UTILITARIANISM FAILS TO RECOGNIZE DIFFERENCES

UTILITARIANISM FAILS TO RECOGNIZE DIFFERENCES

1. UTILITARIANISM CANNOT ACCOUNT FOR DIFFERING CONCEPTIONS OF GOODNESS

Martha C. Nussbaum, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, FORDHAM LAW REVIEW, November, 1997, pp. 281-2.

A second problem with utilitarianism is its commitment to the commensurability of value, the concern to measure the good in terms of a single metric and thus to deny that there are irreducibly plural goods that figure in a human life. Both Sen and I have pursued this question extensively, apart from our work on capabilities. But it has also had importance in justifying the capabilities approach, since the quality of life seems to consist of a plurality of distinct features - features that cannot be simply reduced to quantities of one another. This recognition limits the nature of the tradeoffs it will be feasible to make.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, FORDHAM LAW REVIEW, November, 1997, p. 282.

But a third feature of utilitarianism has been even more central to the capability critique. As Sen has repeatedly pointed out, people's satisfactions are not very reliable indicators of their quality of life. Wealthy and privileged people get used to a high level of luxury, and feel pain when they do not have delicacies that one may think they do not really need. On the other hand, deprived people frequently adjust their sights to the low level they know they can aspire to, and thus actually experience satisfaction in connection with a very reduced living standard.
3. FAILURE TO ACCOUNT FOR ADAPTIVE PREFERENCES DOOMS UTILITARIANISM

Martha C. Nussbaum, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, FORDHAM LAW REVIEW, November, 1997, p. 283.

This phenomenon of "adaptive preferences"—preferences that adjust to the low level of functioning one can actually achieve—has by now been much studied in the economic literature, and is generally recognized as a central problem, if one wants to use the utilitarian calculus for any kind of normative purpose in guiding public policy. We are especially likely to encounter adaptive preferences when we are studying groups that have been persistent victims of discrimination, and who may as a result have internalized a conception of their own unequal worth. It is certain to be true when we are concerned with groups who have inadequate information about their situation, their options, and the surrounding society - as is frequently the case, for example, with women in developing countries. For these reasons, then, the utility-based approach seems inadequate as a basis for offering comparisons of quality of life.
4. UTILITARIANISM CANNOT ACCOUNT FOR PERSONAL DIFFERENCES OF VALUE

Stephen E. Gottlieb, Professor of Law at Albany Law School, HASTINGS LAW JOURNAL, April, 1994, p. 841.

The fundamental problem with utilitarianism has been the impossibility of true interpersonal comparisons of benefits and harms. For most of the issues debated, there is no scale that measures the quality of alternatives or even ranks results. Apples, oranges, Mozart, and Dali are incomparable. Without a common scale, balancing is not intelligible. It cannot be described, and can hardly be improved.

UTILITARIANISM JUSTIFIES CRUELTY TO ANIMALS

1. UTILITARIANISM JUSTIFIES HARMING ANIMALS

Martha C. Nussbaum, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, HARVARD LAW REVIEW, March 2001, pp. 1529-30.

First of all, because the view is committed to aggregation of all relevant pleasures and pains (or preference satisfactions and frustrations), it actually makes the answer to ethical questions about our conduct to animals depend on many complex empirical calculations for which results are uncertain. Thus, as Tom Regan argues, Utilitarianism provides a very shaky and unclear rationale for vegetarianism. Animals do not have rights; therefore we have to calculate all the satisfactions and non-satisfactions of all the people and animals involved: for example, the people who like meat and will mind its absence from their diet; the workers in the meat industry who will have to find other jobs; the short-and long-term economic impact of a global shift to vegetarianism. The answers to these calculations are unknown and may prove unknowable. In short, here as in other areas, Utilitarianism is hard pressed to rule out egregious harms, if those harms might possibly produce an aggregate overall good.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, HARVARD LAW REVIEW, March 2001, pp. 1530-1.

Third, although in its origin the view is quite egalitarian about the worth of all life, in practice Utilitarianism favors animals with complex forms of consciousness. While this conclusion might prove ethically "right," we at least ought to debate it rather than simply assume its validity. According to both Bentham and Singer, it is only wrong to kill an animal when doing so frustrates an animal's interest in its well-being, and they understand this interest as a conscious awareness that death is bad. As Bentham already saw, this requirement draws a pretty significant line - if not precisely between humans and animals, at least between humans and some animals, on the one hand, and most animals, on the other. The preference to continue living is difficult to ascertain: how broadly does it extend in the animal kingdom? By insisting on the presence of this preference as a necessary condition of the wrongness of killing, Singer thus makes differences of capacities directly relevant to that moral issue. "Species membership may point to things that are morally significant." That argument sounds plausible, and yet the idea that there is no moral importance in the deprivations of life suffered by creatures who cannot be said to have a preference for continued life seems questionable.
3. UTILITARIANISM JUSTIFIES WHOLESALE RAISING AND SLAUGHTERING OF ANIMALS

Martha C. Nussbaum, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, HARVARD LAW REVIEW, March 2001, p. 1531.

Finally, all Utilitarian views are highly vulnerable on the question of numbers. The meat industry brings countless animals into the world who would never have existed otherwise. To Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, this reproduction is one of the worst aspects of the industry's moral cruelty: it "dwarfs" the Third Reich because "ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them." For Singer, these births of new animals are not by themselves a bad thing: indeed, we can expect new births to add to the total of social utility. So long as the animals who are killed die painlessly, the existence of more life experience rather than less is a good.