Question about utilitarian-based morality

Economics Political Theory
1

James recently posted this general deduction of the NAP in utilitarian terms:

A basic utilitarian proof:

  • That which is moral is that which causes greatest happiness.

  • One achieves happiness by satisfying one’s preferences.

  • All preferences are subjective.

  • Subjective preferences can only be known by demonstration.

  • One’s subjective preferences cannot be demonstrated if another uses aggression to impose theirs instead.

  • Maximum satisfaction of preferences is impossible if there is aggression.

  • Aggression is always immoral.

The problem with this and the system of utilitarian rights that I understand is this: the definition of aggression. More specifically, it is as follows:

When you use your property, you are acting by maximizing your utility, and are hence guaranteed a Pareto-efficient movement in the world. If someone else messes with your property you are prevented from maximizing your utility.

The problem is “why do only you have the right to utility from your property?” I know this is a shabbily-worded question, but I hope I can explain:

Utility is gained through perception of events and resulting satisfaction in the mind. Maximization of utility exists outside of the objective world, however. What I mean is that for you to experience the utility of using a ball, the ball need not in fact be actually there in the real world. As long as you perceive the ball in the same way and it behaves like an object in the real world, you gain the utility. Hence, utility maximization doesn’t have an inherent tie to the objective world, but to the one of perception.

This is where the problem comes in. Imagine a mind experiment where a person is watching some location ten miles from where he is through a camera on a big TV screen. There is a ball on the ground in the center of the image, and a few people are walking around. None of them interact with the ball. The ball is nice. Then, a researcher comes to the person and tells him that the ball has been gifted to him (the person watching the screen). Ecstatic, the person’s like “Alright!” Yet he is currently preoccupied with looking at the video screen, and he decides not to go to retrieve “his” ball at the moment. A few minutes later, however, a guy walks up to the ball, picks it up, runs into a car, and drives off in a puff of smoke.

There are two possibilities:

  1. The ball was indeed gifted to him

  2. It wasn’t, and they lied to him

Now, to the guy seeing “his” ball being taken away, the situation is just the same. The perception is what matters. There is no variable “ownership” that is objectively attached to the ball and that says “only person X’s utility may be maximized using this ball.”

Hence, utility exists within the (artificial) concept of property rights and cannot be used to justify their existence.

Am I misunderstanding subjective utilitarianism?

2

So the dilemma as I understand it is, since we only know our own perceptions, there is no justification for property rights. For instance a man can not own a ball, he can only own his perception of the ball, therefore the ball is not necessarily his and you are looking at this situation from the eyes of the principle that it is wrong to take someone elses property by force. Looking from the eyes of this principle, this means that since the may not be his ball, then one is free to take it from him. The only answer I can come up is that the perception and what is being percieved must match up, and the percieved acquisition must match up with the real acquisition. You can never really know, as far as I know, that one’s perception and what is being percieved are the same thing, so I guess we can only base our knowledge by our own perceptions and suppliment that with others perceptions (which again are our own perceptions). If one is right or wrong ethically, based upon this principle, for claiming property, I guess motive is the only deciding factor I can think of.

3

The conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises–it isn’t set in proper logical form, so there is no strict logical connection even between the premises and the conclusion. There’s potential, but it needs more rigor.

4

I think that the guy just wanted to stay put more than he wanted to retreive the ball.

So he was doing what he valued most and so his utility was maximized. IMO utility can never actually and totally be brought below optimal levels -its like saying nothing can exist.

Even when people are coerced, the will still operates freely though with an increased fear of the act it wanted. Imagine the amount of freedom to be a continuum, although the will is violated to some degree, it can still freely submit or not, and if it is totally coerced the will is completely free to pursue other acts so that people always choose what is best for them. But this theory does have some problems.

5

Could you please be more explicit here?

6
  1. The proof James provided is wrong. He neglects that fact that an aggressor can receive more satisfaction from an act of aggression than an aggress does from being free. If A recieves more utility from stealing B’s wallet than B does from not having his wallet stollen, then the act of aggression is actually moral according to the premises of the proof. The problem is that the proof is set up to justify act utilitarianism, but instead attempts to justify a rule.

What makes aggression immoral in a utilitarian framework is that its adoption, as a rule, leasds to a massive decrease in material well being for ALL people. At the very extreme, it makes capital accumulation and civilization essentially impossible. But for any given individual, so long as greater society obeys rules of property, commiting acts of aggression might very well be the best way to satisfy various ends.

  1. You need to take all notions of rights out of the equation. The role that rights and property play in utilitarian ethics isn’t to determine who is allowed to gain satisfaction from an object. Rights and property come into play when the adoption or rejection increase or decrease the satisfaction of individual ends. Property is a necessary condition of markets, and markets satisfy material ends greater than any other economic institution. For that reason, the convention of property can be justified by a rule utilitarian.
7

On the other hand, the traditional notion of utilitarianism presumes that intersubjective utility comparisons are possible - which they aren’t.

8

I find the initial proof especially shaky, most importantly this aspect of it:

“That which is moral is that which causes greatest happiness.”

Nontheless a strict utilitarian would have little problem with the actual proof, except possibly the fifth section. At any rate..

I don’t see what the proof has to do with a utilitarian morality in the first place, it could just as easily apply to a natural-rights morality, because the people walking by are in no way important to the example, as the guy ends up stealing the ball in the end anyway, but the question is about the “legitimate” ownership of the first individual, which can apply to any moral code. So I don’t see how this is a question of utilitarian ethics, beyond the fact that you’re saying that utility relies upon the conception, and not the physical thing, but this has little to do with all around utlity as is usually concieved of by utilitarians, the closest in this instance being Misesian utilitarians (I’d argue that realistically Mises wasn’t even really a utilitarian as he claimed but advocated something else entirely). So in the end this is lacking a lot of utilitarian focus by not considering the aggregate utility gain/loss in this, and furthermore at some point an arbitrary line has to be drawn with property, and this is something that even a utilitarian would agree with, and which any practical natural rights theorist must agree with.

In the end the problem is that the type of utilitarian you are speaking of has an arbitrarily defined conception of private property and they realize that it is arbitrary, and usually defined by society. So in this instance it would depend upon whether or not the property was actually the watcher’s in the accepted sense of the term, if he is not then he is in the same situation as the individual who wishes that someone else didn’t perform a certain action with their property.

9

Which of the eight rules of inference does it use?–Modus ponens, modus tollens, hypothetical syllogism, disjunctive syllogism, constructive dilemma, conjunction, simplification, addition?

When you have a longer proof such as this one, a few of your premises end up being conclusions of previous premises like so:

  1. (E → X) → (A v R) (premise)

  2. ~A (premise)

  3. E (premise)

  4. A v R (1, 3, Modus Ponens) (inferred premise, since I go beyond two premises and a conclusion)

  5. Therefore, R (4, 2, disjunctive) (inferred conclusion with the disjunctive rule of inference)

Whatever the letters happen to instantiate, this argument is logically valid in the strict sense of the word. The proof of utilitarianism is not. It needs to be reformulated along these lines (this is just a sample), otherwise the relationship between the premises is not clear, and the conclusion by no means follows at all.

10

I was thinking that for example we’d say that it’s bad to interfere with an object that is supposedly a man’s property because it limits his ability to maximize his utility. But why isn’t it bad to define property in the first place? It appears that defining property itself lessens the abilities of other people to maximize their utility.

11

Sorry, I didn’t mean to come off as though I was challenging your assertion. I wasn’t. I was just curious about what you were basing it on.

This might be tangential, but I think the reason why people find arguments like the one presented in the OP to be logical is because they “fill in” the missing parts of the inference chains. I could be wrong though.

I understand and agree. Like I said above, I was just wondering if you could provide a more detailed explanation.

Let me see if I can make James’ argument logically valid. Here’s a start:

  1. That which is moral is that which causes greatest happiness. (premise)

  2. One achieves happiness by satisfying one’s preferences. (premise)

  3. Therefore, that which is moral is that which causes greatest satisfaction of one’s preferences. (1, 2, hypothetical syllogism)

  4. All preferences are subjective. (premise)

  5. Subjective preferences can only be known by demonstration. (premise)

  6. Therefore, all preferences can only be known by demonstration. (4, 5, hypothetical syllogism)

At this point, I’m having trouble with tying in aggression to the rest. More specifically, I’m finding it difficult to put the notion that “aggression against someone prevents him from the greatest satisfaction of his preferences” in a logically rigorous form. The problem, as I see it, is that “greatest satisfaction of one’s preferences” is only expressed in the above as a predicate, not as a full statement.