Utilitarianism, Religion of Psycopaths? Yes.

Topher Morrison
PurpleSerf.com

Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are familiar names to anyone who took political science 101 or to those social butterflies who just love them some moral philosophers.  A deeper look into the psyches of these "good men", however, gives us new insight regarding the credenda of their philosophies.  I'll put it this way - they don't sound like the kind of guys you'd want to grab a beer with.


          Buried in the back pages of the Economist is a psychological dissection of these two men made possible through the answers of people today.  Daniel Bartels of Columbia University and David Pizarro of Cornell, by questioning those who would subscribe to Bentham and Mill's particular moral philosophy and correlating their findings with respondents' personality traits, found that modern day utilitarians might not be the best people to hang out with, especially when times get tough. 


          Utilitarianism is defined as the proper course of action that maximizes the overall "good" of the greatest number of individuals and is expounded in Bentham's famous aphorism "the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation."  It's easy to see where this philosophy might catch a few snags; do individual rights apply when the rights of millions are at stake?  How many defenseless babies might I kill in order to save one more adult life?  I will use a recent film to illustrate my point.

Unthinkable (2010)
A man plants 3 nuclear bombs in 3 American
cities in an attempt to extricate American forces
from the Middle East.  Is it morally acceptable
 to torture this man in order to save millions
of Americans?  Is it morally acceptable to
murder/sacrifice his wife and child?

          This is the ultimate trolleyology, a technique used to measure a person's willingness to behave in a utilitarian way.  In either case whether the man is tortured, his family murdered in front of him or whether there are numerous other unthinkable pressures imposed on him, the end result justifies the means does it not?  Machiavelli would surely agree, however, where does one draw the line?  According to Bentham and Mill, the answer is evidently a cold 51%.


According to the Economist, Bartels and Pizarro found:


            "a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemas (push the fat guy off the     

          bridge [to save five construction workers]) and personalities that were

          psychopathic, Machivellian or tended to view life as meaningless.  Utilitarians, this

          suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy

          people themselves."

          No doubt!  John Stuart Mill was diagnosed with depression, actually submitting  himself to science in order to learn more about the disorder.  Jeremy Bentham was a little too early for science to offer him the same judgement, however, the man who contemplated how best to imprison the most people with the least amount of work, manifested in the panopticon (see image above), definitely doesn't seem like a guy I'd want to have a beer with!  


          To be fair, these are arguably proto-libertarians whom did much for economic, religious, racial, sexual and personal freedom, unfortunately, they did retain fundamentally anti-freedom opinions.  John Stuart Mill for example indulged in the malthusian school of thought and mused on ways of controlling the population of the "labouring classes."  Jeremy Bentham favored monetary expansion in order to attain full employment, not realizing that this philosophy would bring about massive inflation and centralized theft.  


          Regardless, based on Bartels and Pizarro's findings I probably wouldn't cast my vote for either of them to legislate from Washington, keeping them in their ivory towers was probably the best idea.  The "good people" at the economist claim otherwise:

"Crafting legislation - one of the main things that Bentham and Mill wanted to improve - inevitably involves riding roughshod over someone's interests.  Utilitarianism provides a plausible framework for who should get trampled.  The results obtained by Bartels and Dr. Pizarro do, though, raise questions about what type of people who you want making the laws.  Psycopathic, Machiavellian misanthropes?  Apparently, yes."

I disagree...