The Futility of Utility | Mises Institute

Murray Rothbard had a different view of ethics from the prevailing view among mainstream economists. He advocated rights, while the mainstream favors utilitarianism. The mainstream economists will usually claim to be “value free,” but their appeal to the “social welfare function” belies this.

In my column for this week, I’ll discuss some criticisms of utilitarianism raised by the British philosopher David Wiggins, in his book Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality (Harvard University Press, 2006). Wiggins is one of the best contemporary analytic philosophers, but he writes in a dense and difficult style. If his students were able to follow the lectures on which this book is based, they must have been an extraordinary lot!

Utilitarians argue that you should always choose the option available to you that will have the best consequences. What “best consequences” means varies among different utilitarians, but it usually means the option that is likely to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, where these words are understood in a broad way to mean “preference satisfaction.”

A problem with this, Wiggins points out, is that there can be nothing that is so evil that it is absolutely forbidden: it can be morally allowed, e.g., that murder and rape are not so evil that they could never be ruled out or, indeed, morally required if they maximized utility. Utilitarians try to get around this by assigning negative utility to these crimes, but Wiggins says this doesn’t work:

But the difficulty is. . .that so soon as some definite value is given to the utility of the rule against killing not being broken. . .it will be easy to imagine that so many people will be overjoyed by the victim’s death that the mass of their pleasures swamps the disutility of breaking the rule.

In support of what Wiggins says, here is what Bryan Caplan says about his friend and fellow economist Robin Hanson:

Let me begin with a disclaimer: Despite his moral views, Robin is an incredibly nice, decent person… Nevertheless, Robin endorses an endless list of bizarre moral claims. For example, he recently told me that “the main problem” with the Holocaust was that there weren’t enough Nazis! After all, if there had been six trillion Nazis willing to pay $1 each to make the Holocaust happen, and a mere six million Jews willing to pay $100,000 each to prevent it, the Holocaust would have generated $5.4 trillion worth of consumer surplus.

Let’s consider another example. Suppose the only people in the world are Hannibal the millionaire, a slave trader, and 10,000 penniless orphan slaves. The slave trader has no direct use for his slaves but likes money; Hannibal, on the other hand, is a ravenous cannibal. According to Robin, the “optimal outcome” is for Hannibal to get all 10,000 orphans and eat them.

Wiggins raises a different, though related, problem for utilitarianism. No matter how evil some outcome is taken to be, you can be permitted or even required do something, so long as doing it is a means to minimize the amount of that same evil:

A terrorist of some kind demands. . .that I lean out of the window of the room in which he has surprised me and shoot two rounds into a crowd of persons below—or else (he says) he will blow up Waterloo railway station (London) in rush hour (as he convinces me he has already prepared to do). In this way he seems to force me, as a putative agent, to make a comparison between the badness of a handful of casualties and the badness of thousands of casualties. If the comparison so described is as easy as that, then a remarkable thing becomes visible, which Philippa Foot has pointed out: namely that, according to the canons of consequentialist reasoning, there is nothing so terrible that an agent cannot be required to do that very thing in order to dissuade/prevent others from doing more of it, on a grander scale, with a yet more dreadful outcome.

This is the same problem that the great libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick called attention to when he discussed what he called the “utilitarianism of rights” in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Basic Books, 1974), though Wiggins appears to be unaware of this. I mentioned earlier that mainstream economists implicitly manifest their commitment to utilitarianism by their talk of the “social welfare function,” and Wiggins has some points of a technical nature about this concept:

The original idea of utility is supplanted by the easier and apparently more promising idea that there is some as-if mathematical function which each given “consumer” seeks to maximize in his personal pursuit of his “tastes” and can be given the characteristics it needs to have in order to define and ordering of more or less. In the first instance, the function is posited (we are told) because the hypothesis that it exists is meant to have implications that observation can support or contradict. It is meant to yield observations about observable behavior.

In practice, however, very little thought has gone into setting out the empirical or other credentials of the claim itself (the dogma, I venture to call it) that there must, for each consumer, be some function embracing not only his transactions in the market place but everything that he values. Evidence is not sought for this—it is simply assumed. Apparently it no longer matters whether there is or there isn’t such a thing as utility, or whether there is or isn’t such an overarching function.

One gets the strong impression that Wiggins doesn’t like this view. In less technical terms, he is questioning the dogma that everything has its price. Murray Rothbard also rejected the social welfare function and, in economics, he was always right.