So even though he only had a rudimentary idea of the principle of mini, diminishing marginal utility, he was sure that at the margin, new increments of some good gave less utility than the previous one, and he was also sure that we could compare utility across individuals. Now, why was that a radical idea? It's a very radical idea, but why? >> Well,. >> It, it, it, it implies that you're going to advocate the taking away of money from very rich people, in, in favor of equalizing the playing field for, for less rich people. >> Exactly right. So imagine a world in which we have Donald Trump up there on the left, and we have a poor homeless person on the right. And the question on the table is, should the government take a dollar of Donald Trump's money and give it to the poor person? Should, should the government do that? >> According to me, according to Bentham, yes. >> Yeah, because, Bentham would say, of course, Trump will lose much less utility from losing that dollar, he probably won't even notice, and a homeless person will gain enormously, you know, it's a huge amount for him, right. So we would do it. Well, then wouldn't we want to take a second dollar from Trump, and give it to the poor person. >> Yes, we would according to the theory. >> Right, and the third dollar, and a fourth dollar, and a fifth dollar. When would we stop? >> When they're equal. >> You wouldn't stop until you've reached absolute equality. Right? >> Mm-hm. >> So in short if you both assume, diminishing marginal utility, and you allow comparisons, interpersonal comparisons utility across individuals, you suddenly have a radically redistributive theory on your hands, and so you can see now we've come a very long way from where we started today, because when we started today, it seemed like a very a, a heartless theory from the point of view of the poor that Bentham is completely indifferent as to who has the utility and would even to the point of, you know, the, the utility monster examples and the Holocaust examples, and it's just completely indifferent to who gets it. But now, once you've put it together in this way, you allow both diminishing margin utility and, interpersonal comparisons, you suddenly have a radical egalitarian theory on your hands. And indeed, the early utilitarians were thought of as radicals. They were referred to as the philosophic radicals. And they were not popular with rich people for obvious reasons. And Bentham himself was a reformer. He thought there should be redistribution. But he didn't want to go all the way. He didn't quite want to buy into this notion that we would redistribute, to absolute equality, I mean after all there would be a social revolution which had never been experienced anywhere in the world in his day and indeed which we don't remotely approximate anywhere in the world today. So you might say so how did Bentham put that together? Because this seems to flow with, you know, pristine logic. From the way he defines everything. Seems like there's no way out. But it turns out he, there is a way out. So what he says is, let's make a distinction between practical equality and absolute equality. And he says, well, in principle it's true, we should redistribute it towards equality. That sort of equality would have place, if each man had exactly the same quantity as every other man. That's how he defines absolute equality. Practical equality, he, he defines as getting as close as you can to absolute equality without threatening people's access to the means of subsistence, abundance and security. Now that seems kind of convoluted. What, what do you, want to take as to what he might mean there? What, why would redistribution threaten people's' access to the means of subsistence and security and abundance? Any i, not obvious, but- >> Because then, they would be coerced to do it, someone else would regulate for them to do it, right? And they would basically lose this autonomy and free choice to, to give to, to the other. >> They would, they, yeah would be coercive. That's for sure, and how do you think people react to having things taken away coercively? >> I would assume a revolution against the government. >> They don't like it. >> Yeah. >> They don't like it. Okay. So you can think of this as one of the earliest formulation of the trickled down theory. Basically meant them saying that if you really did redistribute to absolute equality, the rich would get so angry that the pie would shrink. They wouldn't work, they wouldn't invest, they wouldn't create wealth so it's kind of adding a dynamic dimension to what previously was a completely static theory. So, for instance, here he says suppose you started redistributing, what would eventually happen is that the, the rich would basically destroy their wealth before giving it to the poor. So, we might think of, of an example in my lifetime, when the transition to majority rule democracy was occurring in South Africa in the early 1990s. There was a lot of resistance to that on the part of white property owners, because they were afraid, that if blacks became the majority and got hold of the, the coercive forces of government, they would take everything from them, and so one argument that was made was that wealthy whites, they'll burn their crops before giving them to the blacks, turned out it didn't happen. But, so, you can see this is perpetual fear. There's this notion that, that redistribution might be a good idea, but, at some point, it ceases to be, as Bentham would have said, practical. It becomes impractical if you push redistribution to the point where there's actually less for everybody, and so the pie shrinks and everybody is worse off than they otherwise would have been. And so here he says, before that kind of division, by which he means redistribution could be made, the whole would be destroyed and along with it, the access to the means of subsistence, security, and abundance. Think back to Kahneman and Tversky's point. This is loss aversion. These rich people would be losing something. And losing something is, is enough of a source of disutility for them, that they, in this, in these kinds of examples, would either cease to create wealth or perhaps even destroy wealth before giving it to the poor. Now, we've gone through Bentham's scientific theory of utilitarianism and I've explained its basic dimensions. But if you think back to the beginning of the lectures, I said that every enlightenment thinker is committed both to a scientific theory of organizing society and to the importance of individual rights and freedoms. Well we've said a lot, you can see why I think of him as a proponent of a science of society. But there's not much so far about rights in any of this, is there? Can you think of anything? >> No. >> There doesn't seem to be, right? >> Not too much. >> It could be put that he, he's getting right to this individual pursuit of utility >> Well, so he certainly looks at this individual logic, right? But in fact, it turns out he's, he's not on the surface of it a proponent of rights, famously he said" there are no rights without enforcement and no enforcement without government." He's not interested in natural rights, his God given rights that Locke, talked about. But there's a way in which rights enter through the back door. And before I explain that, let's just underscore here what's at stake. On the one hand there's the utility monster problem, which is the philosopher's example, but the real world instantiation of that is the Eichmann problem. That it's perfectly possible on utilitarian thinking of the classical kind, to sacrifice even the life of someone, for the utility of the society. That doesn't sound like much respect of rights. And then secondly, remember the example we started with right at the beginning at our discussion of Bentham. The happiness machine where you could, you could the, the example you were given was would you sign up to be connected to it for the next ten years. And you had a kind of a visceral reaction to that because of your attachment to your freedom or autonomy. So a lot is at stake here and it doesn't seem as you, as you say that this much attention to rights. Well Bentham has a, an answer to that. He says that you have to pay attention because individual motivation is so vital to maximizing social utility. So if you like this as the formulation that he's making that underlies his point about practical equality. He says the greatest enemies of public peace are the selfish and dissocial passions, necessary as they are, society is held together only by the sacrifices that men can be induced to make, for the gratifications they demand. To obtain these sacrifices is the greatest difficulty, the greatest task of government. How does he imagine government can do that? It's basically that, that it's, government has to protect what we create. So he says, law does not say to a man, work and I will reward you but it says, labor and by stopping the hand that would take them from you, I will ensure to you the fruits of your labor. This comes back to your observation a while ago that without government, people would harm one another. Right? So government must stop people from harming one another, must stop people from taking one another's property. Why? Not because it's morally wrong, not because people have a right to their property, but because if you, if government's don't do that people won't produce things that are valuable. And we need people to produce things. Right? If industry creates, he says, it is law, which preserves. If at the first moment we owe everything to labor, at the second, and every succeeding moment, we owe everything to law. So, we have two sources of rights, ultimately, operating in Bentham. One is this notion of "practical equality" which requires a robust defense of individual rights for consequentialist reasons. Not because it's important to respect them for moral reasons, but simply for their consequences in producing the wealth that's going to make, maximizing utility possible. And then secondly we have this kind of back door entry of what I call a workmanship substratum to Bentham's theory of value. He's saying governments don't create utility, what creates the sources of utility is work. Right. This Lockean idea that we create the things that give us happy by work and, unless the state protects people's abilities to work and accumulate wealth to a very considerable extent, we're not going to get the benefits of a utilitarian system. So even Bentham, despite his cavalier disregard for every doctrine of individual rights of, natural rights, natural law, he thinks it's all nonsense on stilts. Nonetheless, he ends up affirming a doctrine of individual rights as essential to a utilitarian society. Next we're going to turn to the transition to neo-classical utilitarianism, which is closer to the utilitarianism of our own day. See you then.
