What happens when you invert the Greatest Happiness Principle? You build a floor and some common ground

Finding a common thread in ethical theory

I am not, for the most part, a consequentialist when it comes to moral theory. My intellectual lineage is Kantian—roughly speaking, that means I “grew up” academically with a habit of thinking that respect for persons is a supreme value—and now I think primarily in terms of care ethics. I have some affection for virtue theories as well, but these days I think they really kind of fit within other frameworks.

Don’t get me wrong: consequences obviously can’t be ignored. And I tell my students that there are multiple ethical theories because moral life is complex and hard to capture in a single unified theory. There are definitely times when I use consequentialist reasoning.

But one of the reasons—the reason, really—that I can’t swallow consequentialism¹ as my main ethical approach is the possibility that it threatens to erase the worth of an individual and makes us all instruments of the greater good, possibly to the detriment of ourselves. You see my Kantian instincts here. Consequentialists have replies to this objection, of course, but so far I just haven’t been convinced. Admittedly, I haven’t tried very hard. That’s because—again as I tell my students—you have to choose your theory by what baggage you’re willing to carry, and I’m not willing to carry that baggage.

Photo by Claude Nai on Unsplash

Earlier this spring

Philosophors

posted a quote by (of all people?)² Karl Popper that reminded me of why I don’t like utilitarianism (one species of consequentialism), but added a new twist I hadn’t thought about before:

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle — the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

Utilitarians have always included minimizing pain in the greatest happiness principle, alongside and possibly synonymous with maximizing happiness. The assumption is that if you’re trying to maximize utility, it amounts to the same thing whether you increase happiness or decrease pain. That’s the way math works: you can increase a total by either increasing positive quantities or decreasing negative ones. Reading this, though, I’m wondering whether the deal-breaking problem I’ve had with utilitarianism depends only on happiness maximizing. If we instead distinguish minimizing pain from maximizing happiness and thus flip the doctrine to emphasize misery minimizing, does that change anything?

On the face of it, a focus on minimizing misery seems to alleviate the (in-principle) problem of increasing the happiness of a (well-off) majority at the expense of a (vulnerable) minority, which is a major hangup for me. Plus, it seems likely to concentrate on the least well off in ways that utilitarianism risks overlooking. A focus on minimizing pain seems to me to get us thinking more deliberately about meeting basic needs: ensuring, for instance, that people have food and housing security as well as health care. Doing this for as many people as possible seems to go a long way toward alleviating other problems that are fed by desperation.

Now, it’s likely that this is what utilitarianism always intended, given that the alleviation of suffering was always meant to be part of the utilitarian calculus. Still, framing it to focus on relieving suffering rather than increasing happiness shifts the way we think about it. Maybe it would have a detrimental effect on the production of life-enriching things like art, but on the other hand, maybe not: if people are more secure in their basic needs, they have more time to do meaningful activities.

In any case, even under this reframing, there’s still a possible objection from people feeling like they’re being used for the good of others. My original worry was about a well-off majority exploiting a vulnerable minority. But this variation might raise an inverse objection from a well-off minority tapped to support a struggling majority. If the objection in the first instance was that we can’t use people merely as a means to the welfare of others, that objection still holds—even if we have less sympathy for it.

Still, many people have a sense that those who are doing well “should” (in some sense of that word)³ support those who are struggling. It turns out that we don’t need consequentialism to get there, however; there are other paths to the same neighborhood.

For instance, in many ways, the pain-minimizing version of utilitarianism sounds noticeably like John Rawls’ “maximin” principle: a foundation of a just society is that we maximize the welfare of the least well-off. Rawls was not a consequentialist, and in fact took utilitarianism to be his main target. His philosophy draws on Kantian principles of respect for persons; his argument proceeds from the idea that justice should be understood in terms of what free and rational but disinterested persons would choose. His 1971 book A Theory of Justice argues that a maximin principle is what such (abstract) persons would settle on if they didn’t know which position they would have in the society they were creating. That is, they would arrange society in such a way that everyone would have a “floor” under them, presumably one stable enough to make a decent life even if it isn’t plush.

Photo by DDP on Unsplash

Pain-minimizing utilitarianism also seems to have a lot in common with care ethics. Care ethics focuses on meeting people’s needs—caring for them—because as persons who matter, each of us deserves that. And while we all have unique needs given our unique situations, the struggle to meet common needs like food, shelter, and health is misery-inducing or even debilitating in ways that other very real struggles are not. Unlike Kant and Rawls, care ethicists start from the premise of people as interdependent, flourishing (or not) together. And unlike consequentialists, they don’t aggregate, preferring to concentrate on localized relationships that can attend to the particulars of individuals’ needs and connections. Still, it’s precisely on these grounds that care ethics points toward policies that put a “floor” under people.

So if versions of three influential ethical theories point toward some sort of basic needs floor for everyone, why don’t we do it? That’s a complicated question whose answer takes us through history, economics, psychology, and sociology as well as philosophy. Predictably, I’ll limit myself to the philosophy thread. A short and simplistic answer is individualism, the assumption that humans are fundamentally separate and on our own. The mindset induced by this philosophy is less conducive to our taking responsibility for one another than a relational mindset is. And it’s laced through both utilitarianism and Kantian/Rawlsian thinking. Both approaches deal in abstract people. Utilitarianism counts everyone, but only as part of the aggregrate. You specifically only matter as one among many, not as yourself. Kantian thinking focuses on respect for autonomy, understood as individual rational choice, which tends to direct us to leave others alone. You matter (though primarily as a specific instance of a special type, namely rational creatures), and you get to make of your life what you will.

One of the strengths of care ethics is that it doesn’t treat people as abstract. You matter, as the specific person you are with the specific needs and connections you have. When we’re concentrating on the relationships we have with particular others in our lives, it’s much harder to ignore their needs in the name of promoting general happiness or respecting individual freedom. This has been framed as a problem with care ethics: it’s no good for making policy because it’s about hyper-local relationships. I think that criticism is short-sighted.⁴ Centering the immediacy of care and relationship recognizes everyone’s moral importance and naturally leads to supporting policies that enable relational beings and especially caregivers—which is all of us, really—to provide that floor for one another. This is one of many reasons why I think it’s so important to change our understanding of human nature to a fundamentally relational stance.

Whatever your preferred ethical framework, however, this idea of a floor for the least well-off is a recurring theme. To me that suggests it’s worth a try.

1. To be fair, I haven’t studied consequentialisms other than utilitarianism in much detail. Maybe there is a consequentialist theory out there that I could swallow. But I think my issues stem from the aggregation function within the theory, and I don’t see how that can be avoided and still maintain the consequentialist character of the theory.

2. Karl Popper is best known for his philosophy of science, but according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy he seems also to have been something of a social and political philosopher. I didn’t know that.

3. Some would call this an obligation, others supererogation (good but not morally required).

4. And also based on questionable assumptions that ethics needs to be universal and abstract.