In 1789, Jeremey Bentham published An Introduction to the Principles and Morals of Legislation. In this landmark treatise, he unveils his philosophy of Utilitarianism and how it might be applied in personal morals and the legislation of a country. For the last two hundred years, philosophers have been advocating and arguing about Utilitarianism within (more or less) the framework originally laid out by Bentham. Provoking constant arguments is one of the highest honors that a philosopher can achieve, so in this sense, he was a true visionary. But few have tried to defend Utilitarianism from an alternate framework. I contend that Bentham was correct in the core of his Utilitarian analysis, but made several unconscious errors that have poisoned the well of Utilitarianism ever since 1789. My aim here is to show what Bentham and the Utilitarians have gotten right, what they have gotten horribly wrong, and how we can reconstruct Utilitarianism on a solid foundation.
First, a few definitions are in order. What do Utilitarians believe? Utilitarianism is the ethical philosophy that contends ethical goodness entails the maximum happiness of the greatest number of people. In his Introduction, Bentham writes:
“By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever; and therefore, not only ever action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.” (An Introduction to the Principles and Morals of Legislation, , 1823, pg. 2)
Bentham’s disciple John Stuart Mill offers a more succinct definition:
“The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals ‘utility’ or the ‘greatest happiness principle’ holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure.” (Utilitarianism, 2001, pg. 7)
The official object of the Utilitarian desire is the maximization of “utility”, which Bentham explains as being:
“the property of something whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness (all equivalent in the present case) or (this being the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is concerned.” (pg. 7)
While Bentham thinks that the maximization of utility is an ethical demand, he also believes that it is, in some sense, inescapable. We are constantly maximizing utility in our actions:
“Nature has placed under mankind the governance of two sovereign masters, plain and pleasure. They alone point out what we ought to do and determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.” (pg. 1)
The Benthamite formulation of Utilitarianism has some appealing features. First, it focuses our attention in ethics on something immensely understandable: happiness. Rather than make some appeal to some ethereal, philosophical standard of morality existing somewhere in the universe, Bentham aims at tethering ethics to happiness. After all, if I choose where to go for lunch on the basis of the happiness it gives me, why not also choose moral modes of behavior on the same basis?
Secondly, it forgoes any complex system of rules for conduct in favor of one overall rule. This is especially useful for the kinds of extreme scenarios that philosophers love to think up. For example, imagine that you are kidnapped by an alien spaceship and they present you with a choice: either press a button that kills one innocent man, or don’t press the button, resulting in the aliens shooting a death laser at Earth and killing everyone on the planet. If you adhere to a Deontological moral philosophy, then it seems you would be forced to allow the aliens to kill everyone on Earth because killing an innocent person is wrong. Of course, this is morally unintuitive, which presents a problem for systems dedicated to hard-set rules. However, the Utilitarian can easily skirt around this kind of problem because he has no ironclad commitment to any rules outside of maximizing total utility.
Even with its benefits, the Utilitarian program is not without its flaws — the most troubling of which is the problem of computing total utility. After all, not all utility is created equal. The utility that I get from eating a sandwich is very different from the happiness I get from graduating college. But how many sandwiches do I have to eat in order to equal the happiness from a college graduation? (And even more importantly, how hungry would I have to be?) Bentham tried to sketch out how we can mathematically maximize happiness with a system of “felicific calculus”, but he failed to actually show how we could actually get any of the inputs for these equations, rendering them useless. This problem eventually led John Stuart Mill to differentiate between “lower pleasures” and “higher pleasures”:
“If I am asked what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.” (Utilitarianism, pg. 8–9)
Beings with lower faculties, such as animals, are only able to engage in lower pleasures. These include things like eating, drinking, reproduction, etc. Human beings have these drives too, but because we also have higher faculties, we are able to enjoy higher pleasures as well. These include things like philosophy, art, beauty, etc. Furthermore, Mill believes that nobody would ever give up any of the higher pleasures in exchange for any of the lower ones. However, this entire distinction seems very arbitrary. Is there really no common element of happiness to be found in eating a meal and appreciating a painting? And surely there is some point at which you would be willing to give up one for the other? If not, then we would have to assume a man dying of starvation would rather receive tickets to the opera than a loaf of bread. Even if this distinction can somehow be maintained, the core problem remains unsolved. Mill still hasn’t shown how we can add up various higher or lower utilities.
These and other problems with Benthamite Utilitarianism are only symptoms of a much deeper problem. On a fundamental level, Bentham and his followers have no theory of human action, and consequently, have an incomplete and half-hearted view of “utility”. As mentioned above, Bentham does believe that we are always engaged in utility maximization in our own actions, but he doesn’t provide any reason why this is the case. Utilitarianism needs to be reconstructed on a firmer foundation — one that understands the nature of human action.
To find the elements of this new foundation, we turn to the economic sciences and the work of the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises. Economics, much like ethics, is a science concerned with human action in the world. But Mises, unlike Bentham, recognized that to understand action in specific instances (such as in markets and exchange), you first must understand the basic principles of action itself. Only then can you impute understanding and meaning into the actions in particular areas. Mises denoted this science of human action as “Praxeology”. In his economics treatise, Human Action, Mises deductively spins out the postulates and theorems of Praxeology. All of Praxeology proceeds from the “action axiom” — the self-evident statement that human beings utilize means to attain ends. Not only is this statement obviously true, but it cannot be denied without engaging in a performative contradiction. In order to deny that man acts, you must utilize means (your words) to attain an end (arguing to prove your point). Mises views the ultimate end of all action as the removal of uneasiness:
“We call contentment that state of human action which does not and cannot result in any action. Acting man is eager to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory. His mind imagines conditions which suit him better, and his action aims at bringing about this desired state. The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness. A man perfectly content with the state of his affairs would have no incentive to change things. He would have neither wishes nor desires; he would be perfectly happy. He would not act; he would simply live free from care.” (Human Action, 1998, pg. 13)
The ends that we pursue are arrayed in a scale, with the most sought-after ends at the top and the least valued ends at the bottom. Murray Rothbard in his economic treatise, Man, Economy, and State, lays out this dynamic clearly:
“All action involves the employment of scarce means to attain the most valued ends. Man has the choice of using the scarce means for various alternative ends, and the ends that he chooses are the ones he values most highly. The less urgent wants are those that remain unsatisfied. Actors can be interpreted as ranking their ends along a scale of values, or scale of preferences. These scales differ for each person, both in their content and in their orders of preference…It is highly useful to assign a name to this value scale held by all human actors. We are not at all concerned with the specific content of men’s ends, but only with the fact that various ends are ranked in the order of their importance. These scales of preference may be called happiness or welfare or utility or satisfaction or contentment. Which name we choose for value scales is not important. At any rate, it permits us to say, whenever an actor has attained a certain end, that he has increased his state of satisfaction, or his contentment, happiness, etc. Conversely, when someone considers himself worse off, and fewer of his ends are being attained, his satisfaction, happiness, welfare, etc., have decreased.” (2001, pg. 17–18)
This view of human action is significantly more robust than any found in the Benthamite Utilitarian tradition. Utility is not just an emotion akin to happiness or joy, but the ultimate end of all action. It is the primary driver of everything that we do. Bentham recognized the primacy of this impulse for utility, but didn’t understand its ultimate meaning. But more importantly, a Praxeological framework for understanding action exposes critical errors made by Bentham and subsequent Utilitarian philosophers. Once these are exposed, we can begin rethinking Utilitarianism in its proper Praxeological context.
Error #1: Utility Has No Units
Utilitarians have long labored under the assumption that utility was something that could be added and subtracted. Indeed, the operational focus of Utilitarianism is numerically maximizing the utility of any given group of people. However, Mises and Rothbard expose this view of utility as being categorically incorrect. Utility does not exist on a numerical cardinal scale, but on an ordinal scale:
“A judgment of value does not measure, it arranges in a scale of degrees, it grades. It is expressive of an order of preference and sequence, but not expressive of measure and weight. Only the ordinal numbers can be applied to it, but not the cardinal numbers.
It is vain to speak of any calculation of values. Calculation is possible only with cardinal numbers. The difference between the valuation of two states of affairs is entirely psychical and personal. It is not open to any projection into the external world. It can be sensed only by the individual. It cannot be communicated or imparted to any fellow man. It is an intensive magnitude.” (Human Action, 1998, pg. 97)
This view of utility perfectly aligns with our own experiences. If someone asks me how much I enjoyed lunch yesterday, it would be absurd to say I enjoyed it seven happiness points or seven utils. As Mises states, we feel magnitudes of happiness, not units of it. We can give rankings of happiness, but not a numerical comparison of them. To help drive this crucial point home, we can make a comparison between utility and another familiar concept: friendship. People may have a best friend, a second best friend, third-best, and so on. Nobody would ever say that their best friend is worth twenty-three friendship points. Friendship, much like utility, is felt in magnitudes, and therefore, is expressible only in terms of an ordinal scale.
Error #2: Utility Cannot be Interpersonally Compared
Implicit within Bentham and nearly all subsequent Utilitarians is the assumption that the utility can be compared interpersonally. The happiness that I feel can be compared with the happiness that you feel, and the comparison of these feelings allows us to maximize the happiness of an entire community. Even in other fields, such as economics, where ideas of utility are relevant, this assumption is also blithely and haphazardly made. Not only is this belief undefended by its proponents, it is patently incorrect. As established above, utility has no units. Therefore, there is no common denominator by which my utility can be compared to your utility. Utility is only felt in magnitudes, but these magnitudes cannot be weighed or measured in different individuals. Mises writes:
“The difference between the value of the price paid (the costs incurred) and that of the goal attained is called gain or profit or net yield. Profit in this primary sense is purely subjective, it is an increase in the acting man’s happiness, it is a psychical phenomenon that can be neither measured nor weighed. There is a more and a less in the removal of uneasiness felt; but how much one satisfaction surpasses another one can only be felt; it cannot be established and determined in an objective way.” (Human Action, 1998, pg. 97)
If this is true — and Praxeology dictates that it is — then the central thrust of Benthamite Utilitarianism is irreparably flawed. The classical Utilitarian focus on the maximization of utility in a community cannot be maintained. The entire idea of an aggregate amount of utility that we can maximize is incoherent. No such additions of utility can be made.
However, Utilitarianism per se is not doomed. As we saw previously, Bentham’s focus on utility as the point of ethical analysis was a sound starting point. However, the compounding errors he and others have placed on top of this foundation have condemned the entire intellectual project. Instead, we require a new Utilitarian structure — one that understands and embraces the tenets of Praxeology in its construction. But how is such a system constructed? First, we must begin with understanding the nature of ethical statements themselves.
In my book, Praxeological Ethics, I demonstrate how we can view all ethical statements through a Praxeological lens. For example, if we look at the statement, “You should drink coffee every morning to stay awake”, we can see a clear Praxeological structure embedded within this statement. The first part of the statement (“You should drink coffee”) gives us a means to employ, and the second part gives us an end that a means is meant to fulfill (“to stay awake”). The terms “good” and “bad” can be seen in a similar Praxeological lens. Something is “good” when it is suitable as a means to achieve an end. Conversely, something is “bad” when it prevents a desired end from being achieved (for more on these points, see Praxeological Ethics, Chapter I).
How can we use this understanding of ethics to construct a new Utilitarian system? First, Praxeology necessitates that any ethical system must be individually focused. Utilitarianism has traditionally focused on groups of people as the points of ethical analysis, but this is an erroneous starting point. (But not totally irredeemable — more on this point below) While we can speak colloquially of groups that “act”, only individuals can act in a strict Praxeological sense. Therefore, any ethical question must always be framed in terms of what is good or bad for an individual. The only way that something can be good for a group of people is if it is good for each individual involved.
How would this system of Utilitarianism make ethical judgments? If we determine what is good or bad based on its suitability as a means for an end, would everybody have to engage in countless means-ends analysis to make decisions? While possible, this is clearly inefficient. Instead, it is more expedient to live according to ethical principles. Instead of discerning for yourself that lying is wrong at every chance you have to lie, just accept as a principle that lying is wrong. This expediency is one of the reasons why we use ethical principles in our own lives. Rather than deduce an entire system of morality for ourselves, we live according to ethical principles accumulated from our intuitions, parents, religions, and cultures.
As previously mentioned, the classical Utilitarians placed the weight of their ethical analysis on the wellbeing of the group. This focus is understandable, because all society agents are impacted by the shifts and changes in society — but this concept was marred by their misunderstandings of utility. Each individual benefits from cooperation in society not because of any aggregate utility they contribute to, but because it satisfies their own ends. As I discuss in Chapter IV of Praxeological Ethics, general ethical principles can be derived from several basic facts — most importantly among them, the life of each individual as a member of society. No matter the ends that individuals decide to pursue, it benefits them to cooperate peacefully with others in society. Henry Hazlitt put it best in his work on ethics, “Foundations of Morality”:
“Social cooperation is the foremost means by which the majority of us attain most of our ends. It is on the implicit if not the explicit recognition that our codes of morals, our rules of conduct, are ultimately based. “Justice” itself consists in observance of the rules or principles that do most, in the long run, to preserve and promote social cooperation.” (pg. 13)
These are just a few basic principles, but more on what a system of Praxeological Utilitarianism would look like can be found in my book. In it, I talk more about the Praxeological basis of ethical language, as well as the implications for this view of Utilitarianism for law and government. Even if you don’t agree with my conclusions, I can guarantee you will find it an interesting and worthwhile read:
Also, you can read the PDF of the book for free on The Austrian Economics Discord Server. Link to join is below as well:
https://discord.gg/the-austrian-economics-discord-server-tm-463155981820493824
