Two essays on utilitarianism, written from opposite points of view, by J. Smart and Bernard Williams. In the first part of the book Professor Smart advocates a modern and sophisticated version of classical utilitarianism; he tries to formulate a consistent and persuasive elaboration of the doctrine that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined solely by their. Bernard Williams, 'A Critique of Utilitarianism,' in Utilitarianism: For and Against, ed. Smart and Bernard Williams (Cambridge, 1973). See especially sec.

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May 1974

Pages 22-24

What to do? Say Jim decides to save the nineteen by killing the one. Williams takes it that Utilitarianism yields the correct answer in evaluating Jim’s performance as morally right. However, he thinks its justification is flawed. The major culprit of faulty Utilitarian reasoning, Williams holds, is its implication of negative responsibility. That is, an agent is not only responsible for the actions she performs; she also has a further responsibility for her omissions of action. Negative responsibility denies that an agent is specially responsible for her actions over those of others. Execute batch file after tfs build properties. Williams thinks this must flow from the Utilitarian commitment to fundamentally valuing states of affairs. He takes it that, according to Utilitarianism, the evaluation of states of affairs need only make reference to an agent insofar as that agent is linked in the causal chain of events that brings about a given state of affairs. In other words, Utilitarianism is committed to negative responsibility because it doesn’t take into account our separateness as moral agents. We are mere points of “causal intervention,” as Williams puts it. This amounts to an impartial abstraction from distinct individual agencies like ‘me’ and ‘you’. The value of a state of affairs does not track the particular agentive source constituting a partial link in the causal chain of events preceding a given state of affairs. This blindness to particular agencies renders ‘that a benefit be done to me’ morally irrelevant. And if it cannot matter morally that some benefit (or harm) be done to me, then neither can it matter morally that it be done by me. Whether in action or inaction, our status as causal lever pullers remains the same.

In light of this, how are we to think of Jim’s situation? Recall that if he assents to Pedro’s proposition, Jim must kill one Indian but Pedro will let the other nineteen go free. And if Jim refrains from killing the one, Pedro will kill all twenty. Given negative responsibility Jim and Pedro are morally indistinct causal factors contributing to either outcome. This is because all that matters morally is that Jim stands in certain causal relations to the production of a state of affairs. The evaluation of a particular action is made in terms of its bare role in playing a part in bringing about some outcome. This means that the distinction between whether an action is performed by me or by someone else is irrelevant. This outcome is then only measured as good in terms of its tendency to generally satisfy desires in general. The relevance of particular agencies gets completely diluted in this impersonal moral measure. For the Utilitarian calculus, there is no morally significant relation between an agent and her doing. All that is retained in the result of the moral calculation is the doing’s (or omitted doing’s) relation to producing/hindering utility. Therefore Jim is just as responsible for the death of twenty Indians as he is for the death of one.

Utilitarianism would also have that any possible squeamishness on Jim’s part in planning to kill the one Indian to save the others is irrational. If the Utilitarian calculus deems killing the right action, then following through on this just is being rational, and therefore any feelings of hesitancy the agent has concerning the act must simply be irrational. Utilitarianism would have us believe that an agent’s moral feelings towards an act is just merely another impersonal element to be factored into the utilitarian weighing of potential outcomes. If an agent “feels bad” (i.e. is unhappy) about doing some act, then that is itself a reason not to perform it. However, it will have to be weighed against everything else in the moral calculus. Utilitarianism would advocate that these feelings should even be discarded altogether for going against the utility rationale. These feelings are not accounted for as being importantly bound up with the agent’s identity.

The lack of any moral significance given to the relationship between agency and doing leads Williams to charge Utilitarianism for alienating us from our actions. Again, the impartial measure by which morally right actions are assessed assigns no particular responsibility of an agent to any action; it acknowledges that “this agent made that happen, and that agent made this happen” but such distinctions are morally irrelevant. The best state of affairs cannot simply be one in which people bring about the best state of affairs. This is empty. The content of ‘morality’ must be constituted by more than just merely the ‘Utilitarian’ project of bring about the best outcome. ‘Utilitarianism’ is a second-order project that has content only if it has first-order ones to which it applies. Being, for instance, a friend, a husband, or a mother. This troubled dismissal of an agent’s projects, Williams contends, constitutes a Utilitarian attack on our ‘integrity.’ He takes our integrity to be the collective sum of our ground projects and various commitments that all together constitute what makes our lives worth living. We identify with these projects and commitments; they make us who we are.

When the Utilitarian calculus demands that an agent perform an act the consequences of which she cannot bear to “live with,” this constitutes a violent affront to her integrity as an agent. This is because it recommends an agent submit the very things she identifies with and most cares about to the Utilitarian valuation as an element undistinguished from the projects of other agents, and be willing to cast them aside if they’re not privileged to be weighed highly relative to the rest. The connection of an agent’s actions and decisions with its source in the agent’s projects and attitudes she closely identifies with is lost and forgotten in this translation. For this reason, Williams believes ‘morality’ relies on an inadequate account of agency. It requires agents to think of themselves as something less than what they are. As a result, Williams see Utilitarianism as making a mockery of these important considerations of agency.

Any answers to practical questions, Williams thinks, must require a robust account of agency. Because Utilitarianism lacks an adequate account of such, he takes its competency to actually provide answers to practical questions as suspect. As evidence to this, he sites ‘morality’s’ mistaken idea that it can just shove aside an agent’s ground projects on its own accord. This is what constitutes Williams’ objection to Utilitarianism. It’s moral calculus dismisses agency. This aperspectival “view from nowhere” works for scientific thought but not for practical matters. Practical impartiality is impossible.