Reclaiming Utilitarian Liberalism
Why caring about the good of all should lead you to liberty and equality
I have recently started describing myself as a ‘liberal’ when asked about my political views. The recency isn’t because I just recently became a ‘liberal’, but because I think the term ‘liberal’ can be quite misleading and so was not really the best way to describe my view. I always thought of myself as a liberal, just not that kind of liberal (where ‘that kind’ was just whatever people wanted to attribute to me on the basis of me claiming I was a liberal).
So, in the past, when asked about my political views, I would often just say “utilitarian”. Partly this was a way to throw people off – for most people it is harder to immediately ascribe specific political views to a “utilitarian” than it is a “liberal”, if for no other reason than ‘liberal’ gets a lot of play in our political culture. But it was also because I am unsure if my utilitarian proclivities would always lead me to endorsing specific institutions or policy prescriptions that others would consider ‘liberal’. Basically, while I think liberal institutions are the proper political institutions, it is not directly because of any principled commitment to liberalism. I arrive at my liberalism from my utilitarianism, and so that means it is open to me to reject certain liberal institutions or embrace certain illiberal ones. I don’t think I have done such a thing, but I have to be open to it.
But as I have become more willing to embrace the ‘liberal’ label, in part to rescue it from abuse and misuse, I have been thinking more about the theoretical and practical connection between my utilitarianism and my liberalism. This was especially important for me because, while working on my dissertation, I took a detour from my utilitarian commitments to explore other approaches to justifying liberalism, most notably the political liberal project. Exploring that project clearly changed the way I thought about certain things, but since the political liberal project is heavily steeped in deontological and contractarian approaches to liberal justification, I was left with a tension: Must I jettison my utilitarian commitments to embrace certain liberal ideas I found appealing? Or should I reject those liberal ideas and reassert my utilitarian commitments?
The answer, which I am now working to more thoroughly develop, is to resolve the tension by dissolving the tension. Instead of jettisoning the utilitarianism or the political liberal commitments, I think it is possible to adopt the most attractive features of political liberalism while adhering to a utilitarian form of liberalism. Indeed, I think doing so produces a more useful and attractive form of liberalism than either more common utilitarian liberalisms or political liberalism itself. I recently spoke about a bit of this on the Embrace the Void podcast with an old friend from Colorado State, Aaron Rabinowitz. And while I am still in the process of working out all the details, I did want to share some of the key features of this view that I think make it particularly attractive. Below I discuss one way I think about the place of utilitarianism liberalism in the history of political philosophy and liberalism more generally. In later posts I’ll discuss some of the other features.
Between Plato & Hobbes
Without endorsing any particular prescriptions from either, I sincerely believe that both Plato and Hobbes have provided us with some of the most insightful political philosophy ever written. However, they each approach political philosophy very differently, a difference that I think is best captured by recognizing the core political values they are interested in. For Plato, at least as evidenced by The Republic, the central political value is justice. Indeed, for many political philosophers, the central political value is justice. As Rawls suggested, justice is the primary virtue of social institutions. For most of these thinkers, justice is a comprehensive ideal that tells us what a perfect society may look like, or at least what a feasible ideal may look like for creatures like us. By and large, as critics have often noted, justice theorists do their work independently of the political history of specific political societies. Indeed, a common criticism of theories of justice like Rawls’s is that it fails to properly account for the grave historical injustices that have heavily influenced the society we have today.
While Hobbes does talk about justice, his conception of it is quite different. Different enough that I think it is better to suggest the core political value he is interested in is not justice at all, but rather something like legitimacy or, even more narrowly, stability. Hobbes’s political philosophy, best on display in Leviathan, arose out of his lived experience during the English Civil War(s). Deeply concerned about the grave instability that such wars create, especially when they are (at least partly) the result of religious or moral disagreement, he sought to defeat any meaningful justification for civil war by leveraging the popular sovereignty arguments of the parliamentarians to justify an absolute monarchy. Talk about argumentative judo!
So Plato was concerned with justice, and endeavored to illustrate what the kallipolis (beautiful city) would look like if it could just be perfectly just. Hobbes’s interest were much more down to earth – let us not worry about the perfect society, it is hard enough to hold on to any peaceful, stable society. And we can take this even further: for out of Hobbes’s work we get the argument, developed more recently by the late Jerry Gaus, that our pursuit of justice can, unless appropriately restrained, destroy any peace or stability that we currently have.
And so we have a tension between competing political values: concern for justice can upset peace, and yet peace seems to be a precondition for justice. A major goal of the political liberal project, as I see it, was to try to harmonize these pursuits. However, I think the final result was not so much to harmonize the pursuits as to sublimate one – justice – to the other. Basically, the political liberal project taken to its conclusion is just a Hobbesian theory of state legitimacy, albeit one that recognizes we can have authority without an authority figure.
Utilitarian liberalism, as I develop it, navigates a better path through this tension. In fact, it does properly allow us to harmonize the competing pursuits. Whereas the political liberal projects of (for instance) Gaus and Vallier put a hard deontic constraint on the pursuit of justice, one rooted in public justification which is itself justified by the importance of peace and stability, utilitarian liberalism treats the values as on a par. Certainly they can conflict, and it may be that peace/stability is in some meaningful sense more fundamental and thus may often win out, but the upshot of the utilitarian view is that if the justice concern is strong or important enough, then sometimes it is right to risk peace and stability.
So a utilitarian liberal can accept that there are a variety of roughly equally important but often competing political values. Good political decisions are not merely about justice or legitimacy or peace or stability or community, etc. Rather each of these values (and more) are relevant to our thinking. This approach is certainly more complex than some others that emphasize only a single value (or two) but I think it better captures the realities of political debate and decision-making.