Utilitarianism as Christian Policy

 

Jeremy Bentham

Six decades ago over coffee in Athey's Cafe, a long-defunct college hangout, Frank Orr explained Utilitarian ethics: the best society provides "the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers." I understood these to be powerful words but wondered how they worked in practice. How can we quantify happiness? Besides, the slogan could seem to justify abusing a minority to pleasure the majority. This apparently wasn't what Jeremy Bentham--a pioneering supporter of women's equality, public education, and gay rights--had in mind when he devised the slogan. Frank proposed a thought experiment that has stuck with me over the years.

Suppose, Frank suggested, that you could be born into the society of your choice. The catch is that you'll be assigned an identity at random. You can't choose to be a medieval knight even if armor turns you on. If you select 13th-century France, you'll have a greater chance of being a female serf. You can't know if you'll be born male or female, slave or free, foreign or native, bright or brainless, able-bodied or disabled, rich or poor, city or country, sane or mentally ill. Your family may be powerful elites or starving outcasts. The degree to which any category exists in the society determines the probability of your being born into that category. The society you would choose, my friend suggested, represents your best judgment as to what society provides the greatest happiness for its greatest numbers.

Athey's Cafe 1950s, from the Auburn University Library 

Maybe this is clear enough, but I'll refine it by stipulating that throughout a lifetime as, say, Maud, the crosseyed peasant woman whom you become after choosing medieval France, you will be fully present and aware--experiencing as your own life all of that woman's joys, frustrations, and sufferings but unable to apply any wisdom you have now. You'll be her co-suffering captive, subject to what Maud knows, feels, experiences, and does--a years-long, pain-inclusive miniseries you're trapped in and forced to care about. (This suggests theories of Christ's double nature, heretical but maybe less paradoxical than the orthodox one.) And here's another refinement: you may either live one random life or you my be reborn again and again until you have co-experienced, in random order, every life in your chosen society, something like the movie Groundhog Day.

This thought experiment brings to mind Jesus' Second Great Commandment, that you love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:39). A good society is one that you would choose even with no expectation of privilege--one in which you risk becoming your least fortunate neighbor. The lord in the manor, a medieval one-percenter dining on roast goose, may be indifferent to Maud's hunger as long as her village keeps supplying him geese, but he would certainly prefer to be randomly born into a society where lords and knights live a little less lavishly and villages like Maud's--where he is far more likely to be born than in the castle--retain enough food to avoid malnutrition. 

         Tossing leftovers to his hounds, the lord may wipe his beard and sigh that life is good, but (in an objective utilitarian sense) life in his fiefdom is less good than it would be if he leaned toward loving Maud's villagers as himself. 

           Because of the enormous underclass--not to speak of the plague and an average life expectancy of around thirty--medieval France would be an unwise choice to be born in, but what is a wise one?

The present era presents strong contenders for best, at least in the developed world. I would be slow to wish for any random reincarnation before Social Security, public sanitation, antiseptics, anesthetics, antibiotics, and the abolition of slavery. I'm addicted to the technology of the last sixty years--especially semiconductors and satellites--but could dream of doing without them. Still, 1960 is unappealing to the extent that I imagine myself female, gay, or black. Of course, some people might settle for the primitive medicine of earlier eras in exchange for advantages such as closeness to nature, non-alienation from labor, or universal religious faith. But I would resist falling for the romance of a bygone era. There were very few Scarlet O'Haras and Rhett Butlers, for instance, in the Old South, and there's less romance in Prissy's field-hand cousins. I'd situate the greatest happiness broadly in the present era and developed nations, and there are many statistical reasons not to head the list with the United States--which is top-ranked for remarkably few characteristics that cause happiness, unless you get your jollies from wasteful consumption and a large military.

This is not to say that the present day anywhere approaches the ideal. Like Democracy, it's the worst possible alternative except for all the others, but it is a place to start (in fact, the only one). And the best use of Bentham's "greatest happiness" is not to play history games but to evaluate public policy--to start where we are and evaluate policy changes according to whether they would create a better society. 

            Of course, we can indulge in fantasies. Like Karl Marx, dreaming of a revolution of workers that leads to a benevolent dictatorship of the proletariate and universal happiness, but that didn't happen. In Russia, Marx's dream led to failed state capitalism. Let's apply Bentham's criterion to reforms known to have worked somewhere, either in the United States or other developed nations.

The United States has an average income of $74,600 per three-person household (Pew Research Institute). This is obviously ample to eliminate involuntary homelessness and hunger, but economic inequality is greater in the United States than in other developed nations and is growing. Since 1970, the upper-class share of aggregate income has risen 66% while the middle-class share has fallen 30%. With top one-percent now owning a third of national wealth, the upper-class share has risen from 60% to 79% percent, the middle-class share fallen from 32% to 19%. Two generations of adults (if not fortunate to have be upper class) are facing more debt and less opportunity than their parents. If this trend continues, "I want my country back," won't be just for conservatives. 

          This isn't a call for radical socialism, but a recognition of the fact that wealth gives economic advantage on the wealthy. Free and fair are two different things. In a free market system, assets generate assets. The rich get richer and the poor, poorer until gross inequality degrades general happiness. Above the level where differences in wealth suffice to motivate productivity, additional differences are utilitarian failures: a thousand dollars in the account of a poor family may cover overdue rent or repair a used car; in the account of a billionaire, it changes nothing. 

Another thought experiment may help to explain the corrosiveness of gross inequality. Suppose that you live in an isolated neighborhood of thirty houses. Let's stipulate that your lifestyle is modest but comfortable: you live in a $200,000 three-bedroom house and have an income to match. How happy you'll be with the neighborhood depends on wealth distribution. Suppose that at the end of your street is a mansion worth five million, but all the other houses are ill-kept shacks worth about $30,000, the occupants having incomes to match. The real estate value of the neighborhood is $6 million, but the millionaire will wall off his property, and you may too. You live in a bad neighborhood. 

          Now, let's suppose that all thirty houses are worth about $200,000, the occupants with incomes to match. It's still a $6 million neighborhood, and your own house hasn't changed, but your circumstances are much better. Of course, in the real world, the houses won't all be all of equal value--except maybe when a developer sells them--but, if they're comparable with incomes to match, you'll be much happier with your neighborhood, not to speak of a greater number of your neighbors (which is why you will). Extrapolate this from a neighborhood to a nation, and clearly even the "haves" should prefer a system without desperate "have-nots."

Here are a few suggestions for increasing opportunity among the lower eighty percent (where Bentham's greatest numbers live) while allowing the rich to remain rich but, God help us, stopping the United States' half-century slide toward plutocracy. The economy is an engine that, like any other, runs on differences. It harnesses selfishness, but within moral bounds. We may, I think, to take at least a few stumbling steps toward loving our neighbors as ourselves.

1. A real progressive income tax. The highest income tax bracket in 1963 was 91%, a slight reduction from WWII rates. By 1984, Reagan had lowered it to 50%, and, between 1987 and 2000, it was about 40%, with the second Bush lowering it to 35% in a "temporary" stimulus that became permanent. Corporate taxes have dropped from over 50% in the 1960s to 21% today. Long-term capital gains taxes are capped at 20%, estate taxes all but eliminated. Billionaires and large corporations use loopholes to pay at lower rates than middle-class individuals. Friends of mine worry that high tax brackets weaken the economy, arguing there's a level that must not be exceeded. I agree. But historic rates for periods of economic prosperity demonstrate that levels double those today do not weaken incentive, and they would help to brake runaway inequality.

2. Universal health care. I see this as a moral issue. The Good Samaritan doesn't hand a bill to the man set upon by thieves. Any payback should take the form of the healed man caring for others in the future. The sick are cared for by the healthy, who in turn receive care when they become sick. In a society where good health care is professional, this implies insurance, and the only way to eliminate unnecessary suffering and avoid worsened inequality through medical debt is for a society-wide agency, the government, to administer it. This isn't hard. Every other developed nation has achieved this with results comparable to the United States health system, often at half the cost. Taxes might be raised, but insurance and hospital fees would be reduced, leaving everybody but insurance investors with more money to spend. It's a win-win.

3. Public education. In 1960 when I enrolled in an Alabama land-grant university, tuition and fees totaled less than $150 per year, easily covered by a summer job or a middle-class family. At the time, California universities were tuition free. Today, annual tuition at Auburn University is $11,492.00, a 7,600% increase. University of California tuition is about the same--mathematically speaking, infinite inflation. When I taught at Clayton Junior College in Georgia, the school charged a modest "matriculation fee" because the state constitution prohibited tuition. Now the institution, renamed Clayton State University, charges $5,419 annually. The next school I taught at, Chattahoochee Valley Community College in Alabama, charged annual fees of $305 in 1979, which had doubled by 1991 and now stand at $4,860. This 1,500 % increase is modest on the scale of most higher education but far outstrips inflation or middle-class income.

              My point is that eliminating college tuition shouldn't be just a progressive issue, but a return to traditional values. A century ago when free high schools became universal in the United States, the usual qualification for a professional job was high school. Now it's college. We know about the massive debts that college graduates owe. One article blames tuition on increased enrollments because, you know, those people are being educated, but if money is a problem, why the tax cuts? The causes are complex, the challenge easy: nearly every developed nation offers free or low-cost public education through at least the 16th grade. Only America levies punitive taxes on upward social mobility in the form of tuition at state colleges.

4. Rebuilding unions. Beginning with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, unions were weakened by barring workers from presenting a unified front (a "closed shop"). Employers, in effect, paid workers not to unionize by giving union benefits to non-union workers who avoided the expense of strikes and union dues. The percentage of workers unionized is less than half what it was then--one important reason for the shrinking middle class. I imagine anti-union readers reciting a litany of union abuses. I've heard them all my life--going back to featherbedding, where firemen were paid to do nothing on diesel train engines--and I will stipulate them all. Humans are selfish. But the misdeeds of management easily match those of labor, including massacres of striking workers (See "List of worker deaths in United States labor disputes," Wikipedia). Neither side has a monopoly on morality or wisdom, but they do have conflicting interests, especially when CEOs are paid hundreds of times more than even the most skilled laborers. Selfishness on both sides is why balance is needed, a balance arguably enjoyed in the economic boom of 1950s but lost today. Restoring it would slow America's unhappy slide into plutocracy.

These are just four of many areas of reform (which could include racism, minimum wage, campaign finance, immigration reform, veterans' affairs, voting rights, mental health, and more) that promise to make a future USA a better approximation of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. I've made sharp turn into politics, but this pertains religion because Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism--understood in terms of Frank Orr's random-birth thought experiment--is an exact public-policy translation of Jesus' commandment to love our neighbor as ourself.

Note: The thought experiment that Fran Orr described to me in 1963 suggests John Rawls' theory of justice as fairness, which he didn't publish until 1971. This may be a case of independent invention, or Frank's professor may have known Rawls. Clearly, something was in the air.