When Utilitarianism becomes mob rule

"We are all Benthamites now!" declared my Criminal Law lecturer at university. And never has the axiom that the way measure right and wrong is the greatest happiness for the greatest number been more popular.

Just as Bentham preserved himself for the benefit of future generations, his ideas has been kept alive for years until they would find themselves an enthusiastic audience in the age of the algorithm. Amongst techy types morality being a mere calculation makes more sense then in years gone by.

It is a good maxim to judge one's personal actions by – I at least attempt to make moral decisions in life by asking: "What will benefit the most amount of people for the longest period of time?"

The problem is that utilitarianism has a propensity to dip into the tyranny of the majority by sacrificing the individual for the collective.

To use an extreme example, if you were to go back in time and ask the parents that sacrificed their child to bring about a bountiful harvest they would have seen themselves as making the moral choice. After all, the harvest helps everyone.

Even more troubling is that utilitarian claims the mantel of the rational form of morality. Many critics of liberalism (or post-liberals) say this about liberalism: that it is a form of morality that doesn't recognise that it is being moral. But it would be more aptly levelled at utilitarianism where rationalisation reigns supreme and ethics is merely a question of counting the amount of happiness to suffering and taking action based on what helps the majority.

Liberalism on the other hand – and the individual rights that it is based on – in many ways is the inverse to utilitarianism (despite the fact that they seem to share the same proponents). A true liberal would not sacrifice the individual for whatever greater good is purported to be gained from it. The is no rationalisation that could justify silencing someone, or taking away their life, choice, or violating their personhood.

The problem with turning ethics into a counting game is that what is counted as producing "happiness" requires a value judgment and one that the proponents of this form of morality seem to be unaware that they are making (at least if you base your morality on some priors not shared by others - e.g. religion - you are more likely to recoginse that your priors may be different to other peoples).

A perfect example of this was the decision to count cases of COVID-19 as the proper metric to judge the utility of the pandemic response. Why was that amount of debt acquired or children out of school or mental health admissions considered to have no bearing on people's "happiness". Who decided that "zeroCOVID" equated to "100% happiness"?

More recent is the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2022, that assumes that public health messaging is so important and infallible that silencing any contrary views or advice is a public good because it might erode institutional trust.

But what is good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander. Even where public health advice is correct for the majority, it is not not necessarily right for the individual. The vast majority of Australians probably could do with being told to lose some weight, but that is not the advice an anorexic needs to hear.

Prohibiting doctors from giving individual advice to their patients that is different to public health messaging could mean – ironically – telling them to do something very bad for their health. I would go so far as to say there is almost no such thing as public health as what is required to make an individual more healthy would depend on the unique circumstances of that person.

Public health has become one of the foremost disciplines utilitarian thinking and a belief that any individual's sacrifice is justified for the sake of the health system. But, there are other movements and trends that have a utilitarianism uber alles mindset.

Effective Altruism, is a movement of tech types (mostly) that claims that they can help people to get the most bang for their do-gooding buck by applying Benthams' ideas to the charity sector. One critique of this movement was recently published in Unherd, which focuses on the type of people drawn to this movement (ones that have never actually helped anyone IRL) but more apt would be the fact that they think their order of priority is perfectly rational, objective and uncontestable.

If you flick through the list of recommended charities - for instance on GiveWell - there are definite priors in play.

One of these priors is that animal suffering should be considered as much as human suffering. This is contestable, or at very least stopping the eating of meat and eradicating hunger are two goals that could well be in conflict, which should prevail?

The other is that physical interventions (in particular those related to health) are more effective than metaphysical interventions, which is also not necessarily true. Rule of law is shown over and over again to be one of the single best predictors of people being more prosperous, healthy and safe. But charities that focus on bringing the rule of law to developing nations are not the top priority.

Big Government, Big Business, and Big Crowds acting on the behalf of the majority whose happiness is being maximised by a particular intervention also risks riding roughshod over the minority whose happiness - like the child sacrifice example - is not served by what the majority wants.

Being the sacrifice - or the scapegoat - for the greater good is a hard role to refuse.

It is for this reason that utilitarianism always needs to stop where liberalism – or the individual - starts. The idea that there are individual rights that ought not be violated, no matter how big the mob whose happiness will be maximised by their violation, is an important counterweight to the tendency for utilitarian thinking to tip into mob rule.

The trend in recent times to prefer the interests of the mob rule is worrying, particularly when we we don't seem to see anything wrong with removing the barrier of individual rights - such as by enacting laws that erode freedom of speech to prevent the public "harm" caused by offensive or contrary opinions - that used to stand in the way of the mob hell bent on pursuing its' desires.

Liberalism used to be the bulwark against utilitarianism run amuck, now we let the utility maximisation mob trample the individual.