Would You Kill the Fat Man (10 page)

Bentham maintained that what mattered about an action was how much pleasure it produced and how much pain was avoided. He enjoined us always to act so as to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. In his most influential book,
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
, he even devised an algorithm for how this could be calculated. He called it the “felicific calculus.” How much pleasure would it give you to eat that piece of chocolate cake in front of you, how long would this pleasure last, would it be accompanied by any unpleasant feelings (make you feel a bit nauseous?). In fact, Bentham identified seven relevant components of a pleasurable
action: the pleasure’s intensity, duration, likelihood, propinquity (how quickly would the pleasure kick in), fecundity (would it produce similar sensations), purity (might it be followed by painful sensations), and extent (how many people would it affect). He regarded individuals as cargo containers of emotion: they should have a minimum of pain and be as jam-packed as possible with pleasure.

The greatest happiness of the greatest number was the measure of all things. Wielding this calculus, the utilitarian could bludgeon out practical solutions to an array of local and national issues, be they political, social, administrative, or legal. There was a beguiling simplicity and elegance to his formula and utilitarianism quickly attracted numerous highly placed disciples. The Lord Chancellor, Henry Brougham, said, “the age of law reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same.”
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Bentham viewed utilitarianism as a type of science, undermining irrational traditions and the superstitions (including religious superstitions) of the past. The sovereign or legislator should have the role of the mechanic, twiddling and tinkering with the wires and handles, knobs and pipes of society to maximize happiness. Utilitarianism was progressive and forward looking with an egalitarian appeal: the pleasure of one person was to count no more and no less than that of another. The way to assess a law or government bill was to weigh its respective benefits and costs and compare them against competing proposals. It’s been said that “he dreamt of doing for morals and legislation what Newton and Leibniz had done for natural science and mathematics.”
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It would be impossible to fault Bentham on his intellectual honesty or his consistency, admirable qualities that led him to make some proposals quite shocking for the age. Since what
mattered was feeling, pleasure and pain, we should care about animal as well as human suffering. “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”
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If sex brought pleasure, then it didn’t matter whether it was between a man and a woman, a man and a man, or a man and a beast (Bentham, the fanatical codifier, spelled out numerous other permutations too) and the laws should be liberalized to reflect this. He made scores of other practical suggestions about how laws could be reformed and government improved—some big, some small, and all driven by the imperative of maximizing happiness. For example, he thought it would be a good idea to have a national register for births and deaths: at the time, none existed.

The point of philosophy was to change the world, and Bentham was keen to spread the utilitarian gospel far and wide. He did, however, face a self-inflicted obstacle: his prose. He wrote prolifically, and coined dozens of wonderful, valuable neologisms (such as “international,” “codification,” “maximize,” and “minimize”), but his most ardent admirers would not inflate their reverence by describing his style as lucid or sparkling. “Tortuous” is a more commonly attributed adjective. It grew worse as he grew older. A contemporary review of Bentham’s book,
Rationale of Judicial Evidence
, complained that “Even the cabinets of diplomacy can scarcely ever have witnessed so successful an employment of words for the concealment of thoughts, as is here exhibited.”
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In many ways utilitarianism was a uniquely British creed, at least in its origins. Britain was rapidly becoming more middle class, more materialistic, more subversive, less hidebound by tradition. Bentham accelerated these developments. But in the rest of Europe Bentham was chiefly known through translations of his Genevan editor and proselytizer, Étienne Dumont,
who did Bentham the inestimable service of turning his language not only from English into French, but from convoluted and stodgy to fluent and accessible.

Bentham, meanwhile, ran a sleek PR campaign of his own, corresponding with scores of statesmen: his influence would be felt from across Europe to North and South America. A historian has noted that “Members of the Colombian Congress in the mid-1820s were quoting Bentham at each other much as eighteenth-century Englishmen had quoted classical authors in the House of Commons.”
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Bentham had a particular affection for, and interest in, the United States, and the feeling was mutual. He exchanged letters with President Andrew Jackson, confiding that in his old age he felt “more of a United States man than an Englishman,”
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and when John Quincy Adams, the future president, was in London, he and Bentham would take strolls together in the park.

Not that Bentham was a supporter of the American system of government.
The Declaration of Independence
was slated as a “hodgepodge of confusion and uncertainty,”
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The Declaration of the Rights of Man
was “a perpetual vein of nonsense.”
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Bentham had been trained as a lawyer, and throughout his life, nothing would enrage him more than examples of what he regarded as legal iniquity, inconsistency, or incoherence. He regarded “rights” as nonsense. Crucially, he flat-out rejected the idea of “natural rights”—universal rights that all people have at all times independent of any particular laws—as “Nonsense on stilts.”
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Appeals to the fat man’s rights would have been given short shrift by Jeremy Bentham.

Numbers mattered to Bentham. Other things being equal, it was always better to save more than fewer lives. It was the reason he was such a staunch opponent of war. He thought in most wars that many are made “to murder one another for the
gratification of the avarice or pride of the few.”
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It was almost inconceivable that the expense of war could be justified by any gains. To the argument that Britain had become prosperous by victory in the Seven Years War (1756–63) he replied, “True enough it is that a man who has had a leg cut off, and the stump healed, may hop the faster than a man who lies in bed with both legs broken can walk. And thus you may prove that Britain was put into a better case by that glorious war, than if there had been no war, because France was put into a still worse.”
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Bentham recognized that commonsense morality held there to be a distinction between “intending” and “foreseeing,” or as he put it, between “direct intention” and “oblique intention.” But he rejected any intrinsic moral difference between these two. So Bentham would not have thought too long and hard about the trolley problem. Assuming all lives are of equal value, killing one person, whether intentionally or not, is preferable to allowing five to die. Only the numbers matter. It is irrelevant whether the deaths are intended and irrelevant too whether they are brought about by killing people or by letting them die. We must ignore our moral intuitions: no valid ethical distinction can be drawn between Spur and Fat Man. The fat man should be pushed.

Beyond Pleasure

Two centuries after his death, Bentham’s voluminous writings are still being edited and published, and there’s a resurgence in Bentham scholarship. But his achievements remain underrated. His outlook is regarded as almost embarrassingly crude, the felicific calculus foolish, the reduction of life’s value to
“pleasure,” shallow. The fact that he delivers such an instant and unequivocal answer to the problem of the fat man constitutes, in the minds of most philosophers, a fatal flaw rather than an asset.

But Bentham was the founder of a school of thought that, though not exactly
à la mode
, nonetheless has powerful adherents to this day. John Stuart Mill, was a utilitarian and Bertrand Russell had utilitarian instincts. Another giant, the nineteenth-century Cambridge philosopher, Henry Sidgwick, wrote within the utilitarian tradition. In the twentieth century, utilitarianism once again had a brief spell of dominance, the pivotal figure in its revival being the Oxford professor, Richard Hare. And today, important philosophers such as Derek Parfit and Peter Singer operate unashamedly in Bentham’s long shadow.

There has been significant fine-tuning of utilitarianism since Bentham, of course, and some of these refinements add levels of subtlety to how a utilitarian should determine the fate of the fat man. Indeed, most students today are exposed to utilitarian thought not via Bentham, but through the writings of the son of his friend, James Mill.

Mill’s Pill

Bentham had been a child prodigy. He was reading at three, was taught Latin and Greek from the age of four, and entered Oxford University at twelve. But compared to John Stuart Mill that made him something of a late developer.

J. S. Mill’s father, James, was an austere, unemotional, and dominating man. Raised in Scotland, he became acquainted with Bentham only after moving to London. Mill Sr. had a thought experiment of his own. He believed that the mind was
born a blank sheet. The question was, what could one imprint on this
tabula rasa
? What would happen if you subjected a child to the most rigorous form of home education—covering both the sciences and the humanities? What kind of a being could you create? What brilliance, what talent, what skills could be cultivated?

The thought experiment of James Mill differed from those in trolleyology in that it could be investigated in the real world. In what today’s social service departments would no doubt regard as a form of child abuse, Mill set about feeding his boy with high-protein knowledge. John Stuart Mill was learning Greek and arithmetic at three years old.
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The toddler was spared Latin, which was deferred until age eight. By fourteen, John had carried out intensive studies of logic and mathematics. He also made his way through lengthy reading lists in other disciplines like history and economic theory.

All this information was effectively crammed into John’s mind, but was not conducive to his mental health: at age twenty, he suffered a breakdown. The emphasis he would later put on liberty and autonomy was perhaps a resentful reaction to his guinea-pig childhood. Nonetheless, at least in theoretical terms, the driving principle of his philosophy was not liberty but utilitarianism (a torrent of academic ink has flowed on the link between these two). Mill said of his guardian that his purpose was “to carry the warfare against absurdity into things practical,”
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a principle that Mill could equally have applied to himself. When he read a translation of Bentham’s work (in French) and came across the principle of utility, he said: “It gave unity to my conception of things. I now had opinions: a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion: the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life.”
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Some geniuses exhibit their gifts in one narrow sphere: Mill’s genius was the sort that revealed itself through many. He was a logician and economist and the most influential English-speaking moral philosopher and political theorist of the nineteenth century. He also found time to be an administrator, essayist, and polemicist, effective advocate of women’s rights, and a member of parliament.

Mill remained indebted to Bentham all his life, and like Bentham was a consequentialist—believing that what mattered about an action were its consequences. But he was far from being an uncritical follower of Bentham’s theory. An essay Mill wrote about Bentham had inflicted lasting damage on Bentham’s intellectual legacy and reputation. For Bentham, all pleasures and pains were to be weighed on the same scale. Describing a child’s game he claimed that, “prejudice apart, the game of pushpin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.”
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If pushpin gave more pleasure than poetry, it ought to be considered more valuable.

Mill had received too elite an education to stomach that. What’s more, after his nervous collapse, he began to read poetry prodigiously, an art form which Bentham had splendidly dismissed as lines that fall short of the margin. For Mill, some forms of happiness were of a higher quality than others. “[i]t is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”
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One could identify the higher pleasure, Mill argued, by seeing which was preferred by a person exposed to both. He had a touchingly naive expectation that the majority of those who had experiences of both pushpin and poetry would choose the latter. He now put more emphasis on imagination and emotion and, reflecting on his early life, wrote: “I conceive that the description so often given of a Benthamite, as a mere reasoning machine
was, during two or three years of my life not altogether untrue of me.”
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But, in addition to drawing a distinction between types of pleasure, Mill proposed another adjustment to Benthamism, more pertinent to the problem of the fat man. It would be disastrous if, each time we had to act, we had to reflect on the consequences of our action. For one thing, this would take far too much time; for another, it might generate public unease. Far better to have a set of rules to guide us.
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