The
Utilitarian Stance
Jason Zarri
~ Section 1 ~
The
Pursuit of “Pleasure”:
What
Utilitarianism Could Not Be
There
are many things that people strive to obtain: Wealth, power, jobs,
friends, material goods, loving relationships... . Is “pleasure”
one of them? Well, if by 'pleasure' one simply means pleasant
experiences, I think the answer
is “yes, of course.” But it has sometimes been thought that there
is a thing called 'pleasure' which is a distinguishable but
inseparable element in all pleasant experiences, and furthermore,
that this element is the sole thing
that is desired for its own sake, and that obtaining it is the one
true motive that drives all our actions. I
will call this belief 'psychological hedonism,' and in the present
section my goal is to argue that it is misguided.
It
is undeniable that there are pleasurable experiences, but I see no
reason to think that the term 'pleasure' denotes a distinguishable
element within them. For my part, when
I examine what I consider to
be a pleasurable
experience—the
sweet taste and crisp-yet-gooey texture of a
caramel apple; the cool, wet
feeling of an ocean wave breaking over me on a warm summer
day; looking up and seeing the subtle, mesmerizing glow of the Milky
Way against a dark, moonless sky—I can
observe nothing but the
experience itself, and though
all of them 'pleasurable', I can find no one thing that is common to
them all. When I bite into a
caramel apple, I do not
experience sweetness and crispness and gooey-ness
and pleasure; I
experience only the first three, and they are enough to satisfy me. I
desire the sweetness, crispness, and gooey-ness themselves,
not as a means to something that accompanies them. I
may have a feeling of
contentment upon this desire's satisfaction, but
this does not make that feeling the object
of that desire. In any case
the feeling is an emotion with a phenomenology of its own, and while
its qualities are not as easily describable in words as are those of
my experience of the apple, they can still be identified in
consciousness. It seems to me
that what makes the feeling one of contentment
is that I like the qualities themselves,
not something else which is conjoined both with them and with the
taste and texture of the apple.
If
one feels inclined to disagree with me about this sort of case,
consider the emotional experience of loving someone or feeling loved
by them, of feeling proud of one's accomplishments or one's
children's, or of feeling hopeful about the future after one's
favored candidate has just won the presidential election. These
are all powerful emotions with quite different phenomenologies. One
likes all of these experiences and desires to have them, but beyond
this liking or this
desiring, is there
really some one thing which is common to them all in virtue
of which one likes or desires
them? Others may, after
reflecting on their experience, discover some such thing which they
choose to call 'pleasure', but I am certain there is no such
principle in me. But if experience should turn out to prove that
others are like me in this
respect, we may say that matters are quite the reverse of what a
psychological hedonist imagines: We do not desire something because
we find it pleasurable; we rather call something 'pleasurable'
because we do in fact desire
it.
“All
well and good,” one might say, “but what is the significance of
this?” Well, for one thing,
it shows that human actions are not motivationally unified in the way
that psychological hedonists think they are. There is no one, simple,
overarching explanation for why people do what they do. One variety
of psychological hedonism,
which I will call 'psychological egoism', holds that people always
desire their own
pleasure. If you donate to charity, a psychological egoist would say
that either you did it to gain the pleasure resulting from the esteem
and good favor of others, or
because you get pleasure from the act of giving itself. If
you protest that you didn't give in order to obtain any feeling of
contentment or self-satisfaction, but
simply to help others, they will reply that it is the pleasure you
get from the thought of
helping others that makes you act as you do. The
betterment of others' lives can at the most be desired as a means
to your own pleasure, it can never be desired for its own sake.
If
I'm right, this kind of simplistic explanation of your behavior is
wrong: There is no such thing as “pleasure” pure and simple, so
it can never be an
object of your desire. The
claim that one always desires to help others as a means of producing
pleasant experiences in
oneself is an empirical one, and one that is almost certainly false.
It may be true that some
always desire
to help others as a means of producing pleasant experiences
in themselves,
but it is by no means necessary that all should do so, for it is
perfectly possible to desire to improve the lives
of others for its own sake. One
can take pleasure in their welfare as such; not,
or not just, in the
experiences that their welfare or the thought of it produces in
oneself.
For
another thing, the truth of my thesis would show that the distinction
between “hedonic” or “pleasure” utilitarianism and “desire”
or “preference” utilitarianism is not a very sharp one. If
we construe hedonic utilitarianism
as the idea that we should produce the greatest amount
of happiness for the greatest
number; 'pleasure' being
understood in the way that the psychological hedonist understands it,
then it is misguided, for it tells us to produce the greatest amount
of something that does not
exist. This is what utilitarianism could not be.
If
however, we construe it, as the idea that we
should produce the greatest amount of pleasant experiences
for
the greatest number,
it
might be true; but
if so, it would not, I think, be the whole truth. For
if one can take pleasure in things besides experiences, and
utilitarianism is about maximizing pleasure, shouldn't those things
be promoted as well? This is basically what is called “desire” or
“preference” utilitarianism, but if the obtainment of what we
desire or prefer is just what pleasure is,
there
are no grounds for distinguishing between it and hedonic
utilitarianism, provided that
we understand the latter to include the production of the greatest
amount of non-experiential as well as experiential pleasures. It
is this kind of utilitarianism that I wish to explore in what
follows.
