Saturday, May 28, 2011
Utilitarianism
Bernard Williams, John Rawls, and Philippa Foot did a lot over the last half of the twentieth century to make utilitarianism a shady philosophical neighborhood to hang out in, but they’re all dead now. Peter Singer has a review in the TLS (not available online) of Derek Parfit’s new and long-anticipated book (in two volumes and 1400+ pages), On What Matters, which Singer writes is “the most significant work in ethics since Sidgwick’s masterpiece [The Methods of Ethics] was published in 1873.” (Really? More important than On the Genealogy of Morals or A Theory of Justice?) Parfit, so far as I can tell, holds an idiosyncratic version of utilitarianism that is a convergence of modern moral theories ("climbing the same mountain on different sides"). I’ve also been having an exchange over at the Catholic Moral Theology blog with Charlie Camosy about the conference at Oxford on Singer and Christian ethics that Rob Vischer posted about earlier. Suffice to say I think Charlie and I have a disagreement about whether and to what extent there are deep and ineliminable contradictions between consequentialist moral theories (including utilitarianism) and Christian ethics, but to quote Foot: “no decision is more important for practical ethics than that by which we come to embrace or reject utilitarianism.”
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/05/utilitarianism.html
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Whether there are deep conflicts between consequentialism and Christian ethics is something I'd gladly leave to others to decide, but it is worth noting that there didn't seem to be a deep conflict to many people for a long time. The book that, I think, was most responsible for making Utilitarianism something like the national moral philosophy of England, for example, wasn't by Mill or Bentham or Sidgwick, but was William Paley's _The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy_, which was used as a text at Oxford and Cambridge for many years, including in the training of future Anglican priests, and was a prime example of theological utilitarianism. (This is the same Paley best known today for his version of the design argument attacked by Richard Dawkins.) John Austin, the legal philosopher and contemporary of Bentham and Mill (not to be confused w/ J.L. Austin, the ordinary language philosopher) also developed and defended a version of theological utilitarianism in _The Providence of Jurisprudence Determined_. It seems perfectly possible to me that Paley and Austin were wrong as to the compatibility of Christianity and utilitarianism, but an explicitly "compatibilist" view was quite common for a long time.