Re: Why Does Justice Have Good Consequences?
In previous posts I have made two statements:
- Rule utilitarianism is a practical concession to the limitations of our intelligence.
- Suppose you are an act utilitarian (AU). You strive to maximize happiness, and one day you notice that your actions follow a pattern; they are lawlike. You can be said thereby to be a rule utilitarian (RU), such that the rules describe what you actually do. … On the other hand, if the acts in AU do not obey any regularities, then it is an impossible ideal. No man can calculate the consequences of his actions in a Godlike manner.
So, the reason for RU is two-fold. First, we just can’t calculate beyond our own noses. The best we can do is evaluate rules, practices, character traits, and suchlike, and even here, as Hayek argued, we must often defer to tradition, such as the common law, the reasons for which we might not fully understand. Second, even if we could foresee the future as God does, we would still find it advantageous most of the time to follow the moral law, doing which would happen to promote, for a number of reasons, the greatest good for the greatest number. A society of omniscient individuals would enjoy perfect coordination, but it, too, would involve, for example, a lawlike respect of contracts.
(Update. To reverse this count, we have rules, because AU acts are usually lawlike; and we use these rules in moral deliberations instead of considering acts directly, because of the limitations of human prudence.)
In Roderick’s terms, then, following rules is an internal and indispensable means to happiness. Widespread law-breaking leads only to misery, which is why society is advised to suppress criminal activities (note again the social focus of utilitarianism). He writes, “[E]ven when I choose to act morally, my choice commits me to rejecting morality in counterfactual situations… where immorality would be a more effective means to the end, and this commitment is a blot on my character now.” If by this statement he refers to lifeboat situations, then we can say with Rothbard that “a lifeboat situation is hardly a valid test of a theory of rights, or of any moral theory whatsoever.” (The Ethics of Liberty, 149) For example, Yeager quotes Richard Epstein to the effect that one of his “simple rules for a complex world” is “limited privilege in cases of necessity (’take and pay’),” such as the case of “the man who breaks into a pharmacy closed at night as the only way to get medicine to save his dying wife.” (Ethics as Social Science, 272) One would be hard-pressed to consider the man’s actions “immoral.” Illegal, sure. But no judge would throw the book at him.
If Roderick refers to cases such as described in my Secrecy and Utilitarianism, then the reply is “What are we supposed to do? Enlighten us, o great moral teacher.” Yeager replies, wisely, that “[o]ne must accept guilt for one action or another, and in accordance with one’s own moral character, but without brooding excessively about it. A moral person will accept the guilt without letting it destroy him.” For example, in the case of the sheriff an NT person might choose to frame, and an SJ person, choose not to frame, with both choices being correct for that person. So, this case entails a kind of temperamental relativism.
Morality in relation to utility, then, is like a box of chocolates: on the one hand, it is a producer good, because it is merely a means to enjoying the taste of chocolate, and you have to advance it further toward a consumer good by eating the candy, etc. On the other hand, it is clearly a consumer good, because it is so close to being the final good, and because it is a sine qua non for enjoying the taste.
Rothbard goes on to say that “In any sphere of moral theory, we are trying to frame an ethic for man, based on his nature and the nature of the world — and this precisely means for normal nature, for the way life usually is, and not for rare and abnormal situations.” So, normally, obeying the rules which have been tuned so as to promote overall happiness and its another internal and indispensable means, social cooperation, will end up as the most beneficial thing to do.