If you look, there are actually two potentially contradictory principles held in “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”: the amount of happiness to be gained and the number of people affected. Bentham himself chose to drop “the greatest number” when he realized that utilitarianism couldn’t tell us whether we should worry more about a lot of happiness existing in the world, spread across many beings, or a smaller amount of happiness concentrated in a few beings. In other words, do we promote many content people, or few happy people?
If we want to be precise, we cannot just worry about the number of people that are satisfied or dissatisfied by a decision, but about the amount of satisfaction or dissatisfaction there is. Remember the hierarchies I was talking about? Being a free person is certainly higher on one’s pleasure hierarchy than living a work-free life. Thus, minority oppression is not always justified, because, even though there are less people suffering, there is still more suffering than happiness.
Really, this is not an important subject. Although there was undoubtedly some suffering, it wasn’t that onerous in this country. Now, as to the ultimate effects of slavery on this country, well, that’s a different set of problems, worthy of much discussion. That there was widespread suffering of the slaves, in the South, is an anthropically inspired fiction. Most plantation owners were not stupid. You don’t get your best work out of suffering, underfed workers.
Sorry that I couldn’t get back into the discussion of Utilitarianism until now. Couldn’t be helped. As I said, last night, after thinking it through, the idea of a Utilitarianistic world - with rules - might make some sense. It seems that most people actually are motivated by the hope of happiness and pleasure.
If that is so, and if we cannot convert people to Catholicism fast enough, we can certainly appeal to these “emotions”. Heck, people are already driven by them anyway - that was what you were trying to get us to understand early in this thread, right?
But, there are some “moral absolutes”, regardless of where one thinks they came from. The first moral absolute is simple, “Do good, don’t do evil.” A second moral absolute is the “sanctity of life.” I use “sanctity” because I can’t think of a more secular sounding synonym. A third would be, “don’t steal”. For starters.
That’s the thing; as a consequentialist, I believe the process of determining rights is an error in logic, as it detracts from the evaluation of the consequences. I would prefer solving conflicts without exploitation, but I can’t say that exploitation is always wrong in theory.
Here, we will have to have some absolutes rules as well. The definition of a “right” is not all that difficult. A right is that benefit accorded between human beings precisely because it is reciprocated. I accord you a right to life, for example, because you accord me a right to life. I accord you a right to property precisely because you accord me a right to property. No different than the marketplace. I sell you a chicken; you pay me. I accord you a chicken; you pay me in kind, or, in something else that I will accept. This is the ultimate utility.
I guess the biggest problem is going to be getting this world changed over. Obviously, there are people on this planet who simply want others to die - kind of like the martian in the movie,
Independence Day. The next problem is how to convert the politicians. It is the process of getting elected to public office that corrupts these folks. Although there might have been some deficiencies of character before they got involved in the system. Nonetheless, we will need to retain most, if not all, of the current politicians, as they know how things work on the macro level. It would simply take too long for newbies to come up to speed, and citizens would suffer greatly in the transition.
These are some of my first thoughts. What do you think?
jd
