidgwick reminds us that `even Common Sense
morality seems to bid me ``love my neighbour as myself'' ' and put myself out for him. In
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practice, then, utilitarianism, though it enjoins the agent to `consider all other happiness
as equally important as his own,' turns out to be no more demanding than the morality of
`Common Sense' [13]. The maximization of utility is not impeded but facilitated by our
seeking, first and foremost, our own good and that of our loved ones [14].
Sidgwick's rather complacent view of the limits of our moral obligations from autilitarian perspective is admittedly open to question. Even if AU does not demand
sainthood, it may reasonably be thought to demand more than a little self-sacrifice on
behalf of people outside our immediate social circle. Whether our kindness to suffering
people in the Third World is `watery' or not, AU still enjoins us to help them when that is
the most optimific thing we can do. (Nor is it much of a problem, as Sidgwick seems to
think, that we do not know them as individuals and are ignorant of their detailed
conceptions of the good; we know quite enough about their needs if we know that they are
starving or sick.) But despite his slightly grudging attitude to charity, Sidgwick makes two
important and plausible points. First, he stresses how essential it is to an individual's
happiness that he construct for himself a private sphere of projects and relationships thatgive shape and meaning to his life. Within this sphere he will work vigorously and
efficiently for his own happiness and for that of people who are dear to him. Like Mill,
Sidgwick believes that someone whose interests are all (so to speak) centrifugal loses his
best opportunity to contribute to the happiness of the world. If this is right, then AU
should not only tolerate but should positively encourage us to develop such private
spheres.
Secondly, Sidgwick maintains that it is wrong to see utilitarianism as much more
demanding than common-sense morality. If the latter bids me to `love my neighbour as
myself' (as Sidgwick thinks it `seems' to), then it will condemn me for allowing my
neighbour to starve when I could save him. Common-sense morality, just as much as AU,prescribes what Kant termed a `practical love' of my neighbour [15]. In a similar vein to
Sidgwick's, Unger has recently argued that the basic values that we all profess (whether
utilitarians or not) properly require us to do `a lot for other innocent folks in need, so that
they may have a decent chance for decent lives' [16]. In Unger's view, we pretend that
our ordinary morality is a quite undemanding affair which permits us to live in a largely
selfish way. But if we took our own values seriously, we would recognize this for the
evasion it really is; if we genuinely valued human lives, as we claim to, we would be far
more active in alleviating human suffering. While Sidgwick would have found Unger's
account of our moral obligations overstated, he would have approved its implication that
`common-sense morality' is no less exigent than AU.The upshot of Sidgwick's two claims is that both AU and common-sense morality
enjoin us to promote happiness and relieve misery beyond the limits of our own private
spheres, but not to the extent that we relinquish those spheres. Charity may not end at
home, but on a Sidgwickian perspective there are sound maximizing reasons for letting it
begin there.
III
We might be inclined to agree with Mill that if everyone lost, or put aside, their self-
concern and their special affections for their families and friends, the net quantity of
utility in the world would decline. That is a good reason for utilitarians to approve and
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promote such concern and affections. But since there is little likelihood that the majority
of people are going to change their patterns of concern, the question arises whether it
would not be a good thing, on AU thinking, if some people (ourselves, say) became, or
sought to become, purely impartial do-gooders, eliminating all favouritism in their
dealings with others. Derek Parfit and Brad Hooker think that the answer to this questionis yes. As things are now, the world contains much suffering, inequality and other things
which make outcomes bad. In Parfit's view:
Much of this suffering I could fairly easily prevent, and I could in many other
ways do much to make the outcome better. It may therefore make the outcome
better if I avoid close personal ties, and cause my other strong desires to become
comparatively weaker, so that I can be a pure do-gooder [17].
Hooker, for his part, concedes that it would be regrettable if everyone in the world lost
their strong affections. But he suggests that `only I and the comparatively tiny circle of
people with whom I am connected would lose if my strong affections were elimi-nated' [18]. If I lost my strong affections, I could then do more to relieve `the enormous
suffering in the world' and `devote more of my time and energy to helping the most
needy' [19]. AU agents must take the world as they find it, not concern themselves with
non-existent hypothetical situations. Even if the world would not be improved byeveryone
becoming a selfless do-gooder, it could be improved right now if I became one. Therefore,
according to AU, I should strive to become a do-gooder of this sort; and so long as the
burden of need remains great and few other agents are prepared to share it, AU will be a
personally expensive morality for those who take it seriously [20].
While it is true that AU tells us to act so as to optimize outcomes given what other
agents are doing, I think we should dispute the Parfit/Hooker view of the implications of this fact. Even if most people are not impartial do-gooders of the kind that Parfit and
Hooker envisage, it does not follow that AU demands from me radical self-abnegation.
Both writers admit the utility-value of personal relationships and Hooker in particular
emphasizes how considerable the loss would be if `strong affections' disappeared from the
world. But if the reason why it would be a loss, as Hooker seems to suggest, is that people
normally do more to make both themselves and others happy when they are inspired by
affection rather than by the mere `watery kindness' of impartial benevolence, it is not
clear why he thinks that AU requires from me the `elimination of . . . my special concern
for myself, family, and friends' [21]. Why should I become a more effective optimizing
agent by assuming the impartial standpoint, if people in general do not? Hooker notesthat I could lose my special concerns without jeopardizing those of the `vast majority.'
This is true but irrelevant. If I lost my special concerns I would lose exactly the same
potential for optimizing action which is apparently what Hooker thinks justifies the
possession by the majority of such concerns. Although Hooker claims to borrow from
Parfit's `matchless discussion' of these issues [22]. Parfit's main point actually seems to
be a different one. Parfit says that if everyone else were a `pure do-gooder,' it would be
better for me not to be one but to act according to my special concerns instead Ð
presumably because my pure do-gooding would be superfluous in a world of pure do-
gooders, where I would create more happiness by pursuing more individual concerns. As
the world is not, in fact, of this kind, I can create more happiness by being a pure do-
gooder [23].
But is this last claim really true? Several points militate against it.
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(i) Those who have no strong affections rarely care much about the general good . Parfit and
Hooker tell me that in order to become a pure do-gooder, I should eliminate my strong
affections and `cause my other strong desires to become comparatively weaker' [24]. It
would be the psychology of fantasy to suggest that I can abolish or reduce my personal
concerns by a simple act of will. Feelings, like beliefs, are not directly subject to the willand I can no more decide that I shall no longer love Jane than I can decide to believe that I
am a better philosopher than Kant. Parfit and Hooker may therefore have in mind more
indirect means of losing my affections or desires, e.g. by withdrawing myself from
situations that stimulate them [25]. However, it is a matter of common experience that
the most energetic and efficient do-gooders are seldom people who have put aside (or who
are capable of putting aside) their special affections. It is the intimate and affectionate
relationships we have with a few other people that teach us what human beings are like,
and why they matter. We care about people beyond those in our immediate circles of
concern once we grasp that they are similar, in essential respects, to those we care about
most deeply. It is far from clear, therefore, that AU should be read as requiring us to lumpeveryone together in a single circle of concern; even if this were psychologically possible
(which is doubtful) it is unlikely that it would lead to a maximization of utility. To lose all
one's strong affections would be a deeply alienating experience, productive rather of
misanthropy than of altruism. Without strong affections, one would lead a bleak and
joyless life and find it hard to preserve a sense of the value of other lives. Human existence
would seem a sorry, pointless affair to someone whose personal experience of it was so
empty. Consequently the best do-gooders (i.e. the ones that do the most good) are
unlikely to be the pure do-gooders. If I want to maximize utility, I do well to set my sights
on a lower goal than moral sainthood.
(ii) Pure do-gooders will seriously damage their own dependants. For normal agents, caringdeeply for a select number of people is a stimulus to socially beneficial action rather than a
distraction from it. Individuals flourish best when the societies they live in do;
consequently, the people with the strongest motive to work energetically for the general
good are not impartial altruists but those whose stake in society is greatest. It is easier to
pay your taxes, or to die for your country, if you believe that your children will benefit
from the sacrifices you make.
Imagine, however, that you aspire to be an impartial do-gooder, believing with Parfit
and Hooker that general utility will be enhanced if there are a few people of your sort
around. You therefore tell your children that while you will go on supplying their bare
necessities, you will no longer provide them with any special luxuries or treats. (Yourmoney and time, you explain, will be better spent on serving the needs of people who are
worse off than they are.) The children are naturally disappointed and upset, not only at
the prospect of the Spartan regimen ahead but because they think you no longer love
them. You try to talk them out of their suspicion, but they understandably doubt your
sincerity.
If you persist with your scheme, your children's life will become a hard and unenviable
one. They may remain materially better off than children in a Bombay slum or an
Indonesian sweat-shop, but they are poorly off in comparison with their peers, who have
nice clothes and toys, take trips to the seaside and cinema and are patently loved by their
parents. Of course, if other parents in your community behaved as you do, your children
would have less reason to feel neglected and envious of their peers. But AU (as Hooker
reminds us) must take the world as it finds it, and in the actual world other parents do not
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act as you do. Even if you manage to bear the manifest distress of your children with the
fortitude of a Stoic, the correctness of your utility calculation is open to question. Your
radical departure from the social and natural norms deprives your dependants of far more
than merely material benefits. Unless you are quite outstandingly effective at using the
money and energy withdrawn from your children to promote utility elsewhere, yourattempt to maximize utility will be a failure. Like Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, who busied
herself with charities while her family went to ruin, you are actually making the world a
worse and not a better place.
(iii) Pure do-gooders rush foolishly in where wiser angels fear to tread . Utilitarianism, I have
argued elsewhere, needs to pay heed to the great importance of self-respect among the
ingredients of the good life [26]. Among the necessary conditions of self-respect is the
sense of being responsible for the basic directions that one's life is taking Ð of being both
script-writer and star of one's own show. It enhances our self-respect to be the major
satisfiers of our desires, and even where others could satisfy our wants more effectively
than we can, we dislike being beholden to them for things which we can do for ourselves.We tend to look on others' good-natured attempts to enhance our welfare as unwarranted
intrusions, and we particularly resent it when they seek to impose on us their own
conception of the good. The last thing that any of us want is to be subject to the well-
meant attentions of a pure do-gooder who seizes every opportunity to make even
marginal `improvements' to the quality of our lives. AU, properly understood, does not
enjoin us to become agents of that kind.
Some, however, might think these observations irrelevant to the issue of whether AU is
overly demanding, since with so much genuine hardship in the world there will always be
plenty for the AU agent to do without becoming an interfering busybody. The famine
victim whose life is saved by a charitable donation will not accuse his benefactor of unreasonable paternalism. Yet I shall argue in the next section that the amount of
suffering in the world which can effectively be alleviated by the actions of individual
agents may not be as great, nor the number of agents helping to relieve it be as small, as
many philosophers have supposed. Moreover, in thinking about our obligations to people
in the developing world, we should not blithely assume that people who live in
economically less prosperous societies than our own must necessarily be less happy than
we are ourselves; for large quantities of material goods may not be essential for a
flourishing life. I shall therefore contend in the final section of this paper that an adequate
form of AU needs to incorporate a suitably pluralistic view of welfare and life-styles.
IV
Hooker rightly remarks that we can nowadays help disaster victims at the other side of the
world just by `picking up the telephone and giving a credit card number to someone at a
highly effective charity such as Oxfam' [27]. But modern technology not only enables us
to relieve suffering in far-off places by lifting the phone: it also alerts millions across the
globe to the occurrence of natural or man-made disasters almost as soon as they happen.
Appeals for emergency aid attract generous support from large numbers of people whose
hearts are touched by pictures of tragedy beamed into their homes. (Aid agencies term
this the `CNN factor.') Usually the hard problem is not to raise money but to get essential
resources quickly to the right people in the right place, and here individuals are seldom
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able to assist. So an AU agent does not need to give his all when such catastrophes occur;
there are always many other charitable people to share the burden with him.
Of course, much of the suffering in the world is caused not by cataclysmic events like
droughts and earthquakes but by political, economic, environmental, infrastructural and
other standing difficulties which impede communities' efforts to attain a reasonablestandard of life. Yet if a country is governed by an evil military junta or crippled by its
burden of international debt, there is not much that most of us can do about it. We can
sometimes help a good cause by joining a pressure group like Amnesty International or
Greenpeace which bring the force of public opinion to bear on oppressive governments or
exploitative companies; but such organisations make their impact by channelling the
moderate efforts of the many rather than the heroic efforts of the few.
It is a commonplace of modern thinking about aid that the most effective way of
assisting poor communities in the `developing' world is to help them to help themselves.
Benevolent governments and charitable agencies accordingly focus their expertise and
resources on supplying needy people with the basic wherewithal (raw materials, cheapcredit, tools and equipment, education and training, etc.) to become self-sustaining. The
long-term advantages of such `development aid' are evident. Self-sustaining communities
are wealth-generating rather than wealth-consuming; their income is no longer subject to
the whims and vagaries of donors; they provide their members with a satisfying sense of
being in control of their own fates. While dependence on hand-outs is never calculated to
enhance a community's self-esteem, development aid at least contains within itself the
seeds of its own redundancy.
David Crocker has criticized philosophers for being too `preoccupied . . . with the task
of justifying aid to distant peoples' and evincing `scant interest in institutional and
practical issues.' He reminds us that a `more ample perspective on world hunger' mustinclude `socioeconomic development as part of the cure' [28]. Often, in fact, even in a
famine-stricken zone, there is sufficient food to feed everybody; the difficulty is that too
many people, for one reason or another, are debarred from sharing it [29]. (In some
societies the best food goes to the men and boys even in times of plenty, with the result
that women and girls are chronically malnourished.) Solving the problems of hunger and
malnutrition calls for changes in local habits and attitudes, as well as economic and
infrastructural improvements and fairer international trading practices. Frequently, what
retards development is not lack of money but the existence of vested interests,
complacency, ignorance and an unwillingness to disturb familiar patterns of life. (The
same goes for the preventable deaths of children, cited by Unger as an internationalscandal. Raising the relatively small amount of money needed to save them would not be
difficult. The real problem is the stubborn persistence of the economic and social
conditions within which children sicken and die.) Only national governments, and such
international institutions as the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF can make
significant progress in the face of such deep-seated obstacles Ð not you and I, for all our
telephones, credit cards and good intentions.
Another contemporary commonplace about aid is that the development it facilitates
should be `sustainable.' Certainly our overcrowded, overheating, polluted planet cannot
stand much more `development' of the sort it has undergone in the last few decades. But
development should be more than merely sustainable: it should make the world a
genuinely better place. To ensure that it does, we must interrogate very carefully the
models and ideals that we employ in our strategic planning. Beating malnutrition, disease
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and economic exploitation are obviously laudable aims, but we need to have a clear
concept of the kind of societies we are trying to foster once the more egregious evils have
been removed. While we pay lip-service to the idea of pluralism, we find it hard in
practice to divest ourselves of the belief that our Western way of life is immensely superior
to all the rest. Hence our disposition to see charity in terms of reducing our own holdingsof material goods in order that Third World people should have more. But we should stop
and reflect in a cool hour whether this is actually what the maximization of utility
requires. Do we really serve people well by inducting them into the consumer society,
encouraging them to share our own expensive tastes and aspirations Ð particularly if
these are mostly doomed to be frustrated?
V
The average British householder has a car, a television set, a washing machine, a 9-to-5job and six weeks' paid holiday a year. Masai tribespeople in East Africa live in adobe huts
without electricity or running water, spend their days herding their cattle, despise
Western comforts and softness and proudly maintain the religious and social traditions of
their race. Are the Masai less `well-off' (in an ethically significant sense) than we are? Is
our conception of the good life clearly superior to theirs? We need to be very sure that it is
before we risk disturbing the traditional Masai pattern of life. Suppose that by showering
riches on the Masai we caused them to abandon their age-old habits and adopt something
closer to a Western lifestyle. Is that what, as AU agents, we should be aiming for?
We need to be careful how we answer this. Certain aspects of modern living, such as
good sanitation and health-care, have dramatically increased our holdings of crucial`primary goods' Ð `things that every rational man is presumed to want' [30]. If these
things are boons for us, they will be boons for the Masai too. (On the other hand, life-
preserving measures such as better medicine can lead to destructive population
explosions unless they are accompanied by strenuous efforts at birth-control [31].) Yet
many discussions of utilitarianism seem to assume without argument that we fail in our
moral duty to people like the Masai unless we share with them the things which we find
essential to our own, highly materialistic form of the good life. But this assumption
(which may reflect in part the too-great influence which economics-generated concep-
tions of well-being have had on the literature of utilitarianism) has only to be made
explicit for its baselessness to become apparent [32].Note that I am not claiming that all human lifestyles are equal in value, or that one may
never criticise one cultural tradition from the vantage-point of another. While there is
room for debate about the conditions under which cross-cultural judgements are valid,
human beings have enough of their needs and interests in common for at least some such
judgements to be well-founded. (We can reasonably criticize, for instance, the harsh and
repressive treatment of women in many societies [33].) Rather, my argument turns on
the weaker claim that it is wrong to presume that our own way of living is so much better
than all the rest that AU morality compels us to adopt it as a universal standard of well-
being. No doubt we would find it hard to give up the familiar comforts and opportunities
of modern living; but it does not follow that those who have never had them are living less
well than we are.
The world is immeasurably enriched by containing a variety of lifestyles. We should
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regard these, in the spirit of J. S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin, as so many different `experiments
in living' [34]. It would be an enormous loss to collective human experience if the present
galloping westernisation finally drove out all the alternatives. There is no universal
correlation between a high material standard of living and happiness; indeed the price we
pay to sustain our contemporary style of life Ð global warming, environmentaldegradation and asset-stripping, the ever more hectic pace of daily life, the `rat-race,'
the dissolution of family ties, the urban alienation, the unremitting noise and gridlocked
traffic of our city streets Ð suggests that ours may turn out to have been one of the less
successful experiments in forms of life. It is very doubtful whether the way to maximize
utility is to share our `advantages' with our fellow-inhabitants of the planet, contenting
ourselves with less in order that they can have more; the benefits of our lifestyle are
associated with too many serious and probably insoluble problems. In fact, the best
utilitarian reason why we in the West should reduce our material expectations is not that
this will leave more goods available for other people, but that our model of well-being is
untenable in the long term.Is AU, then, the `ethics of fantasy'? No, because as I have tried to show, there are many
reasons for regarding as a caricature the picture of AU as an unreasonably demanding,
even psychologically impossible doctrine running diametrically opposite to our normal
moral intuitions. AU permits, and indeed encourages, us to pursue our private concerns
in our own private spaces, as a way of promoting happiness. Not that AU allows us to be
morally lazy Ð it forbids us to ignore all external concerns and its maximizing and
impartial character entails that we must be prepared to sacrifice our individual interests
for the sake of the general good. But such a demand is hardly unique to AU. Clinging on
to one's luxuries while people starved would be poor behaviour from any ethical
perspective other than egoism. The entitlement to live in a private space is an entitlementto live adequately, not extravagantly. Critics of AU therefore exaggerate the sacrifices
that the theory requires from moral agents. Once we arrive at a better understanding of
the nature of maximizing moral agency, and of the exigencies of the world in which
utilitarian agents operate, we can see the demands of AU to be reasonable, moderate and
fulfillable. Properly considered, AU is much nearer to `common sense' morality than its
opponents contend, and `the conduct approved by Common Sense has a general
resemblance to that which Utilitarianism would prescribe' [35].*
* I am grateful to Martin Hughes, Richard Taylor and an anonymous referee for the
Journal of Applied Philosophy for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
Geoffrey Scarre, Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1
3HN, UK.
NOTES
[1] See, e.g., Peter Singer (1979) Famine, affluence, and morality in James Rachels (ed.) Moral Problems,
3rd ed. (New York, Harper & Row); Shelly Kagan (1989) The Limits of Morality (Oxford, Clarendon
Press); R. M. Hare (1981) Moral Thinking (Oxford, Clarendon Press).
[2] J. L. Mackie (1977) Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, Penguin), p. 130.
[3] Jan Narveson (1993) Moral Matters (Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview Press), p. 143.[4] Mackie op. cit., pp. 130, 129. For a small selection of the many philosophers who have questioned the
psychological possibility of AU, see Mackie op. cit., ch. 6, pt. 2; Bernard Williams (1985) Ethics and the
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Limits of Philosophy (London, Fontana), p. 77; Richard B. Brandt (1979) A Theory of the Good and the
Right (Oxford, Oxford University Press), p. 276; ÐÐ (1996) Facts, Values, and Morality, pp. 222±3; Brad
Hooker (1990) Rule consequentialism, Mind , 99; ÐÐ (1991) Brink, Kagan, utilitarianism and self-
sacrifice, Utilitas, 3; R. E. Goodin (1995) Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press), ch. 1.
[5] Peter Unger (1996) Living High and Letting Die (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 4± 5.
[6] Thomas L. Carson (1991) A note on Hooker's `Rule consequentialism', Mind , 100, p. 118.
[7] Singer op. cit., pp. 275±6.
[8] Richard B. Brandt (1996) Facts, Values, and Morality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 222.
The equilibrium point thus reached may not be the point of strict economic equality if wealth is less crucial
to happiness in the beneficiary's society than it is in the benefactor's. People in the beneficiary's culture
may, for instance, be less materialistic than the citizens of the USA or Britain.
[9] Kagan op. cit., p. 1. Martin Hughes has commented (private communication) that Kagan would need to
be sure that he is such a welcome visitor in the sickroom that something better than `mild entertainment'
results from his presence. Perhaps he tells marvellous jokes! `But then he ought to think beyond the
immediate problem: he probably needs to replenish his supply of amusing remarks by absenting himself
from the sickroom and seeking some entertainment for himself.'[10] This matches a suggestion of Peter Unger's: and note that Unger is not writing from a specifically
utilitarian position (see Unger op. cit., passim, on `Libertarianism').
[11] J. S. Mill (1865) Auguste Comte and positivism in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, J. M. Robson
(ed.), Collected Works, vol. 10 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1969), p. 338. Mill's point is not quite
correctly stated. Strictly speaking, contradiction would be avoided if, in a world of wholly altruistic
individuals, everyone benefited more from others' self-sacrifices than he suffered by his own. Such a state
of affairs is conceivable, though unlikely.
[12] Henry Sidgwick (1874) The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1981), pp. 430±9.
[13] Sidgwick op. cit., p. 431.
[14] This Sidgwickian line has been termed the `maximization strategy' by Scheffler (see Samuel Scheffler
[1982] The Rejection of Consequentialism [Oxford, Clarendon Press], ch. 3). It permits individuals space to
pursue their own projects and concerns, justifying the permission on the grounds that not granting it wouldimpede the maximization of the general utility. Scheffler contrasts it with what he calls the `liberation
strategy,' which allows `agents to devote energy and attention to their projects and commitments out of
proportion to the value from an impersonal point of view of their doing so' (op. cit., p. 62). The liberation
strategy clearly involves a departure from, or a limitation of, the AU ideal. For fuller discussion of both
strategies see my (1996) Utilitarianism (London, Routledge), ch. 8.
[15] Immanuel Kant (1969) Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, L. W. Beck (tr.) (New York and London,
Macmillan), pp. 18±19.
[16] Unger op. cit., p. 12.
[17] Derek Parfit (1984) Reasons and Persons (Oxford, Clarendon Press), p. 30.
[18] Brad Hooker (1991) Brink, Kagan, utilitarianism and self-sacrifice, Utilitas, 3, p. 268.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Hooker himself proposes that we should abandon AU in favour of Rule Utilitarianism. His advocacy of RUappears to rest principally on two contentions about the kind of rules that a reasonable RU will enjoin us to
act on: a) that those rules will accord with our fairly unexacting moral intuitions about charitable giving;
b) that they will (therefore) be psychologically much easier to act on than the more demanding AU
principle. Hooker's view that RU is intrinsically less demanding than AU has been questioned, to my mind
cogently, by Carson (op. cit.). The claim that an eligible utility-maximizing rule of charitable giving must
be in reflective equilibrium with our moral intuitions is plausible enough; but it is highly disputable
whether those instuitions are as undemanding as Hooker alleges. This is denied not only by Carson but also
by Singer and Unger. (At the very least, our intuitions may turn out to be inconsistent, with some of them
favouring quite vigorous charitable action.) Moreover, if we sincerely believed that our values implied that
we should increase our charitable activity, it should not be impossible (though it might be painful) to bring
our behaviour closer in line with our values: so Hooker's claim that AU is psychologically unrealistic is
likewise open to question.[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., n. 21.
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[23] Parfit op. cit., p. 30.
[24] Parfit, ibid.
[25] But not just any form of withdrawal will do. Entering a monastery, for instance, is an ineligible choice for a
do-gooder.
[26] See Scarre op. cit., ch. 7.
[27] Brad Hooker, op. cit., p. 269.[28] David A. Crocker (1997) Hunger, capability, and development in Hugh Lafollette (ed.) Ethics in
Practice (Oxford, Blackwell), pp. 606, 613.
[29] Crocker op. cit., p. 609.
[30] John Rawls (1972) A Theory of Justice (Oxford, Oxford University Press), p. 62.
[31] The destructive effects of overpopulation are not, of course, felt only by human societies. On the day I
write this (27 February 1998) The Times reports that 20,000 chimpanzees have recently died in the forests
of Gabon owing to increased logging activities driven by human population increase. AU should consider
the welfare of all sentient creatures, not just that of humans.
[32] I am sympathetic to a point made by Martin Hughes, that fairness demands that the Masai are not shut out
from material benefits, if they want them. Establishing the political, educational and economic
arrangements to give them access to these will clearly be a delicate business; the danger is that exposure
to the (meretricious?) charm of the goods of consumerist society will undermine their traditional culture.[33] As Mary Midgley has remarked, there are enough `shared moral compass-bearings' between different
societies for it to be `possible for us to praise and learn from other cultures, and also to accept the criticisms
which outsiders pass on our own culture' (Mary Midgley [1984] Wickedness [London, Routledge & Kegan
Paul], pp. 38±9).
[34] J. S. Mill (1859) On Liberty in Essays on Politics and Society, J. M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works, vol. 18
(Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1967); Sir Isaiah Berlin (1969) John Stuart Mill and the ends of life
in Four Essays on Liberty (London, Oxford University Press).
[35] Sidgwick, op. cit., p. 468.
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