Hello everyone,

Does anyone know of any serious attempt to try and justify hedonistic utilitarianism from the standpoint of reflective equilibrium? The only hedonistic utilitarian making such an attempt is, from what I know, Torbjörn Tännsjö in his Hedonistic Utilitarianism, but Tännsjö is rather brief and does not try to carry out such a project in any greater detail.

Utilitarians seems to favor foundationalist approaches, but these attempts of justification are often quite frail. I suspect that utilitarians have lost a lot of ground by not stressing enough how utilitarianism both coincides with and explains many of our commonsense intuitions. Examples of cases where utiltiarianism fares well are, for example: policy making, emergency situations and the voting in elections. In all of these cases we are expected to behave in utility-maximizing ways.

I often find that opponents to utilitarianism are much worse off trying to explain our utility-maximizing intuitions, than utilitarians are explaining experience machines and repugnant conclusions.

Oh, and the reason why I'm asking is that I'm preparing a research application for Ph.D.-studies in philosophy.

Thankful for any feedback!

Hey Simon,

I suspect you'd have more informed responses to this type of theoretical question in the Facebook utilitarianism group (most of the current regulars here are non-philosophers).

I'm not really familiar with RE, but reading the (albeit very scrappy) Wikipedia entry, it doesn't seem like something that could easily apply to util, since util would normally be one of (if not the entire set of) the principles from which other things are derived. RE seems to rely on an intuitionistic approach to ethics that I think most utilitarians would reject.

That said,

Jack Smart uses a number of intuitionistic devices in his seminal essay on util (that's first half of the book Utilitarianism: For and Against)

Henry Sidgwick famously believed util derived from common sense (see Methods of Ethics)

Also I think that Toby Ord's work on global consequentialism attempts to show that utilitarianism properly understood derives from or is at least compatible with the typical intuitions that lead some to other ethical systems (see his thesis Beyond Action or the paper derived from it 'How to be a consequentialist about everything')

Obviously Smart and Sidwick predated Rawls' term, but it seems like a similar method. I don't know how much Toby Ord references it...

Note the only one of these I have read through is Smart's. The others I only know of from reading around them.

Thanks, I'll take it up on the facebook group. I'll also look at Ord.

I agree that utilitarians traditionally have tried to argue from some first principles, and then design our common-sense morality on such basis. But note that the problem is epistemic. How can we reach knowledge of these first principles? One way is to find some ethical axioms, perhaps through intuiting or reasoning, and start from there. Sadly enough, no compelling arguments have been given for why we should accept utilitarianism as a first principle. At least, I have not found any. I think that Sidgwick never tried to argue directly for the first principles, and Hare's argument is commonly viewed as faulty. The same goes for Mill's infamous argument from psychological hedonism.

As I see it, a utilitarian philosopher working from a reflective equilibrium, supposing moral truth, could take a different approach to the matter. For her, reflective equilibrium (which is a way of working back and forth between our common-sense intuitions, ethical principles and background theories) could be viewed as a way of justifying moral truth - that is, a way of justifying utilitarianism.

By discarding common sense intuitions, as well as the reflective equilibrium, I suspect that utilitarians have underestimated the possibility to argue for utilitarianism partly on the basis of our common-sense intuitions. We could justify utilitarianism, not on the basis of having found some first principles through pure reason or intuition, but rather because it is the only remaining possibility after having screened through all our available background theories and common-sense views.

Well, it's an idea at least.

I have been wanting for ages to write down my first-principles argument for (pseudo-)utilitarianism, since although no specific part of it feels original, I haven't seen anything comparable to the whole written out somewhere.