Political Theory. Pete Woodcock

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СКАЧАТЬ equal to the scenario when the child was rescued for purer motives. For Bentham, those things that promote happiness are good, and those that lead to pain are bad; this applies just as much to politics and government legislation as it does to ethics.

Utilitarianism

      Jeremy Bentham is generally regarded as the founding father of utilitarianism. Bentham was born in 1748 in London, and educated at Oxford. In addition to his writing on utilitarianism, he was a leading social reformer of his day. Whereas he was an opponent of natural rights arguments, he nevertheless supported the notion of legal rights when they could be said to increase the overall happiness of the people.

      You can still visit Bentham to this day. Bentham played a role in founding University College London, and left his body to the college. His mummified remains are displayed in the main reception area.

      Other utilitarians include father and son team James and John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick. It still has proponents in the contemporary world, with the works of Australian philosopher Peter Singer, who uses the idea to support vegetarianism and giving all of our disposable income to charity.

      Utilitarian philosophers critiqued a large array of social and political policies when they were writing. For example, they championed reforms of the punishments that prisoners received; not upon the grounds of morality or rights, per se, but more on the overall manner in which they worked and the results that they brought about. One such reform was that of lowering the punishments associated with crimes such as theft. Utilitarians in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century noticed a problem with sentencing. Offences that we would regard as minor today such as theft might still be punishable by death. So the problem was that if you are caught stealing a pig, you have absolutely no incentive to go quietly and accept your punishment; if the punishment for stealing a pig is the same as killing the person who caught you stealing the pig, then you might as well fight your way out of the situation. You would have little to lose at this point, and the overall happiness would be improved by more lenient penal laws. Again, these proposals were put forward not because of human rights concerns, but to produce more happiness.

And this is the key contribution of utilitarianism to debates surrounding the nature of politics: contrary to many liberal thinkers such as Paine and Rawls (who we will address later in this book) who argue that the purpose of government is to protect rights, utilitarians do not really think we have rights. Bentham regarded the notion of rights as rhetorical nonsense on stilts. As a consequence of this, the purpose of politics is to promote happiness not rights. There are a number of ways in which protecting rights might lead to less happiness overall. Take the famous Trolley Problem. You are by a railway track and you notice that a train is out of control and is hurtling towards, and if unhindered will surely kill, a group of five people on the track ahead of it. Now suppose you could not stop the train, but you could pull a lever that would move the train onto another track, but that this act would certainly kill one person who was on that track. So you could do nothing, and five people would die, or you could take an action, and that action would result in one person dying. The overall happiness would probably be greater if you took an action that killed one person (or saved four lives to put it in a more positive way), but does not the one person have a right to life?

      Governments take actions that lead to some people suffering all the time. Winston Churchill left Coventry undefended from Luftwaffe raids in the Second World War despite knowing that it was going to be attacked. He got the information from the captured Enigma machines, whose code had been deciphered by Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park, and feared that if he defended Coventry too rigorously, the Germans would suspect that their code had been broken, change it, and all strategic advantage would be lost. This would prolong the war, and possibly result in greater loss of life. Likewise, Truman had to consider this when the option of using the atomic bomb was available to him. American troops were in the process of island hopping on the Japanese archipelago at the time, and the hope was the dreadful firepower of atomic bombs would bring the war to a swifter conclusion and consequently save lives despite the terrible casualties. The residents of Coventry and Hiroshima at the time may dispute this philosophical sleight of hand.

      These are extreme examples. When a government decides to give a shipbuilding contract to a port here, rather than there, its actions will negatively affect some citizens for the greater good. Similarly, if a person’s family home is demolished to make way for a motorway, wind turbines spoil the view from your study library, roadworks cause your commute to be extended by 20 minutes every day for the summer, and so on. Sometimes politics involves trade-offs between people’s interests. Whereas utilitarians don’t think people have rights, they do think they have interests, and these interests need to be borne in mind when discussing politics and ethics.

Whereas Bentham’s notion of rights being ‘nonsense on stilts’ leads to the possibility of me being horsewhipped in front of all of the readers of this book if they find it dull and it brings them happiness, most utilitarians would look to protect liberties even though they would conceptualize them differently from rights-based liberal thinkers. J.S. Mill was a rule utilitarian, meaning that he thought that overall we would be happier as a society if we applied certain types of rules. The ‘Harm Principle’, which we will discuss later in this book, is an example of such a rule; we will be happier as a society if we are allowed to do as we please even if certain aspects of that liberty causes us to be unhappy. So the ability to speak our mind freely trumps the hurt we might get if we are offended by something someone says whilst exercising their free speech. Mill also thinks that happiness is more complicated than it might seem, and thinks there are different levels of happiness. You might be happy after spending two hours watching Storage Wars on TV, but the quality of happiness is better if you spend that two hours reading the classics of the history of political thought. He justifies this with the highly questionable proposition that anyone who has known the more cerebral pleasures in life would not go back to the more basic pleasures. But do not college professors like football, or medical doctors basketball?

      Activity 3. Please attempt the following tasks:

      1 Why does Bentham think that rights are nonsense on stilts?

      2 What is meant by rule utilitarianism?

      3 Do you think that the person rescuing the child in the pond due to the attractive celebrity close by was committing a moral act?

Kant, Walzer, morality and dirty hands

      Immanuel Kant has no time for utilitarianism, or consequentialism of any flavour for that matter. For him, politics must always ‘bend the knee’ to morality, that is to say that morality is more important than politics and we should do what is right even if this makes us less happy than if we did not.

For Kant, for something to be ethical it has to be able to be universalized, to be made a universal law of nature that we would ourselves accept if it happened to us. So, whereas I may not want to pay my friend back the $10 they lent me last week, if I universalize this, and suggest that my other friend to whom I lent $20 last week need not pay it back to me, I may like this less. Let us take this back to the discussion of the child in trouble in the duck pond that I mention above. In the first scenario, where you rescue the child because it is right to help children in need, this is clearly a law that can be universalized; we should all help children in need of assistance. So this is a moral act. The second scenario, where you rescue the child in the hope of gaining the attention of your attractive celebrity, cannot be universalized. We should all rescue children who get into distress in close proximity to a celebrity that you find attractive does not have quite the same ring to it as the previous example. As you are basing your actions on their consequences rather than their motivations, it cannot be a moral act.

       Kant

      Immanuel СКАЧАТЬ