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Taking Utilitarianism Seriously
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2009
Extract
With a book as wide ranging and insightful as Barry's Justice as Impartiality, it is perhaps a little churlish to criticize it for paying insufficient attention to one's own particular interests. That said, in what follows I am going to do just that and claim that in an important sense Barry does not take utilitarianism seriously. Utilitarianism does receive some discussion in Barry's book, and in an important section which I will discuss he even appears to concede that utilitarianism provides a rival though ultimately inadequate theory of justice. Nevertheless, utilitarianism is not considered a rival to ‘justice as impartiality’ in the way that ‘justice as mutual advantage’ and ‘justice as reciprocity’ are. One response, and perhaps the only adequate response, would be to construct a rival utilitarian theory. I cannot provide such a theory in this paper, and I certainly would be very cautious about claiming that I could provide such a theory elsewhere. What I want to suggest is that utilitarianism is a genuine third theory to contrast with ‘justice as mutual advantage’ and ‘justice as impartiality’ – ‘justice as reciprocity’ being merely a hybrid of ‘justice as mutual advantage’, at least as Barry presents it (pp. 46–51). I also want to argue that it poses a more significant challenge to a contractualist theory such as Barry's than his discussion of utilitarianism reveals.
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References
1 Barry, B., Justice as Impartiality, Oxford, 1995Google Scholar. Subsequent page references in the text refer to this volume.
2 As I do not intend to offer a fully articulated utilitarian theory here, I use the term simply to identify a family resemblance between a variety of distinct theories which promote good consequences defined in terms of some conception of welfare, individual well-being or utility, however each of these is conceived.
3 Barry, B., Political Argument, reissued with new introduction, Hemel Hempstead, 1990Google Scholar.
4 A good case can be made for seeing the work of Hare, Griffin, Harsanyi, and Singer as concerned with giving content to the core idea of fairness and equality of concern and respect underlying fairness. See Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking, Oxford, 1984Google Scholar; Griffin, J., Well-Being, Oxford, 1986Google Scholar; Harsanyi, J., Essays on Ethics, Social Behaviour and Scientific Explanation, Dordrecht, 1976CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Singer, P., Practical Ethics, Cambridge, 1979Google Scholar.
5 MacIntyre, A., Whose Justice, Which Rationality, London, 1988Google Scholar.
6 See Kelly, P. J., Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice: Jeremy Bentham and the Civil Law, Oxford, 1990Google Scholar.
7 Barry's contractualist defence of ‘justice as impartiality’ is based on Scanlon, T. M., ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’, Utilitarianism and Beyond, ed. Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 103–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Hardin, R., Morality Within the Limits of Reason, Chicago, 1988Google Scholar.
9 Arneson, R., ‘Neutrality and Utility’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, XX (1990), 215–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Ibid., 220.
11 This was a real case, see Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, 437 U.S. 153 (1978), cited in Dworkin, R., Law's Empire, Cambridge, Mass., 1986, pp. 20–3Google Scholar.
12 Arneson does appear to make this claim when he says, ‘In a sense, subjectivism is obviously non-neutral: it identifies the good with fulfilment of preferences’, Arneson, , 220Google Scholar. It is, however, clear from the context that he is not offering an account of the meaning of the good or value terms so I do not think too much can be read into this.
13 I use this term in the same way as Sue Mendus, who makes a similar argument about tragedy and loss in theories of justice such as Barry's, though I should point out she does so for very different reasons to my own. I am nevertheless indebted to her argument. See S. Mendus, ‘Some Mistakes about Impartiality’, Political Studies, forth-coming.
14 Rawls, J., A Theory of Justice, Oxford, 1971Google Scholar.
15 See e.g., Griffin, Well-Being and Broome, J., Weighing Goods, Oxford, 1991Google Scholar.
16 Scanlon, p. 110.