Sidgwick Defended

John Quiggin is not a fan of contemporary utilitarianism, and he blames Sidgwick. I think he’s right that Sidgwick has had significant influence (especially via Parfit); but I think more by introducing previously-unasked questions than by turning away from any clearly contrary commitments in Bentham and Mill. As I explained in Puzzles for Everyone, people often make the mistake of thinking that neglecting a puzzling problem puts one in a philosophically better position (since it allows one to refrain from committing to any particular set of costs), but when every complete and precise view has significant costs, we should appreciate that a noncommittal disjunction of costly commitments cannot be better than its least-costly disjunct. My sense is that a mistake along these lines—not appreciating the costs of the alternatives—may underlie Quiggin’s objections to Sidgwick’s views.

Let’s consider the three objections in turn.

Valuing potential lives

The classical utilitarians argued for public policies which promoted the welfare of the community to which they applied, on the basis of “each to count for one, and none for more than one”. This applied both to the current population and to the children who would actually be born as a result of their choices, but not to hypothetical additional people who might raise the sum of total utility.

By contrast, contemporary utilitarian philosophy yields bizarre spectacles like “longtermism” which implies that our primary goal should be to produce as many descendants as possible provided that the result is an increase in aggregate utility.

Firstly, that’s not an accurate statement of longtermism (which is more ecumenical than the total view of population ethics). But more to the point, it seems anachronistic to read Bentham and Mill as excluding “additional people” from counting, as opposed to simply failing to consider the relevant question. It’s hard to imagine them approving of voluntary human extinction, for example, even if the final generation got a slight utility boost from increased material consumption. Such a narrow focus on guaranteed existents fits ill with Mill’s deep concern for “the permanent interests of man as a progressive being,” for example.

Quiggin quotes Sidgwick as urging total over average utilitarianism. I find it strange to call this an “error” when the average view is subject to far more decisive counterexamples. Quiggin’s dismissal of “hypothetical additional people” suggests that he may personally prefer