Utilitarianism is an egalitarianism

Utilitarianism turns out to be a very egalitarian philosophy in practice

By utilitarianism, I mean the philosophy that holds that we should aim to maximize the overall welfare of people. Many philosophers working on political topics reject utilitarianism as a theory of the good society. This is fair enough, no theory will win universal approval. Most often, in the context of political philosophy, this criticism comes from the ostensible left of utilitarianism. Utilitarians are thought to be insufficiently egalitarian. The utilitarian, it is objected, only cares about the total and/or average amount of welfare. But surely the worst off have a special claim to our help, and surely inequality is objectionable in and of itself.

Positions that some egalitarian critics of utilitarianism hold include:

The difference principle: The difference principle is associated with John Rawls. It holds that between two societies, one can determine which is better by looking at the worst off person in each, and seeing which of them is doing better. This is not as counterintuitive as it may sound. Have not many people said, “judge a society by how it treats its worst-off”? Under this rule, inequality is justified only if it is ultimately to the benefit of the poorest.

Priortarianism: Prioritarians hold that changes in a person’s wellbeing should count for more if their wellbeing is lower. An increase in a poor person's wellbeing counts for more good.

Egalitarianism: Egalitarianism is like prioritarianism but different in subtle ways. Egalitarians hold that less inequality in a society is inherently good, and more inequality is bad. Sometimes it might be acceptable to increase inequality, but the badness of inequality must always be considered.

Luck egalitarianism: Luck egalitarians hold that everyone must have the same opportunity to succeed. This may sound inegalitarian to you because many people say they believe in equality of opportunity without meaning it. A true believer in the equality of opportunity, the luck egalitarian will reject things like inherited wealth. Because we do not control many of our talents, differences in talent will also not be a legitimate source of differences in outcome. One of the few things that will be a source of legitimate differences in outcome is choices about whether to work or take leisure.

All of these philosophies have sometimes used utilitarianism as shooting practice. They have criticized it as inegalitarian and seen it as indifferent to claims of fairness.

I’m concerned by this strain of critique because utilitarianism is a very egalitarian philosophy. Utilitarianism shares with its egalitarian critics an opposition to the status quo because the status quo is too unequal. What follows is a meandering collection of observations on equality, practical politics, philosophy, and utilitarianism.

1.The ideas that have real currency

It is odd that the debate between utilitarianism and more egalitarian philosophies has taken up so much space. Views on distributive justice popular outside academic philosophy are so much less egalitarian than utilitarianism.

In public discourse, a charitable reconstruction of the political center would be a qualified Nozickeanism. Nozickeanism here means that individuals have a right to their property through the history of the way they acquired it. Because it is a qualified Nozickeanism, proponents concede that these rights to property may be abridged under circumstances of great moral urgency, but only in such circumstances.

You can read more about Nozickeanism and historical accounts of distributive justice here.

But stripping back the gloss of charitable reconstruction, I suspect the philosophy of distributive justice held by many is a philosophy that we will call rulesianism. Rulesianism is a kind of folk philosophy held by many in the media class. To the best of my knowledge, no professional political philosopher has ever been a rulesian. However, rulesianism holds a magnetic power over some segments of the public. The ruelsian holds that if you gained your wealth through the rules, then by those rules, you own that wealth. It would be cheating to change those rules now. The wealthy winners played the game and won- that's the end of it.

Desert theory supplements rulesianism. People deserve their property because they have displayed good character to get it- thrift and industriousness. Yet we can see that rulesian considerations are more fundamental than desert considerations. This is because Rulesians say that even the nakedly undeserving get to keep their property if they acquired it following the rules.

One might think that rulesianism is just respect for incentives. If we don’t let people keep what they gained through the rules, why would they bother to gain anything? Society would be poorer as a result. Yet rulesianism goes deeper than respect for incentives. Granted, in a market economy, some inequality is necessary to create incentives. However, the rulesian seems more concerned with letting people keep what they hold than appraising overall incentive structures.

The obvious objection to Rulesianism is that the same rules that assign wealth also allow for wealth redistribution for the common good. Perhaps there is a way to make Rulesianism survive this objection but I can't think of it. I think philosophers must grapple with rulesianism despite its weaknesses- because it is a barrier to the egalitarianism many philosophers favor, and because political philosophers have an obligation to engage with popular ideas.

Moving along from rulesianism. If we go outside of public discussion and to the circles of technocrats, many fear that we are ruled by “government house utilitarianism”. The reasoning seems to be that since economics is the queen of the social sciences in the opinion of government decisionmakers, and economics is utilitarian, utilitarianism must be the ruling ideology of technocracy. This seems to be the fear of the Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales- a group of scholars convened to fight what they see as the threat of technocratic utilitarianism.

Rumors of the utilitarianism of the economics profession are exaggerated. Since Pareto and Lionel Robbins, economists have usually rejected interpersonal comparisons of utility. To interpersonally compare utility is to make a judgment between two people about who has the greater welfare. Without the interpersonal comparison of utility, utilitarianism is impossible (I give my own approach to solving the comparison problem here). Instead of utilitarianism, an ideology we will call efficientarianism reigns among economists. According to efficentarianism what matters is to make Kaldor Hicks improvements. Intuitively speaking, to make a Kaldor-Hicks improvement is “to grow the economic pie”. This is to be done with no regard to how that pie gets distributed. The theory is that someone else will take care of distribution through tax and transfer.

It’s not so much that economists believe in efficientarianism- many are quite sincere in their desire to see redistribution through tax and transfer down the road. Rather, efficientarianism is the practical result of what economists do. One of the problems with the idea that technocrats can get on with growing the pie and someone else will take care of redistribution in the future is that rulesianism means that people think that once you have an asset, you get to keep it. Efficentarianism among public officials and rulesianism among the political chattering classes combine to create inequality.

So rulesianism is in vogue among the media class and efficientarianism is often the result of economists’ practice. It’s odd then to see philosophers criticizing utilitarianism for being inegalitarian when it is so much more egalitarian than these ideas that have real power.

2.CBA and the misleading way we talk about “efficiency versus equity”

Part of the confusion around utilitarianism comes from the way we often talk about efficiency versus equity. This confused way of talking allows efficientarianism to pass itself off as utilitarianism.

Cost-benefit analysis is a form of economic analysis which attempts to quantify all costs and benefits in monetary terms. If you look at many documents which outline cost-benefit analysis, they will include a disclaimer like this: "cost-benefit analysis is only concerned with efficiency but not equity".

What they mean by this is that cost-benefit analysis (CBA) treats a dollar as a dollar in a peculiar way. Let’s suppose the government is deciding where to build a bridge. There are two options. The first option, favored by Monoply Man Von Moneybags (MMVN), is to build the bridge at site A. The second option, favored by a village full of people, is to build it at site B. MMVN wants it built at site A because it will allow him to cross the river more quickly to get to his 117 hole private golf course using only a limo, not a chopper. The village all wants it built at site B because they all have ailing mothers the bridge will let them visit.

All 50 people who live in the village would be willing to pay 1000 dollars each to have the bridge built at location B, for a total willingness to pay of 50,000. 1000 dollars may not be very much, but it represents pretty much all the income each of them can spare. MMVN would be willing to pay 100,000 dollars to have it built at site A. The method of unweighted CBA suggests the government should build the bridge at site A.

You probably find this result disturbing (I crafted the example that way). But I want to focus in on something interesting about how we talk about this kind of CBA. Economists call the result efficient and say your concerns with the result are equity concerns. Economists grant equity concerns are valid. However, they argue that it is not the domain of economists to work out equity concerns, but instead political decision-makers. In practice, I suspect the politician, left with the clear CBA on the one hand, and unquantified equity concerns on the other, will do what the CBA says.

Here’s my concern. I disagree with the recommendation of that cost-benefit analysis in the example I made up, but I don’t think this is because of equity concerns. When I think of pure equity concerns, I think of the philosophies I described in the introduction that aims to be more egalitarian than utilitarianism

But you don’t have to be a prioritarian or an egalitarian to disagree with cost-benefit analysis. If you are a utilitarian you can have another kind of efficiency concern. Distributive efficiency. Wikipedia defines distributive efficiency as follows:

In welfare economics, distributive efficiency occurs when goods and services are received by those who have the greatest need for them. Abba Lerner first proposed the idea of distributive efficiency in his 1944 book The Economics of Control.

i.e. in a situation of perfect distributive efficiency, each good and service is assigned to the person who will most benefit from it, which is to say receive the greatest boost in utility or wellbeing from it.

The danger in treating a dollar as a dollar in cost-benefit analysis is not just that it’s unfair. The danger is that from a utilitarian perspective it’s an inefficient way of assigning dollars or in-kind benefits to maximize welfare.

But an equivocation of our public dialogue- between efficiency in the sense of the economist, and efficiency in the sense of the utilitarian, leads us into confusion about utilitarianism. Since pure equity concerns do not directly play a role, many assume that utilitarianism only cares about efficiency in something like the economist’s sense. In truth, utilitarianism quite egalitarian, due to a concern for distributive efficiency.

3.Perhaps maximalist demands for egalitarianism can be less effective than strong but quantified demands for egalitarianism

Consider two separate claims one might make.

1. Our number one priority is to help the poorest people in society. This takes priority over helping any others, no matter the relative magnitudes

2. The income elasticity of the marginal utility of income is 2

The first, a gloss on the Rawlsian difference principle, allows no balancing whatsoever between interests.

The second is a little harder to unpack. What it means is that for every one percent income increases, the marginal utility of income falls by 2%. What would this mean in practice? Well, it would mean that an extra dollar going to a person on 25,000 dollars a year is worth 16x more than an extra dollar going to a person earning 100,000 year. It would also mean that if we have the choice between giving 7 dollars to a person making 25,000 dollars a year, or 100 dollars to a person making 100,000 dollars a year, the former is preferable.

Technically, claim 1 is infinitely more egalitarian than claim 2. However, I think there’s a practical sense in which claim 2 actually turns out to be more egalitarian than claim 1. How?

When you tell people that X is infinitely more valuable than Y, they tend to just treat X as much more valuable than Y. This is why it’s so dangerous just to say “lives are infinitely valuable”. In practice, no one will ever act as if lives were infinitely valuable- if we did, at the very least road usage would be much more restricted. So when you say life is infinitely valuable, you can actually diminish the concern people have for lives in practice.

If, however, you tell people lives are worth a very large but finite amount, say 10 million dollars, then it can enter decision-making functions. A strenuous effort will be made to avoid it. It is my sense that something similar might be true about the value we place on the welfare of the poorest. If we say “the position of the worst off is all that really matters” people aren’t going to take us literally. Thus claim 2 may be, in practice, more egalitarian than claim 1.

Am I right about this? I don’t know, but it is one practical reason to consider utilitarianism over the difference principle in politics.

4.Utilitarianism is so supportive of wealth redistribution that there is little practical difference between utilitarianism and putatively more egalitarian philosophies

There is a cottage industry of researchers that study the implicit eta or rate at which marginal social utility declines in income that is implied by the tax and transfer systems of different countries. That is the eta value that would be necessary to make those tax systems rational if the aim of the tax system is to maximize social welfare. Bargain et al. (2014) arrive at an estimate of inequality aversion for a number of European countries. This includes the Danish tax and transfer system which they find has an implicit eta of 3. They suggest that such a value is clearly beyond utilitarianism and that Denmark is effectively following the min-max rule of Rawlsianism: improve the position of the worst-off at all costs. An eta of three implies that an extra dollar for someone earning 30,000 is worth 37 times as much as an extra dollar for someone earning 100,000 dollars a year. You might think this could not possibly be a utilitarian approach.

Oh contraire. Utilitarianism can endorse what appears to be an eta of 3 in the tax and transfer system- or even higher. My colleague Latty has shown this through work on wellbeing, diminishing marginal utility in income, and relative income effects.

A relative income effect is an effect on your welfare caused by your neighbor’s income. Generally speaking, people desire to have greater, or at least equal income, than their neighbors. In very unequal societies, relative income effects tend to reduce overall wellbeing. Relative income effects are often taken to represent envy, but actually, they may represent all sorts of things. To pick an example at random, suppose you were poorer than many of your neighbors. This might make it hard for you to partake of the social life of your neighborhood. You may also find that only luxury goods and services are sold in your area, pricing you out of many things.

Evidence suggests that the effects of relative income on happiness are large. Relative income effects are another factor, in addition to the declining marginal utility of income, that pushes the utilitarian to prefer a more equal distribution of income.

Technically relative income effects should be treated as a separate parameter to eta in models of the inequality aversion of a tax system. However, if relative income effects are not accounted for separately, as in Bargain 2014’s model which does not include relative income effects, the apparent eta implied by a tax system that is trying to be at least approximately utilitarian could be north of 3.

My colleague Kieran Latty has done mathematical work on prioritarianism and utilitarianism and found that using empirically plausible values of the declining marginal effect of income on wellbeing, as well as plausible estimates of the magnitude of relative income effects prioritarianism and utilitarianism gives almost the same result in almost all cases. Utilitarianism is so powerfully affected by these considerations that it is, in practice, not very different to prioritarianism (even when the degree of priority is raised very high) and other forms of egalitarianism. Latty finds that many popular forms of welfarism converge in practice, drawn towards egalitarianism by the declining utility of income and relative income effects.

One philosophically interesting aspect of this is that it is, in part, the very same human intuitions of fairness that drive philosophers to egalitarian philosophies that make utilitarianism more egalitarian. People tend to flourish more without the negative effects of income disparity at least partly because they find those conditions fairer. Thus utilitarianism delivers the same result as egalitarianism for the same reason that many philosophers end up believing in egalitarianism- because a sense that equality (or approximate equality) is fair is built into us. Fairness intuitions are in a very direct sense, incorporated into the utilitarian calculus, not discarded by it. Another way to put it is this: fairness is built not into the philosophy itself, but into the people that utilitarianism is applied to. In turn, utilitarianism is responsive to the needs and wants of people.

5.How can philosophy fight when the enemy isn’t ideas, but entrenched power structures? I don’t know, but being clearer on what we’re united around couldn’t hurt

My argument, then, is that the fight between egalitarianism and utilitarianism is not as pressing as some have made it out to be. One objection that could be mounted to the argument I’ve made here is as follows. “Bear, you’ve said that utilitarianism is more redistributive than the actually existing political center, and egalitarians and utilitarians should focus on their common ends. However, we are doing political philosophy, not politics. In political philosophy, we argue out differences on the basis of their theoretical, not their practical significance. There is still a debate to be had between utilitarianism and more egalitarian philosophies, even if, in practical terms, they have more in common than is often recognized.”

I acknowledge this objection. I agree there is a debate to be had. But I also think there is another project that is worth engaging in- the philosophical articulation of an overlapping consensus. An account of how different starting points arrived at the same conclusion. Meditation on how different starting points inform and reinforce the egalitarian case overall, and each tributary argument that flows into it. We might call this project of seeking and creating overlapping consensus on policy questions applied political philosophy due to its similarity with the project of applied ethics.

6.It’s often forgotten that utilitarianism doesn’t come with a specific theory of the good life

There’s a sense in which utilitarianism, as an approach in political philosophy, can be agnostic on what the good life actually is.

According to utilitarianism, goodness is equal to the sum or average of welfare. Exactly what welfare is isn't specified by utilitarianism itself, but only by its variants (hedonic utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism, etc). One possibility, often neglected, is that utilitarianism can come with a rich theory of what the good life is. For example, utilitarianism can encompass a eudaimonic or objective list account of the good life.

The interesting feature of different concepts of welfare is that such concepts, as Hausman has pointed out, invariably intercorrelate closely. Measures of flourishing or capabilities correlate closely with measures of pleasure. Measures of pleasure correlate very closely with measures of life satisfaction.

This feature of human wellbeing means that, from the point of view of practical politics, it often matters very little what theory of the good we plug into our utilitarianism. Thus it is quite possible to be a political utilitarian, but not endorse any particular theory of what the good life is. That is to say, these concepts of the good mostly just track each other anyway, so you can be agnostic about which one is the true measure of what matters since from a policy perspective, they amount to much the same thing- get one and you’ll get the others.

One of the things particularly philosophers, who pride themselves on rich inner lives etc, find frightening about utilitarianism is the possibility that it will elevate the pig to the level of Socrates. The good news is that if you prefer a richer theory of the good life, which includes things like the full development of natural capacities, etc., etc, from the point of view of the political advocate it is unlikely to matter. The same priorities like poverty reduction, incarceration reform, etc. remain the same, whatever theory of wellbeing you plug into utilitarianism, and the same policies will almost certainly lead to all three of desire satisfaction, pleasure, and the full flourishing of human capabilities.

For the record, personally eudaimonic utilitarianism is my personal preference because it seems to me to do justice to the idea that life should be rich and full (it rejects wireheading), while still capturing what is persuasive about consequentialism, and the welfarist notion that what matters ultimately is the welfare of people.

Interlude: Colander

Colander argues that all of early utilitarianism was vague about exactly what the good was in a slightly different, but still interesting way:

What was meant by “good” for the question at hand was not expected to be fully defined or known beforehand. It was to emerge from the normative discussion. For some policy debates, material welfare might be the relevant goal and what was meant by good could be defined relative to standard economic measures. For other debates, “good” could mean freedom of choice and have little concern about material welfare. “Greatest good for the greatest number” was a malleable concept that would be defined by the context of the policy question, not by any fixed definition. Strictly scientific economic models could not capture the many dimensions of “good,” which was why their scientific models did not lead to any policy implications on their own.

7.Can utilitarianism be a critical philosophy? Yes.

We often imagine the utilitarian as a decisionmaker, perhaps a bureaucrat, sitting alone in a tower overlooking those proverbial train tracks, making the decision whether or not to divert the train. But despite phrases like “government house utilitarianism”, the utilitarian is unlikely to be inside the tower, the utilitarian is much more likely to be sprinting up to the tracks trying to save the five, after the government made the call not to kill the one, because he was a citizen or his family were swing voters, or above all, because he had greater willingness to pay.

We too easily forget that utilitarianism as imagined by Bentham was a critical philosophy, intended to make the defenders of existing legislation, moral codes, and institutions nervous. Utilitarianism is a criterion for finding special interests, entrenched elites, and unnecessary cruelties. I suppose I see my (partial, qualified) utilitarianism in this spirit. It is not a way not of trying to create a closed ethical system. It is certainly not the last word on ethics. But it is a starting point for critical ethical discussions about the status quo.

Philosophers have a justified skepticism of unprincipled theoretical eclecticism which says “take a dash of this and that” but doesn’t explain how this and that can go together. Am I making an apology for such an unprincipled eclecticism here? No, I don’t think so. All one must grant in order to use utilitarianism as I’ve described is the following:

If, of a set of mutually exclusive and exhaustive alternatives, X increases welfare the most, this gives us strong reason to favor X.

Call someone who accepts the above a weak utilitarian. We are almost all weak utilitarians. Weak utilitarianism is all we need to embrace utilitarianism as a critical yardstick for evaluating society. It is useful as a yardstick because it is very easy to quantify compared to many alternative approaches to the common good.

8.Utilitarianism as a public philosophy

The philosopher Goodin has an interesting discussion about utilitarianism as a public philosophy. By this, he means utilitarianism is as an ethical philosophy especially suited for public, rather than private decision-making. I agree, although I perhaps see it in slightly different terms. We can see utilitarianism as useful as an approximation of the correct approach to politics without being utilitarians ourselves in our day-to-day ethical existence.

Why do this? Because many of the most plausible counterexamples to utilitarianism involve methods and situations which are not relevant to governance or, at any rate, are unlikely to be relevant to governance in a modern democracy. Won’t utilitarianism lead us to wirehead the whole world? Doesn’t utilitarianism lead us to neglect what is special about our friendships and individual commitments? All reasonable objections, but objections unlikely to arise in the context of working out the ideal progressivity of the tax system, or penal reform.

The point converges with that in the previous section on utilitarianism as a critical philosophy. We should not let counterexamples that are not immediately relevant lead us to discard utilitarianism as a measuring stick. There are merits to using utilitarianism in policy analysis- because it is so easily quantifiable-, even if one is not a utilitarian?

This leads me to think that we should see political utilitarianism as a distinct philosophy from utilitarianism generally. The political utilitarian also need not hold any particular theory of the good life (see section 6), and can be agnostic or even negative on utilitarianism as a system of ethics.

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