Plato's “democratic man” and the implausibility of preference utilitarianism
✍ Scribed by Tal Scriven
- Publisher
- Springer US
- Year
- 1988
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 610 KB
- Volume
- 24
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0040-5833
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
For some time J. C. Harsanyi has defended a theory called "preference utilitarianism". He poses his theory, against the classical hedonistic utilitarianism of Bentham and the ideal utilitarianism of Moore which, he claims, face the following objections:
The hedonistic definition was based on a now completely obsolete hedonistic psychology, which assumed that human actions were always motivated by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, as if people could not be motivated by a desire for money, social status, success, knowledge, or by a genuine concern for the interests of other people -regardless of the possible IAeasures they may or may not expect to derive from attainment of their objectives. On the other hand, Moore's ideal utilitarianism assumed that "mental states of intrinsic worth" differed from other mental states in having some special "nonnatural qualities" -a metaphysical theory most of us find hard to accept (and would find even harder to support by credible arguments even if we were willing to accept it)?
Preference utilitarianism avoids this problem by allowing agents to determine their own "fundamental values" which may be rad:,cally different than the fundamental values of Bentham and Moore. What Harsanyi insists upon is "the familiar principle of consumers" sovereignty" which holds that the "interests of each individual must be defined fundamentally in terms of his own personal preferences and not in terms of what somebody else thinks is 'good for him' ,,.2 Correction of preferences which are based on factual misinformation or on miscalculation is allowable, according to Harsanyi, but for an individual i to censor the preferences of j "because j's preferences conflict with i's own fundamental value judgements" and i "could not satisfy j's preferences 'with good conscience' " is wrong. 3 Two problems surface immediately for this theory. First of all, how far may we go in allowing various "fundamental values" to count as legitimate values for rational people to pursue? Do we allow malice or sadism to be legitimate fundamental values to count as equals with benevolence