Can Utilitarians Have Friends? 
Evan Tiffany

     An increasingly pervasive objection to utilitarianism, made popular by Bernard Williams¹ and Michael Stoker², is that a commitment to impersonal morality interferes with a person’s ability to carry out her own personal projects and intimate relationships.  Utilitarianism, the critics maintain, requires one to treat oneself and others as simply one among many inputs to an impersonal utility-calculus.  Maintaining intimate relationships, on the other hand, requires that one treat oneself and others as having intrinsic worth.  Hence, the argument concludes, there is an essential tension between the kind of impersonal morality characteristic of utilitarianism and the maintenance of personal relationships. 

     One instance of this general argumentative strategy comes from Bernard Williams’s now famous one-thought-too-many objection.  Commenting on an example originally posed by Charles Fried,³ Williams has us imagine a man who can, at no real risk to himself, save one of two lives in equal peril.  The catch is that one of the lives is that of his wife; the other that of a complete stranger.  The utilitarian, it would seem, must reason along the following lines: “Since I can only save one life, and both lives are of equal intrinsic worth, it is wholly arbitrary which life I save.  While it is true that I will gain in happiness by saving my wife, the other person’s spouse would equally gain in happiness were I to save her.  Thus, the utility calculus comes out that it is equally permissible to save either life, and my only moral obligation is to save one or the other (as opposed to saving neither).  I am thus morally permitted to save my wife’s life.”  But, Williams objects: 

This construction provides the agent with one thought too many: it might have been hoped by some (for instance, his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one’s wife.⁴ 

     A similar type of objection can be found in many of Charles Dickens’s writings.  Perhaps the most direct challenge to the view may be found in Hard Times, published seven years prior to Mill’s Utilitarianism.  The blurb on the back of the penguin edition⁵ states: 

In the persons of Gradgrind and Bounderby [Dickens] stigmatized the prevalent philosophy of Utilitarianism which, whether in school or factory, allowed human beings to be caged in a dreary scenery of brick terraces and foul chimneys, to be enslaved to machines and reduced to number.

‘…And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation.  And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money.  Isn’t this a prosperous nation?  Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation, and a’n’t you in a thriving state?’ 

‘What did you say?’ asked Louisa. 

‘Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know.  I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine.  But that had nothing to do with it.  It was not in the figures at all,’ said Sissy, wiping her eyes. 

‘That was a great mistake of yours,’ observed Louisa. 

‘Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now.  Then Mr M’Choakumchild said he would try me again.  And he said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year.  What is your remark on that proportion?  And my remark was – for I couldn’t think of a better one – that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million.  And that was wrong, too.’⁶

     John Stuart Mill, in his original statement and defense of utilitarianism, anticipated and offered a response to just this line of attack.  Against, the Dickens-type objection, he responds: 

It is often affirmed that utilitarianism renders men cold and unsympathizing; that it chills their moral feelings toward individuals; that it makes them regard only the dry and hard consideration of the consequences of action, not taking into their moral estimate the qualities from which those actions emanate.  If the assertion means that they do not allow their judgment respecting the rightness or wrongness of an action to be influenced by their opinion of the qualities of the person who does it, this is a complaint not against utilitarianism, but against any standard or morality at all; for certainly no known ethical standard decides an action to be good or bad because it is done by a good or bad man, still less because done by an amiable, a brave, or a benevolent man, or the contrary.  These considerations are relevant, not to the estimation of actions, but of persons; and there is nothing in the utilitarian theory inconsistent with the fact that there are other things which interest us in persons besides the rightness and wrongness of their actions.⁷

     As with any objection to utilitarianism, there are two distinct modes of response.  The first is to challenge whether the utilitarian is in fact committed to the claims attributed to her (the ‘Oh, yeah?’ response), and the second is to question whether those claims are in fact unacceptable (the ‘So what?’ response).  In the above passage, we see Mill employ both strategies, maintaining that we distinguish between two importantly different claims: 

(1) The utilitarian judges the rightness or wrongness of actions (or policies) solely on the basis of their consequences. 
(2) The utilitarian judges the admirability of a person solely in terms of the consequences of a person’s actions. 

He admits that the utilitarian is committed to (1), but insists that this is a virtue of the theory.  Mill does go a bit far in claiming that “no known ethical standard decides an action to be good or bad because it is done by a good or bad man,” for one might say that, suitably qualified, Aristotle holds this view.  However, the basic idea is that it is possible for good people to do bad things and for bad people to do good things. 

     The Dickens passage does have an intuitive appeal.  Who, after all, would you be more interested in befriending, the dispassionate Mr. Choakumchild, who goes so far as to refer to his students by number rather than name, or the sympathetic Sissy?  Mill’s response is that one can consistently accept the principle of utility as an account of the rightness and wrongness of action, while finding deep character flaws with persons like Mr. Choakumchild. 
     To Williams’s one-thought-too-many objection, Mill also has a response: 

[Critics] say that [utilitarianism] is exacting too much to require that people shall always act from the inducement of promoting the general interests of society.  But this is to mistake the very meaning of a standard of morals and confound the rule of action with the motive of it.  It is the business of ethics to tell us what are our duties, or by what test we may know them; but no system of ethics requires that the sole motive of all we do shall be a feeling of duty; on the contrary ninety-nine hundredths of all our actions are done from other motives, and rightly so done if the rule of duty does not condemn them.⁹

Notes
1.  See “Persons, Character and Morality” in his Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 1-19; “A Critique of Utilitarianism” in Smart and Williams (eds.) Utilitarianism: For and Against (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
2.  “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,” Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 453-66.
3.   An Anatomy of Values (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 227.
4.  “Persons, Character and Morality,” op. cit., p. 18.
5.  Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Penguin Classics, 1985; first published 1854).
6.  Ibid., p. 97.
7.  J.S. Mill, Utilitarianism, G. Sher, ed.  (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001; first published 1861), p. 20.
8.  Ibid., p. 21.
9.  Ibid., p. 18.
 

Discussion Questions
1.  Do you agree with the two responses that Mill gives?  Does the first response (in which he distinguishes assessments of actions from assessments of character) address the heart of Sissy’s answer to Mr. Choakumchild? 

2.  In lecture, we will watch two clips.  The first advances the Williams-Dickens objection.  The character Jack Bauer claims that success as a counter-intelligence agent requires that one “remain detached.”  Unlike Gradgrind, Jack does have genuine emotions with which he often struggles; however, at the end of the day, he always does what is in the public interest.  In a dialogue with Jack, Chase (his young colleague) claims that he does not want to become such a person, a person who is detached from his loved ones.   Are either the ‘Oh, yeah?’ or the ‘So what?’ response applicable here?  Are either successful? 

3.  In the second, Doyle beseeches Angel to become personally involved with the people that he helps.  Is the clip best “read” as advancing the Williams-Dickens objection or as a potential utilitarian response to that objection?  Of particular relevance to this question is the part where Doyle foreshadows what will happen if Angel remains solitary, doing penitence in his cell, detached from the very people he aims to help.  Doyle mentions how the thirst for human blood will only grow until he at last gives in to temptation – afterall “I’m still ahead by the numbers.” 
 
 
 
 

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