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Utilitarianism, Multiplicity and Liberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 March 2015

JEFF SEBO
JEFF SEBO*
Affiliation:
New York [email protected]
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Abstract

I argue that utilitarianism requires us to tolerate intrapersonal disagreement for the same reasons that it requires us to tolerate interpersonal disagreement. I begin by arguing that multiplicity has the same costs and benefits as multiculturalism: It causes conflict, but it also allows us to perform experiments in living, adopt a division of labour, compartmentalize harm and learn from ourselves. I then argue that, in light of these costs and benefits, utilitarianism requires us to adopt a liberal system of individual self-government, according to which we should not try to impose a unified set of beliefs and values on ourselves. Finally, I argue that we should apply this policy of liberal toleration to intrapersonal disagreement about utilitarianism too. If we want to maximize utility, then we should tolerate inner conflict not only about how to maximize utility but also about whether we should be maximizing utility in the first place.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 326 - 346
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Throughout this article, I will use ‘comprehensive conception of the good’ to refer to a comprehensive conception of how to live. For more on this use of the term, see Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York, 2005), pp. 19–20Google Scholar.

2 Erving Goffman develops this dramaturgical theory of social self-presentation in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959). For more on this topic, see Sawyer, R. Keith, Creating Conversations: Improvisation in Everyday Discourse (Cresskill, NJ, 2001)Google Scholar; Strasberg, Lee, A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; and Velleman, J. David, How We Get Along (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 To be clear, I am using ‘multiple personality’ in a wide sense that includes, but is not limited to, dissociative disorders such as dissociative identity disorder. I will not consider these much more extreme forms of multiplicity in this article.

4 See, for example, Holton, Richard, ‘Intention and Weakness of Will’, The Journal of Philosophy 96 (1999), pp. 241–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as well as Jackson, Frank, ‘Weakness of Will’, Mind 93 (1984), pp. 1–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 See, for example, Davidson, Donald, ‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?’, Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford, 1969/2001)Google Scholar and Watson, Gary, ‘Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, The Philosophical Review 86 (1977), pp. 316–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See, for example, Frankfurt, Harry, ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 159–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), p. 301Google Scholar.

8 See, for example, Bratman, Michael, ‘Practical Reasoning and Weakness of the Will’, Noûs 13 (1979), pp. 131–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harry Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 11–25; Shoemaker, David, ‘Caring, Identification, and Agency’, Ethics 114 (2003), pp. 88–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Watson, Gary, ‘Free Agency’, Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), pp. 205–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Frankfurt, ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’, p. 175.

10 For more on experiments in living, see Mill, John Stuart, On Liberty (New York, 2004), p. 59Google Scholar.

11 For more on dissociative identity disorder, see Haddock, Deborah, The Dissociative Identity Disorder Sourcebook (New York, 2001)Google Scholar.

12 For evidence that multiplicity helps us to compartmentalize harm in this way, see Morgan, A. G. and Janoff-Bulman, R., ‘Positive and Negative Self-complexity: Patterns of Adjustment Following Traumatic and Non-Traumatic Life Experiences’, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 13 (1994), pp. 63–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Linville, P. W., ‘Self-Complexity as a Cognitive Buffer Against Stress-Related Illness and Depression’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (1987), pp. 663–76CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For general discussion of this issue, see Carter, Rita, Multiplicity (New York, 2008), pp. 74–90Google Scholar.

13 Mill, On Liberty, ch. 2.

14 Of course, this is not to say that the state should tolerate all comprehensive conceptions of the good. Rather, the idea is that the state should tolerate all reasonable comprehensive conceptions of the good, where a comprehensive conception of the good is reasonable in the relevant sense if and only if it supports a free and open exchange of ideas in society. See Rawls, John, Political Liberalism (New York, 2005), pp. 48–54 for more on this ideaGoogle Scholar.

15 To be clear, this is not to say that utilitarians support the same kind of liberalism as deontologists. For example, as David Brink points out, one difference between Millian liberalism and Rawlsian liberalism is that Millian liberalism is perfectionist whereas Rawlsian liberalism is not. David Brink, ‘Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, <http://www.plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/mill-moral-political/> (2008).

16 For good contemporary discussions of this idea see Berger, Fred, Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Berkeley, 1984)Google Scholar and de Lazari-Radek, Katarzyna and Singer, Peter, ‘Secrecy in Consequentialism: A Defence of Esoteric Morality’, Ratio 23 (2010), pp. 34–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 How can we manipulate, coerce and physically restrain ourselves? Ulysses arranged for people to bind him to the mast, but we have many other, less extreme options available to us as well, which philosophers and psychologists discuss in the literature on self-binding. For example, if you want to make yourself get up in the morning, you can place your alarm clock on the other side of the room. If you want to prevent yourself from gambling (or at least pressure yourself not to do so), you can pledge to donate money to a charity you oppose if you get caught gambling. And so on. As I will note below, liberalism and illiberalism agree that self-binding is often morally permissible; what they disagree about is whether or not we should use self-binding in order to impose a single, unified set of beliefs and values on ourselves across situations. For much more on the nature and rationality of self-binding, see Elster, Jon, Ulysses Unbound (Cambridge, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 For more on indirect utilitarianism, see Brink, David, ‘Utilitarian Morality and the Personal Point of View’, Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986), pp. 417–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Railton, Peter, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 13 (1984), pp. 134–71Google Scholar.

19 Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford, 1984), p. 24Google Scholar.

20 Jeff Sebo, ‘The Just Soul’, The Journal of Value Inquiry (forthcoming).

21 Thanks to Justin Clarke-Doane, Jonathan Cottrell, Dale Jamieson, Matthew Kotzen, Colin Marshall, Derek Parfit, John Richardson, Gina Rini, William Ruddick, Jonathan Simon, Sharon Street, J. David Velleman, and the participants at the NYU Thesis Preparation Seminar and the 12th Conference of the International Society for Utilitarian Studies for invaluable feedback and discussion about this article. Thanks also to Brad Hooker and two anonymous referees at Utilitas for very helpful comments on previous drafts.