So, today we're gonna talk about Utilitarianism. And were gonna start with the classical doctrine formulated by an Englishman by the name of Jeremy Bentham. And I'll talk a little bit about his background in a minute. But, in order to give you a sense of what's at stake in thinking about Utilitarianism, I want you to start by imagining that somebody comes to you with the following proposition. That you could be put inside a happiness machine. And it will be programmed from a number of interviews and research that's been done about what makes you happy, and what makes you unhappy. And then, there will be a like trans connected to your brain and you believe that you are having the experience that makes you happy if its possible for you to be, we could call it as Happiness Machine. You will be inside the Happiness Machine and you'll be perpetually happy and the question is, would you sign up to be connected to the Happiness Machine to the next 10 years? >> And for how long that would be? >> 10 years. >> Oh then my answer would be no. >> Why not? >> Because I would not like to miss out on the real life experience. >> Okay, you say you wouldn't like to miss out on real life experiences, but you would think that it was real. It would be sort of like, when you're having a dream, you never say, is this a dream? You would think it's real, even though after you wake up you know it wasn't, but you would think it was real. That still bothers you? >> Yes, because it's not authentic. And it would mean as if I'm taking a pill to live my life in a way that's is missing out the real connection, yeah. >> So the Happiness Machine is kind of way of being stoned, you think, or something like that? >> [LAUGH] Medicated. >> Okay, would you sign up? >> I don't think so. I have a number of worries. If it's ten years, what if it malfunctions and I'm actually having terrible experiences in. >> Okay, well this is a philosophy example, so let's assume it won't malfunction. >> Even if it doesn't malfunction, I don't feel like I have any control, I don't know what kind of experiences I'm gonna be having and I'm not controlling it at all. >> Okay, so think about that, what you said that it's inauthentic, it's somehow not real and you worry about the loss of control, the loss of autonomy, your loss of freedom. This, so these two answers just thinking back to the last lecture, show you what creatures of the enlightenment you both are. Because you're worried about things being real Science is ultimately concerned with getting at reality, and you're worried about your freedom, your individual autonomy that we tend to think of as being protected with the doctrine of individual rights. And you're also right to intuit that Utilitarianism has challenges on both these dimensions. And we'll talk about how Utilitarian thinkers grapple with those challenges, because as I've said to you, Utilitarianism is an enlightenment doctrine, and so we'll wanna know what it has to say about reality and science on the one hand, and individual rights and human freedom on the other hand. So that just gives you a little taste of what's at stake, but I want to talk a little bit about Jeremy Benthem, the man. I call him a Useful Extremist, why might somebody be a Useful Extremist? What do you think that suggests to you? >> Because he takes one idea to the extreme to explain everything. >> That's exactly right. He's somebody who takes an idea and says to himself, what if this explained literally everything? And he pushes it to the most extreme imaginable formulation. Long often most people will have jumped off the train, he's gonna be driving it off into the sunset. So thinkers of this kind, why do you think they might be useful? >> Cuz then we have a ten year old theory that explains in politics, institutions, life. Well that's a reasonable answer but that's not the reason I have in mind. The reason I have in mind is this, that most of the ideas we're gonna talk about in this course are useful up to a point. But beyond a certain point start to become problematic. And it's very hard to see what that point is, unless you're willing to go beyond it. And so there's the certain kind of thinking, precisely because they're so philosophically fanatical that they really believed in the core of their beings that this idea explains absolutely everything. That they play our for us, the consequences of taking the idea further than anybody's comfortable with. Even though it's an idea that on some dimension and up to a certain point, most people are gonna wanna embrace. And so, it helps us think about the limits of possibility of an idea. So that's why I think of people like Bentham and we'll see Karl Marx, is another Useful Extremist in this sense. And we'll see later in the course, Robert Nozick also I think is a Useful Extremist, somebody who pushes an idea all the way to the hilt. And then it helps us to sort of put it under the microscope in a certain kind of way that we wouldn't be able to otherwise. So he's a Useful Extremist. He was also a very eccentric human being. I have a slide here of what's called the Auto Icon, which is actually Jeremy Bentham's mummified body in the hallway of the University College London, university in London. And so, toward the end of his life, Bentham formed the idea that his body should be donated to science. And he wrote in his will that, that first of all, there should be an autopsy of him done, in public, on a stage, that people could go and watch, which was indeed done. And then he wanted his body mummified and put on display and he donated it to University College, and it's even said that in the last years of his life, he walked around with these two glass eyes in his pocket that were gonna be put into his eye sockets. In any event, all of this was done and what happened was, they mummified the body, but they actually made a mess of mummifying his head. And it became all shriveled up. And so what they did as a result of this was they made a wax head and put his two glass eyes in the wax head. And put some of his actual hair into the wax head, and put the wax head on top of his mummified body in that glass cabinet that you see there. And his real head, was put in a box on the floor, but undergraduates being what undergraduates are, the University College undergraduates use to play pranks with the actual head and once they stole it and ransomed it for 10 pounds they put it in a left luggage office in the Glasgow railway station. Another time they record playing soccer with it. So finally the university authorities locked the head away. But there it is. So it can give you some sense this was not your every day academic thinker Jeremy Bentham, he's a very eccentric guy. And hugely important for the development of Utilitarianism. He was really the inventor of this doctrine. One of the nice things about Bentham, is that he reduces his entire doctrine to a single paragraph. With many philosophers you discover that there huge amounts of convoluted formulations and jargon not prevent them. So here it is right at the very first paragraph, the opening paragraph that obvious, the principles of morals and legislation, Bentham says, nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. That's the throne of pleasure seeking and pain avoidance. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, and in all we think. Every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, that's our subjection to the sovereign masses of pleasure and pain, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words we may pretend to abjure their empire, but in reality, he will remain subject to it all the while, the principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it to be a foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law. Systems which attempt to question it deal in sounds instead of senses, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light. So there it is, as I said, that's the bumper sticker version of his theory. It's all nicely and compactly stated and it couldn't be more extreme. He say, in everything we do, in everything we think, in everything we aught to do, in everything we aught to think, this is the only principle that matters.
