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Is Act-Utilitarianism the Èthics of Fantasy'?

GEOFFREY SCARRE

abstract Act-utilitarianism is often criticised as an unreasonably demanding moral philosophy

that commits agents to a life of ceaseless and depersonalizing do-gooding. In this essay I argue in

Sidgwickian vein that the strenuousness of act-utilitarianism has been greatly exaggerated, and

that the practical demands of the doctrine in the contemporary world are closer to those of common-

sense morality than such critics as Derek Parfit and Brad Hooker allow.

I

Act-utilitarianism (henceforth ÀU') holds that an action is right if and only if it can

reasonably be expected to produce at least as much utility as any alternative feasible action.

Such a doctrine, as many writers have noted, seems to commit moral agents to a life of

unremitting do-gooding in which all their private projects, commitments and relationships

are subordinated to the goal of maximizing the public good. Responses to the apparent

strenuousness of AU morality vary. A few philosophers think that AU is right to be sodemanding. They point out that it is of the essence of morality to require us to take an

impartial view of our own and other people's good and not to seek our own advantage

simply because it is our own. Once this impartiality requirement is combined with the

prima facie plausible principle that we should always promote the good as fully as possible,

then AU is the consequence. These authors conclude that the problem is not with AU for

demanding too much from agents but with other moral theories for demanding too

little [1].

But many philosophers have seen things differently. For instance, Mackie holds that

even if AU is construed as `supplying not the motive but only a test of right actions' (so

that the AU agent is not required constantly to keep in mind the maximizing goal), itremains unreasonable to judge the morality of individuals' actions by their propensity to

maximize the general good [2]. Some simply deny that our moral obligations are as

extensive as AU would have us believe. Thus Narveson suggests that I am not duty-bound

to save a starving man from starvation unless his plight is the result of my previous

activities; if it is not, then I may choose to help him if I wish, but no blame attaches to me

if I refuse [3]. AU is also said to fail to take seriously the psychology of real people. No

one, it is claimed, can care about the interests of total strangers as keenly as he does about

his own and those of his nearest and dearest, for actual lives are driven by a variety of

private and personal concerns that make them worth living from their subjects' point of

view. So no real agent is likely to act in a way that fully satisfies the AU criterion and AU is

an impractical philosophy for agents whose actions `will not only not be motivated by a

desire for the general happiness but also will commonly fail the proposed test of being

Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1998

# Society for Applied Philosophy, 1998, Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.



such as to maximize the general happiness.' AU is nothing better than the èthics of

fantasy' [4].

How just is this indictment? In my opinion, not very. AU is a fairly demanding

philosophy, but not, I shall contend, so onerous as to be an unliveable, soul-destroying

morality for human beings. In the world as it is (and is likely to remain), living by the AUstandard requires less moral athleticism than conventional wisdom supposes, and agents

who measure up to it need not be characterless, self-disregarding moral fanatics with a

hyperbolical sense of duty. Indeed, not only is AU not the èthics of fantasy' but in

practice its demands are not so far removed from those made of us by that pre-theoretical

form of morality that philosophers engagingly ascribe to `common sense.' As no one

claims that common-sense morality is fantastical, or fit only for aliens or archangels, it is

therefore time, I shall argue, to give a kinder reception to AU.

II

Much of the debate about the demandingness of AU has focused on the question of

charitable action. Many people in the world are worse off than those of us who live in the

affluent West. Middle-class citizens of countries like the USA and Britain have a far

higher material standard of living than most people in the Third World. If we spent less

on luxuries for ourselves and our families and donated the money instead to organizations

like Oxfam and UNICEF, utility would seem to be much more effectively promoted.

Take a single statistic, cited in Peter Unger's recent clarion-call to charitable action

Living High and Letting Die: in each of the last thirty years over 10 million children in the

developing world have died of readily preventable diseases [5]. Shouldn't AU agents dotheir best to prevent these preventable deaths? If our money would help save the lives and

alleviate the hardships of children and adults in poor countries, aren't we duty-bound to

send what we can after satisfying our own essential needs? Thomas Carson suggests that

American professionals could afford to give half their income to charitable causes and still

remain, by world standards, comparatively well off; yet very few give of their plenitude

more than a few percent [6]. Oughtn't they to feel guilty about their meanness?

Peter Singer has famously argued that the affluent should transfer wealth to the poor

until they have reduced themselves to the level of marginal utility [7]. One might certainly

suppose it to be an AU principle that (in Brandt's words) à given individual should give

of his own income so much that if he gives more, the benefit to the (optimal) recipientwill be less, or at least no more, than the benefit to him of not giving more' [8]. Similar

utility calculations can be made concerning an agent's disposal of his time and labour.

Thus Shelly Kagan asserts that since `the pleasure [I] could bring in an evening visiting

the elderly or the sick quite outweighs the mild entertainment I find in the movies,' AU

requires me to give up my evenings to these kindly activities' [9].

Of course, there are psychological limits to the extent to which real human beings can

assume the role of utility maximizers, if this means divesting themselves wholly or largely

of their special interests, projects, commitments and relationships. But it is not

psychologically impossible for most of us, if we try, to become more generous than we

are with our time, energy and resources and to broaden the scope of our practical

concern. Perhaps if we paid closer attention to our basic moral values and less to our

selfish desires we would find the needs of the suffering more motivating than we normally

260 G. Scarre

# Society for Applied Philosophy, 1998



do [10]. It is scarcely the ethics of fantasy to hold that we could, and therefore should,

moderate our tastes for expensive luxury items and send the money saved to charity

instead. Even if we cannot be moral saints, we can at least be more philanthropical than

most of us are. However, AU's critics assert that AU implies that each time we act in a less

than optimific way we are not merely falling short of a saintly ideal but committing apositive fault; and this, for many people, is the sticking-point. If AU requires moral

sainthood, then it fails to observe the principle that ` `òught'' implies ``can'' '.

But is it really true that to obey AU's maximizing injunction we would have to strip

ourselves of our personal concerns (or put them more or less permanently on ice) and

dedicate ourselves heart and soul to helping the neediest people we can find? There is a

powerful tradition of utilitarian writing that holds otherwise. Mill and Sidgwick

suggested that effective optimization, far from forbidding the pursuit of private projects

and commitments, actually requires it. This idea is grounded on a realistic appraisal of the

psychological facts. The more an agent abstains from any other than universal concerns,

the less fulfilling his life will be for him. Saints lack the satisfactions which ordinary peoplederive from their intimate relationships, from creating themselves as distinctive

individuals, and from developing and pursuing their own cultural and recreational tastes.

The saint's only real pleasure in life comes from his sense of doing his duty. Admittedly, if

fully-fledged sainthood is impossible, the aspirant saint will sometimes succumb to the

lure of more private and individual concerns. Yet when this happens his pleasure will be

seriously tempered by uneasiness of conscience; he will condemn himself for following

interests that are pettily personal. Slaves of duty are not only doubtfully happy

themselves, they are also unlikely to spread much sweetness and light to people around

them. To his family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances, the selfless optimizer appears

as cold, unloving, remote, cheerless and (paradoxically) narrow-minded. He is thehusband who fails to buy flowers for his wife's birthday, the father who refuses a toy to his

own child while children in Africa are hungry. Whatever good he may do abroad, he tends

to do less at home than more `self-centred' people; in fact, by disappointing conventional

expectations he may even do harm.

Mill proposed that `the notion of a happiness for all, procured by the self-sacrifice of

each, if the negation is really felt to be a sacrifice, is a contradiction' [11]. He thought that

by forgetting, or neglecting, to live our own lives, we lose a major opportunity to enhance

the world's utility. The abandonment of the private spaces in which individuals naturally

live and move and have their being promises to hinder, rather than promote, the cause of

utility; so if AU issues a self-denying ordinance, it simply obstructs its own objective.Likewise, Sidgwick claimed that no one would be motivated to enhance another's

utility if he were not allowed to enhance his own. In his view the `specialized affections'

we have for our family and friends are the source of much more happiness, to ourselves

and to them, than could ever flow from the mere `watery kindness' we feel for the rest of

the world. Since our capacities for doing good are finite, the most effective benevolence is

that which is stimulated by close personal relationships; moreover, we have a more

accurate idea of the needs of the people we love than of those of perfect strangers [12].

Sidgwick also feared that over-lavish charity would encourage idleness and improvidence

among the beneficiaries (he shared the orthodox Victorian view that people should be

made to stand on their own two feet). While utilitarianism sometimes requires a degree of

self-sacrifice in the service of others, Sidgwick reminds us that èven Common Sense

morality seems to bid me ``love my neighbour as myself'' ' and put myself out for him. In

Is Act-Utilitarianism the Èthics of Fantasy'? 261




practice, then, utilitarianism, though it enjoins the agent to `consider all other happiness

as equally important as his own,' turns out to be no more demanding than the morality of

`Common Sense' [13]. The maximization of utility is not impeded but facilitated by our

seeking, first and foremost, our own good and that of our loved ones [14].

Sidgwick's rather complacent view of the limits of our moral obligations from autilitarian perspective is admittedly open to question. Even if AU does not demand

sainthood, it may reasonably be thought to demand more than a little self-sacrifice on

behalf of people outside our immediate social circle. Whether our kindness to suffering

people in the Third World is `watery' or not, AU still enjoins us to help them when that is

the most optimific thing we can do. (Nor is it much of a problem, as Sidgwick seems to

think, that we do not know them as individuals and are ignorant of their detailed

conceptions of the good; we know quite enough about their needs if we know that they are

starving or sick.) But despite his slightly grudging attitude to charity, Sidgwick makes two

important and plausible points. First, he stresses how essential it is to an individual's

happiness that he construct for himself a private sphere of projects and relationships thatgive shape and meaning to his life. Within this sphere he will work vigorously and

efficiently for his own happiness and for that of people who are dear to him. Like Mill,

Sidgwick believes that someone whose interests are all (so to speak) centrifugal loses his

best opportunity to contribute to the happiness of the world. If this is right, then AU

should not only tolerate but should positively encourage us to develop such private

spheres.

Secondly, Sidgwick maintains that it is wrong to see utilitarianism as much more

demanding than common-sense morality. If the latter bids me to `love my neighbour as

myself' (as Sidgwick thinks it `seems' to), then it will condemn me for allowing my

neighbour to starve when I could save him. Common-sense morality, just as much as AU,prescribes what Kant termed a `practical love' of my neighbour [15]. In a similar vein to

Sidgwick's, Unger has recently argued that the basic values that we all profess (whether

utilitarians or not) properly require us to do à lot for other innocent folks in need, so that

they may have a decent chance for decent lives' [16]. In Unger's view, we pretend that

our ordinary morality is a quite undemanding affair which permits us to live in a largely

selfish way. But if we took our own values seriously, we would recognize this for the

evasion it really is; if we genuinely valued human lives, as we claim to, we would be far

more active in alleviating human suffering. While Sidgwick would have found Unger's

account of our moral obligations overstated, he would have approved its implication that

`common-sense morality' is no less exigent than AU.The upshot of Sidgwick's two claims is that both AU and common-sense morality

enjoin us to promote happiness and relieve misery beyond the limits of our own private

spheres, but not to the extent that we relinquish those spheres. Charity may not end at

home, but on a Sidgwickian perspective there are sound maximizing reasons for letting it

begin there.

III

We might be inclined to agree with Mill that if everyone lost, or put aside, their self-

concern and their special affections for their families and friends, the net quantity of

utility in the world would decline. That is a good reason for utilitarians to approve and

262 G. Scarre




promote such concern and affections. But since there is little likelihood that the majority

of people are going to change their patterns of concern, the question arises whether it

would not be a good thing, on AU thinking, if some people (ourselves, say) became, or

sought to become, purely impartial do-gooders, eliminating all favouritism in their

dealings with others. Derek Parfit and Brad Hooker think that the answer to this questionis yes. As things are now, the world contains much suffering, inequality and other things

which make outcomes bad. In Parfit's view:

Much of this suffering I could fairly easily prevent, and I could in many other

ways do much to make the outcome better. It may therefore make the outcome

better if I avoid close personal ties, and cause my other strong desires to become

comparatively weaker, so that I can be a pure do-gooder [17].

Hooker, for his part, concedes that it would be regrettable if everyone in the world lost

their strong affections. But he suggests that ònly I and the comparatively tiny circle of

people with whom I am connected would lose if my strong affections were elimi-nated' [18]. If I lost my strong affections, I could then do more to relieve `the enormous

suffering in the world' and `devote more of my time and energy to helping the most

needy' [19]. AU agents must take the world as they find it, not concern themselves with

non-existent hypothetical situations. Even if the world would not be improved byeveryone

becoming a selfless do-gooder, it could be improved right now if I became one. Therefore,

according to AU, I should strive to become a do-gooder of this sort; and so long as the

burden of need remains great and few other agents are prepared to share it, AU will be a

personally expensive morality for those who take it seriously [20].

While it is true that AU tells us to act so as to optimize outcomes given what other

agents are doing, I think we should dispute the Parfit/Hooker view of the implications of this fact. Even if most people are not impartial do-gooders of the kind that Parfit and

Hooker envisage, it does not follow that AU demands from me radical self-abnegation.

Both writers admit the utility-value of personal relationships and Hooker in particular

emphasizes how considerable the loss would be if `strong affections' disappeared from the

world. But if the reason why it would be a loss, as Hooker seems to suggest, is that people

normally do more to make both themselves and others happy when they are inspired by

affection rather than by the mere `watery kindness' of impartial benevolence, it is not

clear why he thinks that AU requires from me the èlimination of . . . my special concern

for myself, family, and friends' [21]. Why should I become a more effective optimizing

agent by assuming the impartial standpoint, if people in general do not? Hooker notesthat I could lose my special concerns without jeopardizing those of the `vast majority.'

This is true but irrelevant. If I lost my special concerns I would lose exactly the same

potential for optimizing action which is apparently what Hooker thinks justifies the

possession by the majority of such concerns. Although Hooker claims to borrow from

Parfit's `matchless discussion' of these issues [22]. Parfit's main point actually seems to

be a different one. Parfit says that if everyone else were a `pure do-gooder,' it would be

better for me not to be one but to act according to my special concerns instead Ð

presumably because my pure do-gooding would be superfluous in a world of pure do-

gooders, where I would create more happiness by pursuing more individual concerns. As

the world is not, in fact, of this kind, I can create more happiness by being a pure do-

gooder [23].

But is this last claim really true? Several points militate against it.





(i) Those who have no strong affections rarely care much about the general good . Parfit and

Hooker tell me that in order to become a pure do-gooder, I should eliminate my strong

affections and `cause my other strong desires to become comparatively weaker' [24]. It

would be the psychology of fantasy to suggest that I can abolish or reduce my personal

concerns by a simple act of will. Feelings, like beliefs, are not directly subject to the willand I can no more decide that I shall no longer love Jane than I can decide to believe that I

am a better philosopher than Kant. Parfit and Hooker may therefore have in mind more

indirect means of losing my affections or desires, e.g. by withdrawing myself from

situations that stimulate them [25]. However, it is a matter of common experience that

the most energetic and efficient do-gooders are seldom people who have put aside (or who

are capable of putting aside) their special affections. It is the intimate and affectionate

relationships we have with a few other people that teach us what human beings are like,

and why they matter. We care about people beyond those in our immediate circles of

concern once we grasp that they are similar, in essential respects, to those we care about

most deeply. It is far from clear, therefore, that AU should be read as requiring us to lumpeveryone together in a single circle of concern; even if this were psychologically possible

(which is doubtful) it is unlikely that it would lead to a maximization of utility. To lose all

one's strong affections would be a deeply alienating experience, productive rather of

misanthropy than of altruism. Without strong affections, one would lead a bleak and

joyless life and find it hard to preserve a sense of the value of other lives. Human existence

would seem a sorry, pointless affair to someone whose personal experience of it was so

empty. Consequently the best do-gooders (i.e. the ones that do the most good) are

unlikely to be the pure do-gooders. If I want to maximize utility, I do well to set my sights

on a lower goal than moral sainthood.

(ii) Pure do-gooders will seriously damage their own dependants. For normal agents, caringdeeply for a select number of people is a stimulus to socially beneficial action rather than a

distraction from it. Individuals flourish best when the societies they live in do;

consequently, the people with the strongest motive to work energetically for the general

good are not impartial altruists but those whose stake in society is greatest. It is easier to

pay your taxes, or to die for your country, if you believe that your children will benefit

from the sacrifices you make.

Imagine, however, that you aspire to be an impartial do-gooder, believing with Parfit

and Hooker that general utility will be enhanced if there are a few people of your sort

around. You therefore tell your children that while you will go on supplying their bare

necessities, you will no longer provide them with any special luxuries or treats. (Yourmoney and time, you explain, will be better spent on serving the needs of people who are

worse off than they are.) The children are naturally disappointed and upset, not only at

the prospect of the Spartan regimen ahead but because they think you no longer love

them. You try to talk them out of their suspicion, but they understandably doubt your

sincerity.

If you persist with your scheme, your children's life will become a hard and unenviable

one. They may remain materially better off than children in a Bombay slum or an

Indonesian sweat-shop, but they are poorly off in comparison with their peers, who have

nice clothes and toys, take trips to the seaside and cinema and are patently loved by their

parents. Of course, if other parents in your community behaved as you do, your children

would have less reason to feel neglected and envious of their peers. But AU (as Hooker

reminds us) must take the world as it finds it, and in the actual world other parents do not

264 G. Scarre




act as you do. Even if you manage to bear the manifest distress of your children with the

fortitude of a Stoic, the correctness of your utility calculation is open to question. Your

radical departure from the social and natural norms deprives your dependants of far more

than merely material benefits. Unless you are quite outstandingly effective at using the

money and energy withdrawn from your children to promote utility elsewhere, yourattempt to maximize utility will be a failure. Like Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, who busied

herself with charities while her family went to ruin, you are actually making the world a

worse and not a better place.

(iii) Pure do-gooders rush foolishly in where wiser angels fear to tread . Utilitarianism, I have

argued elsewhere, needs to pay heed to the great importance of self-respect among the

ingredients of the good life [26]. Among the necessary conditions of self-respect is the

sense of being responsible for the basic directions that one's life is taking Ð of being both

script-writer and star of one's own show. It enhances our self-respect to be the major

satisfiers of our desires, and even where others could satisfy our wants more effectively

than we can, we dislike being beholden to them for things which we can do for ourselves.We tend to look on others' good-natured attempts to enhance our welfare as unwarranted

intrusions, and we particularly resent it when they seek to impose on us their own

conception of the good. The last thing that any of us want is to be subject to the well-

meant attentions of a pure do-gooder who seizes every opportunity to make even

marginal ìmprovements' to the quality of our lives. AU, properly understood, does not

enjoin us to become agents of that kind.

Some, however, might think these observations irrelevant to the issue of whether AU is

overly demanding, since with so much genuine hardship in the world there will always be

plenty for the AU agent to do without becoming an interfering busybody. The famine

victim whose life is saved by a charitable donation will not accuse his benefactor of unreasonable paternalism. Yet I shall argue in the next section that the amount of

suffering in the world which can effectively be alleviated by the actions of individual

agents may not be as great, nor the number of agents helping to relieve it be as small, as

many philosophers have supposed. Moreover, in thinking about our obligations to people

in the developing world, we should not blithely assume that people who live in

economically less prosperous societies than our own must necessarily be less happy than

we are ourselves; for large quantities of material goods may not be essential for a

flourishing life. I shall therefore contend in the final section of this paper that an adequate

form of AU needs to incorporate a suitably pluralistic view of welfare and life-styles.

IV

Hooker rightly remarks that we can nowadays help disaster victims at the other side of the

world just by `picking up the telephone and giving a credit card number to someone at a

highly effective charity such as Oxfam' [27]. But modern technology not only enables us

to relieve suffering in far-off places by lifting the phone: it also alerts millions across the

globe to the occurrence of natural or man-made disasters almost as soon as they happen.

Appeals for emergency aid attract generous support from large numbers of people whose

hearts are touched by pictures of tragedy beamed into their homes. (Aid agencies term

this the `CNN factor.') Usually the hard problem is not to raise money but to get essential

resources quickly to the right people in the right place, and here individuals are seldom





able to assist. So an AU agent does not need to give his all when such catastrophes occur;

there are always many other charitable people to share the burden with him.

Of course, much of the suffering in the world is caused not by cataclysmic events like

droughts and earthquakes but by political, economic, environmental, infrastructural and

other standing difficulties which impede communities' efforts to attain a reasonablestandard of life. Yet if a country is governed by an evil military junta or crippled by its

burden of international debt, there is not much that most of us can do about it. We can

sometimes help a good cause by joining a pressure group like Amnesty International or

Greenpeace which bring the force of public opinion to bear on oppressive governments or

exploitative companies; but such organisations make their impact by channelling the

moderate efforts of the many rather than the heroic efforts of the few.

It is a commonplace of modern thinking about aid that the most effective way of

assisting poor communities in the `developing' world is to help them to help themselves.

Benevolent governments and charitable agencies accordingly focus their expertise and

resources on supplying needy people with the basic wherewithal (raw materials, cheapcredit, tools and equipment, education and training, etc.) to become self-sustaining. The

long-term advantages of such `development aid' are evident. Self-sustaining communities

are wealth-generating rather than wealth-consuming; their income is no longer subject to

the whims and vagaries of donors; they provide their members with a satisfying sense of

being in control of their own fates. While dependence on hand-outs is never calculated to

enhance a community's self-esteem, development aid at least contains within itself the

seeds of its own redundancy.

David Crocker has criticized philosophers for being too `preoccupied . . . with the task

of justifying aid to distant peoples' and evincing `scant interest in institutional and

practical issues.' He reminds us that a `more ample perspective on world hunger' mustinclude `socioeconomic development as part of the cure' [28]. Often, in fact, even in a

famine-stricken zone, there is sufficient food to feed everybody; the difficulty is that too

many people, for one reason or another, are debarred from sharing it [29]. (In some

societies the best food goes to the men and boys even in times of plenty, with the result

that women and girls are chronically malnourished.) Solving the problems of hunger and

malnutrition calls for changes in local habits and attitudes, as well as economic and

infrastructural improvements and fairer international trading practices. Frequently, what

retards development is not lack of money but the existence of vested interests,

complacency, ignorance and an unwillingness to disturb familiar patterns of life. (The

same goes for the preventable deaths of children, cited by Unger as an internationalscandal. Raising the relatively small amount of money needed to save them would not be

difficult. The real problem is the stubborn persistence of the economic and social

conditions within which children sicken and die.) Only national governments, and such

international institutions as the United Nations, the World Bank and the IMF can make

significant progress in the face of such deep-seated obstacles Ð not you and I, for all our

telephones, credit cards and good intentions.

Another contemporary commonplace about aid is that the development it facilitates

should be `sustainable.' Certainly our overcrowded, overheating, polluted planet cannot

stand much more `development' of the sort it has undergone in the last few decades. But

development should be more than merely sustainable: it should make the world a

genuinely better place. To ensure that it does, we must interrogate very carefully the

models and ideals that we employ in our strategic planning. Beating malnutrition, disease

266 G. Scarre




and economic exploitation are obviously laudable aims, but we need to have a clear

concept of the kind of societies we are trying to foster once the more egregious evils have

been removed. While we pay lip-service to the idea of pluralism, we find it hard in

practice to divest ourselves of the belief that our Western way of life is immensely superior

to all the rest. Hence our disposition to see charity in terms of reducing our own holdingsof material goods in order that Third World people should have more. But we should stop

and reflect in a cool hour whether this is actually what the maximization of utility

requires. Do we really serve people well by inducting them into the consumer society,

encouraging them to share our own expensive tastes and aspirations Ð particularly if

these are mostly doomed to be frustrated?

V

The average British householder has a car, a television set, a washing machine, a 9-to-5job and six weeks' paid holiday a year. Masai tribespeople in East Africa live in adobe huts

without electricity or running water, spend their days herding their cattle, despise

Western comforts and softness and proudly maintain the religious and social traditions of

their race. Are the Masai less `well-off' (in an ethically significant sense) than we are? Is

our conception of the good life clearly superior to theirs? We need to be very sure that it is

before we risk disturbing the traditional Masai pattern of life. Suppose that by showering

riches on the Masai we caused them to abandon their age-old habits and adopt something

closer to a Western lifestyle. Is that what, as AU agents, we should be aiming for?

We need to be careful how we answer this. Certain aspects of modern living, such as

good sanitation and health-care, have dramatically increased our holdings of crucial`primary goods' Ð `things that every rational man is presumed to want' [30]. If these

things are boons for us, they will be boons for the Masai too. (On the other hand, life-

preserving measures such as better medicine can lead to destructive population

explosions unless they are accompanied by strenuous efforts at birth-control [31].) Yet

many discussions of utilitarianism seem to assume without argument that we fail in our

moral duty to people like the Masai unless we share with them the things which we find

essential to our own, highly materialistic form of the good life. But this assumption

(which may reflect in part the too-great influence which economics-generated concep-

tions of well-being have had on the literature of utilitarianism) has only to be made

explicit for its baselessness to become apparent [32].Note that I am not claiming that all human lifestyles are equal in value, or that one may

never criticise one cultural tradition from the vantage-point of another. While there is

room for debate about the conditions under which cross-cultural judgements are valid,

human beings have enough of their needs and interests in common for at least some such

judgements to be well-founded. (We can reasonably criticize, for instance, the harsh and

repressive treatment of women in many societies [33].) Rather, my argument turns on

the weaker claim that it is wrong to presume that our own way of living is so much better

than all the rest that AU morality compels us to adopt it as a universal standard of well-

being. No doubt we would find it hard to give up the familiar comforts and opportunities

of modern living; but it does not follow that those who have never had them are living less

well than we are.

The world is immeasurably enriched by containing a variety of lifestyles. We should





regard these, in the spirit of J. S. Mill and Isaiah Berlin, as so many different èxperiments

in living' [34]. It would be an enormous loss to collective human experience if the present

galloping westernisation finally drove out all the alternatives. There is no universal

correlation between a high material standard of living and happiness; indeed the price we

pay to sustain our contemporary style of life Ð global warming, environmentaldegradation and asset-stripping, the ever more hectic pace of daily life, the `rat-race,'

the dissolution of family ties, the urban alienation, the unremitting noise and gridlocked

traffic of our city streets Ð suggests that ours may turn out to have been one of the less

successful experiments in forms of life. It is very doubtful whether the way to maximize

utility is to share our àdvantages' with our fellow-inhabitants of the planet, contenting

ourselves with less in order that they can have more; the benefits of our lifestyle are

associated with too many serious and probably insoluble problems. In fact, the best

utilitarian reason why we in the West should reduce our material expectations is not that

this will leave more goods available for other people, but that our model of well-being is

untenable in the long term.Is AU, then, the èthics of fantasy'? No, because as I have tried to show, there are many

reasons for regarding as a caricature the picture of AU as an unreasonably demanding,

even psychologically impossible doctrine running diametrically opposite to our normal

moral intuitions. AU permits, and indeed encourages, us to pursue our private concerns

in our own private spaces, as a way of promoting happiness. Not that AU allows us to be

morally lazy Ð it forbids us to ignore all external concerns and its maximizing and

impartial character entails that we must be prepared to sacrifice our individual interests

for the sake of the general good. But such a demand is hardly unique to AU. Clinging on

to one's luxuries while people starved would be poor behaviour from any ethical

perspective other than egoism. The entitlement to live in a private space is an entitlementto live adequately, not extravagantly. Critics of AU therefore exaggerate the sacrifices

that the theory requires from moral agents. Once we arrive at a better understanding of

the nature of maximizing moral agency, and of the exigencies of the world in which

utilitarian agents operate, we can see the demands of AU to be reasonable, moderate and

fulfillable. Properly considered, AU is much nearer to `common sense' morality than its

opponents contend, and `the conduct approved by Common Sense has a general

resemblance to that which Utilitarianism would prescribe' [35].*

* I am grateful to Martin Hughes, Richard Taylor and an anonymous referee for the

Journal of Applied Philosophy for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Geoffrey Scarre, Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, 50 Old Elvet, Durham DH1

3HN, UK.

NOTES

[1] See, e.g., Peter Singer (1979) Famine, affluence, and morality in James Rachels (ed.) Moral Problems,

3rd ed. (New York, Harper & Row); Shelly Kagan (1989) The Limits of Morality (Oxford, Clarendon

Press); R. M. Hare (1981) Moral Thinking (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

[2] J. L. Mackie (1977) Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, Penguin), p. 130.

[3] Jan Narveson (1993) Moral Matters (Peterborough, Ontario, Broadview Press), p. 143.[4] Mackie op. cit., pp. 130, 129. For a small selection of the many philosophers who have questioned the

psychological possibility of AU, see Mackie op. cit., ch. 6, pt. 2; Bernard Williams (1985) Ethics and the

268 G. Scarre




Limits of Philosophy (London, Fontana), p. 77; Richard B. Brandt (1979) A Theory of the Good and the

Right (Oxford, Oxford University Press), p. 276; ÐÐ (1996) Facts, Values, and Morality, pp. 222±3; Brad

Hooker (1990) Rule consequentialism, Mind , 99; ÐÐ (1991) Brink, Kagan, utilitarianism and self-

sacrifice, Utilitas, 3; R. E. Goodin (1995) Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge

University Press), ch. 1.

[5] Peter Unger (1996) Living High and Letting Die (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 4± 5.

[6] Thomas L. Carson (1991) A note on Hooker's `Rule consequentialism', Mind , 100, p. 118.

[7] Singer op. cit., pp. 275±6.

[8] Richard B. Brandt (1996) Facts, Values, and Morality (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), p. 222.

The equilibrium point thus reached may not be the point of strict economic equality if wealth is less crucial

to happiness in the beneficiary's society than it is in the benefactor's. People in the beneficiary's culture

may, for instance, be less materialistic than the citizens of the USA or Britain.

[9] Kagan op. cit., p. 1. Martin Hughes has commented (private communication) that Kagan would need to

be sure that he is such a welcome visitor in the sickroom that something better than `mild entertainment'

results from his presence. Perhaps he tells marvellous jokes! `But then he ought to think beyond the

immediate problem: he probably needs to replenish his supply of amusing remarks by absenting himself

from the sickroom and seeking some entertainment for himself.'[10] This matches a suggestion of Peter Unger's: and note that Unger is not writing from a specifically

utilitarian position (see Unger op. cit., passim, on `Libertarianism').

[11] J. S. Mill (1865) Auguste Comte and positivism in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, J. M. Robson

(ed.), Collected Works, vol. 10 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1969), p. 338. Mill's point is not quite

correctly stated. Strictly speaking, contradiction would be avoided if, in a world of wholly altruistic

individuals, everyone benefited more from others' self-sacrifices than he suffered by his own. Such a state

of affairs is conceivable, though unlikely.

[12] Henry Sidgwick (1874) The Methods of Ethics (Indianapolis, Hackett, 1981), pp. 430±9.

[13] Sidgwick op. cit., p. 431.

[14] This Sidgwickian line has been termed the `maximization strategy' by Scheffler (see Samuel Scheffler

[1982] The Rejection of Consequentialism [Oxford, Clarendon Press], ch. 3). It permits individuals space to

pursue their own projects and concerns, justifying the permission on the grounds that not granting it wouldimpede the maximization of the general utility. Scheffler contrasts it with what he calls the `liberation

strategy,' which allows àgents to devote energy and attention to their projects and commitments out of

proportion to the value from an impersonal point of view of their doing so' (op. cit., p. 62). The liberation

strategy clearly involves a departure from, or a limitation of, the AU ideal. For fuller discussion of both

strategies see my (1996) Utilitarianism (London, Routledge), ch. 8.

[15] Immanuel Kant (1969) Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, L. W. Beck (tr.) (New York and London,

Macmillan), pp. 18±19.

[16] Unger op. cit., p. 12.

[17] Derek Parfit (1984) Reasons and Persons (Oxford, Clarendon Press), p. 30.

[18] Brad Hooker (1991) Brink, Kagan, utilitarianism and self-sacrifice, Utilitas, 3, p. 268.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Hooker himself proposes that we should abandon AU in favour of Rule Utilitarianism. His advocacy of RUappears to rest principally on two contentions about the kind of rules that a reasonable RU will enjoin us to

act on: a) that those rules will accord with our fairly unexacting moral intuitions about charitable giving;

b) that they will (therefore) be psychologically much easier to act on than the more demanding AU

principle. Hooker's view that RU is intrinsically less demanding than AU has been questioned, to my mind

cogently, by Carson (op. cit.). The claim that an eligible utility-maximizing rule of charitable giving must

be in reflective equilibrium with our moral intuitions is plausible enough; but it is highly disputable

whether those instuitions are as undemanding as Hooker alleges. This is denied not only by Carson but also

by Singer and Unger. (At the very least, our intuitions may turn out to be inconsistent, with some of them

favouring quite vigorous charitable action.) Moreover, if we sincerely believed that our values implied that

we should increase our charitable activity, it should not be impossible (though it might be painful) to bring

our behaviour closer in line with our values: so Hooker's claim that AU is psychologically unrealistic is

likewise open to question.[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid., n. 21.





[23] Parfit op. cit., p. 30.

[24] Parfit, ibid.

[25] But not just any form of withdrawal will do. Entering a monastery, for instance, is an ineligible choice for a

do-gooder.

[26] See Scarre op. cit., ch. 7.

[27] Brad Hooker, op. cit., p. 269.[28] David A. Crocker (1997) Hunger, capability, and development in Hugh Lafollette (ed.) Ethics in

Practice (Oxford, Blackwell), pp. 606, 613.

[29] Crocker op. cit., p. 609.

[30] John Rawls (1972) A Theory of Justice (Oxford, Oxford University Press), p. 62.

[31] The destructive effects of overpopulation are not, of course, felt only by human societies. On the day I

write this (27 February 1998) The Times reports that 20,000 chimpanzees have recently died in the forests

of Gabon owing to increased logging activities driven by human population increase. AU should consider

the welfare of all sentient creatures, not just that of humans.

[32] I am sympathetic to a point made by Martin Hughes, that fairness demands that the Masai are not shut out

from material benefits, if they want them. Establishing the political, educational and economic

arrangements to give them access to these will clearly be a delicate business; the danger is that exposure

to the (meretricious?) charm of the goods of consumerist society will undermine their traditional culture.[33] As Mary Midgley has remarked, there are enough `shared moral compass-bearings' between different

societies for it to be `possible for us to praise and learn from other cultures, and also to accept the criticisms

which outsiders pass on our own culture' (Mary Midgley [1984] Wickedness [London, Routledge & Kegan

Paul], pp. 38±9).

[34] J. S. Mill (1859) On Liberty in Essays on Politics and Society, J. M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works, vol. 18

(Toronto, Toronto University Press, 1967); Sir Isaiah Berlin (1969) John Stuart Mill and the ends of life

in Four Essays on Liberty (London, Oxford University Press).

[35] Sidgwick, op. cit., p. 468.

270 G. Scarre


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