AN
253 The ‘greatest happiness’ principle of the utilitarians is a basically arbitrary ratioform argument. If you don’t like it it would have no hold on you whatever. Except perhaps when it takes the form of moralism Moralism, the pressure to accept a judgement to which one is really disinclined.
258 How do I see utilitarianism? The artist tyrant. A rationalistic doctrine, a pattern that rulers might follow. Like a Chinese Emperor’s doctrine. As uncomplicated an expression of will to power as anything.
AW
152 The Romans had stoicism for their ideology of empire. We have come up with philosophies like utilitarianism. More commonly, the human rights ideas that are vestigial Christianity. Both of these have had bad consequences. We need a philosophy which will condemn what to us are unacceptable developments, like east Asian inhumanity towards drugs offenders.
253
AQ
34 See what is hidden, what really misses the point. Utilitarianism, hedonism. The real nature of the pleasures that is missed, the pleasures of snobbery, of ego aggrandisement. What is wrong with passive amusements, and titillation? Why do they not satisfy? All is will to power. No pleasure is really satisfying unless certain desires are satisfied.
370 Idea of quantification of pain and suffering. Jeremy Bentham. Philosophical mistakes. Application of arithmetic. Complete inappropriateness or arithmetic for this purpose. Felcific calculus. Here is proof that arithmetic is not universally applicable, that it is mere convention. Quantities of pain, even for a single individual, are not sensibly measurable. If it were possible to measure by intensity of stimulus or whatever it would be of no importance.
Present pain or pleasure is all that matters, not past pain. From this point of view what is past simply has no existence. It is like adding what does exist to what does not exist. The pain of different people added together does not make more pain.
Utilitarianism is nothing but a rationalistic tyranny with some aesthetic value.
ZZ
11 Utilitarianism. Egalitarianism. Shallow rationalistic scheme, partly depending on an assumption of commonality of values.
The pleasure principle is a form of reductionism. Mistakes of utilitarianism, psychological hedonism.
First there is the analysis, the pleasure principle. I do not necessarily object to this, it seems to me sound enough if interpreted in the right way. But it is an analysis of how everyone is said to behave.
All human values are said to be explicable under this principle.
Fair enough, but to jump from this to saying that everyone should live consciously calculating pleasures and pains is illegitimate.
a. analysis of what is really involved in human values
b. proposal of a new human value based upon this insight.
to try and impose b. upon everyone is a form of oppression.
It is not true that the innermost form of all human values is the b. value. Here is an understandable error of thought, which perhaps helps to explain when socialists and other egalitarians often cannot understand how oppressive their ideas are.
It is not realised the b may involved a kind of febrility and decadence, though not necessarily; as with all such things it might represent some ascetic challenge to a strong sprit.
One man’s meat is anther man’s poison.
To someone who accepts b the utilitarian or egalitarian scheme will appear sweetly reasonable. The pain and sense of oppression it will arouse in others committed to different values will be far from intolerable to them
AC 97 Utilitarian philosophy seen as providing the foundation for British industrial civilisation. Enlightenment doctrine of psychological egoism, Yet another proof of the importance of philosophy. Philosophy as programme for civilisation and culture. In Rome stoics v epicureans. In England intuitionists v utilitarians.
Increasing democratisation means that such philosophical ideas cease to have directing force. Popular conceptions and misconceptions acquire the same weight as clear philosophical ideas.
AH
144 Utilitarianism only took certain ideas which may have been thought as implicit in Christianity and made them clear and explicit. The idea of benevolence- but benevolence is not at the root of most social and political behaviour nor is it necessarily the case that it should be,
the interest of each is not the same as the interest of all.. fundamental insight.
Among the implications of this- it may be that the interest of the whole is best served by the selfishness of a ruling class. For interest read happiness.
The effects of individual greed are bad but it is wrong to say individuals should not be greedy. Perhaps their greed should best be stopped by the greed of others.
177 Who is bad, who is evil? Urge to burn more brightly. Lack of benevolence. Christian ideal is of love thy neighbour; ie of disinterested benevolence. Utilitarianism may be said to be an exploration of this. Christianity turned into a purely rationalistic framework. Mill, a fundamentally good sort, explored it from the inside and tried to overcome some of its difficulties.
Such an ideal of benevolence not inevitable. For some people the corollary of their own exaltation is the thrusting of others down into slavery. What is wrong with this? Unless we judge from a Christian perspective.
Christianity does not have a monopoly on benevolence. Benevolence is one motive among many Does it have to be overriding?
186 Love thy neighbour may be taken as the central message pf Christianity. It remains in utilitarianism as a general injunction for benevolence,
Christianity is all about compulsory benevolence. Rationally speaking one does not have be benevolent.
Mo Tsu favoured universal benevolence. Mencius said we must start with what is near. In wishing to exalt some people is there nay reason why I should not want to degrade others? Looking at communism for example, should I necessarily deplore the fact that some people are not free? Or may not their slavery give me a sharper enjoyment of my own freedom?
Why should I necessarily wish for prosperity for many other people? Why should not my primary consideration be aesthetic?
Compulsory benevolence is established as a value by those in a position to fear the possible malevolence of the powerful.
Utilitarianism is interesting because it explores and systematises this fundamental principle of Christianity making it the foundation of civilisation. JS Mill was led to modify it much as Christianity took on board chunks of paganism (such as Platonist philosophy). It has continued to provide much of the dynamic of western civilisation, like the imperialistic or universalising principle behind democracy. Foreign policy.
R M Hare, a Kantian type of utilitarian, thinking of himself as a Christian. He sees even supposed agnostics like Ayer as really Christian. ‘What else could they be?’ he asks.
Yet he admits there are alternatives.
AI 119 Moral Thinking, Its Levels Method And Point by RM Hare is an admirable synthesis of ethical theories:- intuitionism, utilitarianism. Kantianism. He clarifies much, his theory of ‘levels’ ie one on which intuitions are valid, the other critical thinking. Interesting idea on the prescriptivity of ‘I’.
Hare is a logical fanatic. He takes his utilitarianism to counterintuitive extremes. hard theoretical cases he says will never happen. Moral intuitions he agrees are a result of conditioning. And is prepared to give all his allegiance to his rational principle. He makes a lot of habits. of being well brought up. Does not say much about conscience. How much does conscience apply to his critical thinking?
The rationalistic ideal a Nietzschean would explain as only the effect of his will to power.
Most people’s commitment is to their own desire, their own will.
For his own desires, Hare, following Kant, replaces this fantastic intellectual construction to which he affirms a commitment that overrides all partial loyalties. Why should he do this unless out of pride at his own rational consistency?
Hare talks of certain epistemological difficulties like the other minds problem, he has to face. Actually there are a huge number of other difficulties of that nature that faces, like all kinds of questions to do with time. The past does not exist.
I see conflict as eternal. It’s just a question of who’s master, that’s all. Morality has place, it is an autonomous kind of language, hardly to be systematised to the extent Hare does it. It serves the will, ie my will. His account of the prudential motives for bringing up a child to be moral I agree with. But he implies I am a bad man for not feeling a bit repelled.
He is a great anti relativist.
Preference utilitarianism. Doing away with some difficulties to create others.
Hegel resembles Hare quite distinctly in this area. Both are extreme rationalists. Hare’s explanation of moral judgement and behaviour is all centred upon his rational formula, his ideal of rational consistency.
Hare’s philosophy is sometimes counter intuitive. Preference utilitarianism. It may conflict with certain basic beliefs, religious or philosophical beliefs. To say that in origin moral beliefs derive from his standards of critical thinking is obviously wrong.
What is fundamental is will.
The logic of moral judgments as made can be made to fit this. His rationalism simplifies and organises these into a model of rational consistency.
His own will is a freak, a peculiar pride in an ascetic subjection to a standard of rationality.
305& Private vices PublicBenefits (Mandeville). This is actually a cheerful and encouraging thesis. Forgiveness of sin. Vice, much easier and more enjoyable than virtue.
Butler, Mandeville.
The very concept of vice gives a meaning to life that otherwise pursuit of inclination seems to lack. The utilitarian or behaviourist vision of life in terms of satisfaction of impulse is a way of making it meaningless.
Choice of vice is a way of getting meaning. Psychological truth is closer here, because moral codes gain their meaning outside themselves. Benevolence, yes, fine and good, but ownness of will is the really important thing. Beyond good and evil.
To embrace vice is to be prepared to do the forbidden, the resources for the accomplishment of the will are so much the greater. And vice so obviously comes from nature. Virtue, the thought of oneself as virtuous has an inhibiting quality.
I would say the interpretation of virtue is post hoc not propter hoc.
Private vices public benefits. One likes expression of power.
Christian virtue, in the name of virtue immense ugliness is perpetrated. Insofar as vice is conceived as selfishness it is a good thing. Not being a dictator I am not responsible for everything in society such as seeing the people have decent housing. Let people look after their own interests, I fight for my own corner,
So much purpose built public housing has been aesthetically repellent. Yet one is asked to approve of it for moral reasons. In accordance with Christian morality, mortifying one’s own will in the process. This creates corruption and decadence.
To see the immorality behind anything is to see the will to power and to appreciate it aesthetically.
Emancipation for the false views that oppress.
AF 4 Nietzsche called JS Mill a blockhead. James Mill his father, one of those Scottish extremist ultra enthusiasts one sued to get at the time. JS Mill the perfect educational product of the English enlightenment. All his inconsistencies perhaps these should be seen in relation to the fact that he had been early indoctrinated, that he had what amounted to a deep religious commitment to aspects of a rationalistic faith from which he never would be expected to break free. Ie the rest of us have different starting points from him. In a way he was human freak. What made him a blockhead was that, for all his intellect, he could hardly be committed to pure logic, or pure reason in certain fields. The difficulties he feels cannot be lightly avoided by changing his opinion.
In his ‘Utilitarianism’ for example, one might compare him with a Christian, grappling with some of the intellectual difficulties of his faith, and trying to produce more up to date and enlightened version of it.
A phenomenon of he Victorian age. To say that he was indoctrinated means more than that the idea of the truth of certain theories was implanted in his brain on Hartleyan principles. He was given an emotional disposition towards virtue. What may be thought a type of secularised Christian prejudice.
Contrast his education with that of De Sade or a Squire Western. Of Western ‘One brought up from infancy where no one dared to contradict his arguments or control his conduct’ (Scott)
Mill. His libertarianism, his absolute antiprohibitionism.
J S Mill and the subjection of women. The perniciousness of all doctrines of intrinsic equality.
AO
47 Power of morality that brings pessimism. Pessimism is an effect of thwarting of desire. The prevailing views of a time can be so pervaded with moral restraint that satisfaction seems impossible.
Neo classicism of western Europe. People who were taught civilisation by the Romans. For whom the Roman gods suggest nothing oppressive, people who identify themselves with the Romans of Caesar's day, Cicero Brutus etc, who hold the destiny of the world in their hands.
What future can there be for this? How can we hold the destiny in our hands with any satisfaction? Fear people have of ecological disaster.
Repel morality by means of art. Transvaluation, look at everything in a new way. What is needed is to create a perspective, not to get rid of anything.
Exploit suggestibility. No need to create some sudden inhumaneness.
Actually utilitarianism suggests will to power, the tyrannical rationalism of a Chinese Emperor.
148 Utilitarianism. The success of such values would involve the suppression of others. What those would be would be any attempt to alter common assumptions. Common assumptions are declared to be right and true. How is this to be justified? Try and see it altogether.
If I see that some values flourish at the expense of others that are suppressed.
Struggle against a just and fair power is what we are accused of, the strong are those who are unfairly trying to get more than they deserve. But it is not like that.
The weak are the weak because they are not the strong. The convolutions one gets into when unable to grasp the simple point.
Suppression of strength, does not mean suppression of everybody’s drive to power. That of the weak could be satisfied.
The utilitarian order. What it is a particular manifestation of power with suppression of various alternatives.
It satisfies and it frustrates, different people. This is because all the drives and desires with which it deals does not include this one, Power.
Pictures one may conceive. The philosophy itself expresses a drive. Attack on the whole utilitarian picture. All the drives and desires it aims to take account of and satisfy.
There is something that it does not take account of, the desire to overthrow itself. This gives an alternative picture of desire to its own. Pictures, images, that are thrown up dependent on points of view.
The picture that everyone really desires to be a dictator rather than that they are each satisfiable with a selected niche.
It is only a picture and we need to see how it arises.
Rather than that desire stops short of that.
But to come back to the basic dispute. If one thinks in terms of all the positions one will see the utilitarian position as repressing one’s own desire. No doctrine is intrinsically repressive, because it satisfies some people. We can still say it is shallow and does not take account of human nature.
That the desire to be lawgiver is not intrinsic. That different people’s desires are like hunger and not to be conceived in relation to each other. Isolable. How the scheme can be devised. That there is, or need be, no desire for power.
Try and bring out to the full these two pictures or images of human psychology.
One, everyone really desires to be a dictator and the necessary limitations on the effectiveness of this create all his values and ideals.
Two, desires are just given, do not necessarily interrelate .
The second picture results in pressure for mediocrity. It ignores all the relations of weakness and strength. It allows the desires of weakness equal value with those of strength. Consequently it represses strength, treating its desires as illegitimate.
Weakness and strength can only become apparent when one sees all existing values in relation to each other and in terms of suppressed possibilities.
Explain why it has appalling consequences, and not the good ones it proposes.
This consequence is that of oppression, oppression of strength.
Suppression of what is entirely legitimate, oneself and one’s own desires
The inequality. Unequal rights for the unequal. One law for the lion & ox is oppression.
Look from whose point of view.
From a certain viewpoint one will feel oneself suppressed. Persuading others of this, hardly likely to appeal to their compassion.
To persuade of the will to power, which is objectively true.
Tyranny of weakness over strength. The falsification that is the perspective of weakness.
Truth is a value that should reign supreme.
The fact, all the possibilities that are suppressed the logical framework within which we all live (move and have our being).
The moral force dedicated to the suppression of he fact and the values it legitimises.
That a so called fairness directed against this knowledge many answer to some strong motives, but is incompatible with recognition of reality, and is neither fair nor just.
Go over the system again and again. Desires conceived is isolation, from a despot’s aesthetic, of equal value.
Redescribe the reality. Incompatibility of different people’s desires. The dominance of one particular idea expresses some people’s desires and not others. It may be said that the desire against it should be disregarded but that is the height of dishonest favouritism.
That to impose it is a despotism. Because it suppresses other people’s desires for power. That this order, which expresses power, refuses to see itself in that sense because it does not accept the desire for power as part of human nature. It is inconvenient for the theory, so it can be dispensed with.
Chinese Emperor. So attractive to Voltaire.
I think particularly of utilitarianism, though a dogmatic equal rights faith has the same effect. If that order were to be imposed it would express power. It would aim to suppress other people’s desires for power. but it would do this to a large extent on a dishonest premise, because it would not admit what it was doing. So by exposing the dishonesty the oppression could be removed, insofar as it is not legitimate and does not express rationally acceptable principles.
What is oppressive, or what is really objectionable, that some people are frustrated. But that is you accept true premises you will find your own strength under attack.
Now suppose you take the other side, the Jacobin side. That some people should suffer is obviously no concern of yours. You might be content to let millions die, or be tortured to death for the sake of your equality. But what are you defending, apart from your political rights, which no one particularly begrudges you? If it is something that you could be shown to be rooted in illusion could hardly continue to console you.
If you look at it in the demystified perspective, if the falsification cold be dispelled, it is your own strength that you would see as threatened. That some people are frustrated is not much concern unless you are of their number.
AT 332 The production of a model of happiness. The happiness of some which is the result of satisfied revenge, is presented as abstractly as a human ideal of happiness available and appropriate for everyone.
Like laughing at jokes with are not found funny but which one believes to be clever. The ideal, which works for those who have the resentful desire. For those who do not it just depresses the whole culture. Domination of women. Increase in misery.
The utilitarian aim as in this way self defeating. The socialist happiness that is happiness for very few.
In measuring and comparing the happiness of different people 1 + 1 = 1. it does not = 2. the idea that it does is an error. Happiness is not doubled. The utilitarian principle is generally bogus. The model which is possible but its real conditions are not considered and it is considered abstractly that it may be imitated.
Nineteenth century radicals allied the happiness principle to laisser faire. There was more sense in this there was arguably a more genuine benevolence, a better psychology.
Benevolence is a motive selfish in its own way. Difference between the benevolence of the Benthamite and that of the socialist.
AR 24 Fairness and equality are not moral. Think of moral reformers from Bentham onwards who want to replace a morality of rights with an idea of fairness or equality.
Dilthey’s contempt for the utilitarians. Trouble with the moral reform, that it introduces a principle that logically ends in oppression so bad that it has to be repudiated. Repudiated in terms of a doctrine of rights, historically existing rights, an alternative morality to the morality of farness. Like you choose one or the other. The morality of fairness goes with communism, which is the ne plus ultra, the terminal point of revolution. It is so oppressive that has to be rejected, its morality has to be rejected in favour of a morality of inequality, ie liberty and inviolability.
Against all extreme ideas it is said that Britain always follows a middle way. Extremist ideas come from the continent. And it is said Britain learns from these without feeling the need to go to a logical extreme.
If equality is wrong then inequality is right, ie people have to be secure in their rights and their property.
AS 245 Normality and its threat. The rule of normality and the tininess of the minority that do not fit and are condemned to madness.
Tiny minority. That it may not seem unfair to condemn some to madness when the overwhelming majority seem to be happy. This concept of normality and health,. The utilitarian
Completely wrong by Nietzsche’s standard. A class full of children. What sort of care you have for them disregarding the few in the interests of the majority.
How rational that might see from some perspectives. It looks like justice. But it is against justice. Revolutionary justice it may be, but that is merely crime.
Justice must be connected to the sense of self and truth.
Justice depends upon unequal rights. Where Christianity accepts that, then well and good.
AY 4 Bulwer-Lytton (England and the English). Fascinating to see an earlier form of radicalism, when liberty was a passion of the past, an old cause. Now philosophical radicalism.
Bulwer writes much of aristocratic power, Now that has gone we may consider what has taken its place. Value of history in showing us clearly things it may be hard to discern.
Utilitarianism, philosophical radicalism. French revolution. Self assured body of doctrine. Analyse as will to power.
Will to power and its implications Looking at an old radicalism and seeing how far cynicism should extend. How much is the will to power direct and naked.
Real relations are explored by revealing the total context. The pressure against, the oppression of opponents.
Currents of thought in the nineteenth century. Illuminating for modern problems too. Bulwer's attacks on Byron. As if his discontent comes down to the same evil. Bulwer’s enthusiasm has diagnosed the precious influence of aristocracy on British society
Just like Hegelians and socialists of a later era, the idea that their new order can solve everything, all discontents, that coercion will not be felt once change has been effected. Idea of the middle class coming to power in France in 1830.
The proto Victorian synthesis.
He writes of cynicism that would presumably have sneered at the spirit of 1830. Young man’s enthusiasm
Aristocratic power has gone, but many of the features of the English character remain. Not all that depends so completely on the constitution as he so blithely asserts.
Bulwer-Lytton the Victorian project at its inception, Reasonable seeming, the flaws came out later. Rational project. When we look back on it we can't see that, we see irrational convention hard to get out of.
AX 82 utilitarianism, its argument. Formal nature of it, its non deductive quality.
