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[Jul. 11th, 2012|10:44 pm]

Scott

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Go to any discussion about utilitarianism and CTRL+F "communists" or "Soviet" in the comments. It's like its own little mini-Godwin's Law. A comment on a recent LW post that started off as a very academic critique of the mathematical assumptions:

"The Soviet Union was an attempt to build a Friendly government based on utilitarianism. They quickly reached 'shoot someone versus dust specks' and went for shooting people."

Those two sentences make me cringe for at least three reasons, but here I'm going to concentrate on the big one: were the Communists actually utilitarian?

There are at least two ways the Communists could have been utilitarian. First, they could have actively believed in and endorsed utilitarian philosophies. Second, they may have explicitly rejected utilitarian philosophies, but still implicitly acted according to utilitarian principles.

Let's start by looking up "utilitarianism" on Wikipedia. There's no mention of the Communists until the section "Individual Criticisms of Utilitarianism", where we find only two historical figures who objected to utilitarianism vociferously enough to be included as Official Wikipedia Utilitarian Critics. One is Pope John Paul II. The other was Karl Marx.

Marx's actual critique is somewhat opaque. As far as I can tell, he seems to alternate between sometimes criticizing it as so obvious that even to state it is wasting his time, and other times condemning it as pretty much his least favorite thing ever.

According to Karl Marx by Allen Wood, "Marx's explicit statements about utilitarianism do not give us much to work with. They express contemptuous rejection of the doctrine, but give little evidence that Marx understands what he is rejecting. They attack only caricatures of utilitarian thinking, and betray some fairly elementary misunderstandings of what utilitarianism is all about."

This is my feeling as well. Marx seems to be confusing the personal speculations of Jeremy Bentham (whom Marx called "an insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of ordinary bourgeois understanding") with the fundamental principles of utilitarianism. So when Bentham speculates utilitarianism would support the Christian religion as conducive to a peaceful society, Marx just hears "utilitarianism = Christianity" and dismisses it.

Is there anything a little more substantive? According to the same work: "Marx appears disinclined to regard the nonmoral good as quantitatively measurable and summable in the ways required by utilitarian theories. I think this is part of what The German Ideology means to express when it criticizes utilitarians for 'merging all relations in' ... the 'abstract category of utility'... Marx's deepest disagreements with utilitarianism have to do with his conception of morality. Marx regards moral norms as determined by correspondence to the prevailing mode of production, and not by what is conducive to the greatest nonmoral good. Given Marx's theory of social change, this leads to systematic divergences betewen his account of what morality demands and a utilitarian account."

I am not a Marx scholar, and I get the feeling that there may be an element of semantics in here - that Marx dislikes utilitarianism as a moral theory, since he believes all moral theories are by definition tools of oppression. Right now all I can say with confidence is that Marx personally believed he strongly disagreed with utilitarianism, and condemned it pretty harshly. If I wanted to be a jerk about it, I would say that he shared exactly the same criticisms as the people who invoke his name as an arch-utilitarian have themselves, and that he figured utilitarianism was a Christian plot just as the Christians believe it to be a Marxist one.

Speaking of Communist condemnations of utilitarianism as Christian, in his very directly-titled work Their Morals And Ours, Leon Trotksy traces the principle "the end justifies the means" back to the Jesuits, a historical point I didn't previously know. Although I find the book pretty impenetrable, its Communist commentators assure me that he wrote it because he was 'accused of being an amoralist who always believed that the ends justified the means'. Trotsky certainly sounds like he thinks he's arguing that the end doesn't justify the means, although his attack on that concept seems to me to be half-hearted (and Lenin did famously say "If the end doesn't justify the means, what does?" although others have interpreted Lenin as a virtue ethicist). So I dunno what the heck Trotsky thinks on ends and means himself, but he does go on to say the obligatory "Actually, it's the capitalists who really believe the ends justify the means" plus the obligatory digs at Benthamism and utilitarianism.

According to Socialist Alternative's summary of the book:

"Trotsky is not interested in playing intellectual games. For him the point is that utilitarianism was the philosophy par excellence of the capitalist class at its most rabid - when the industrial revolution was blighting the lives of British workers."

We could go on in this vein forever with treatments of different communist thinkers, but Mao and Stalin would give us a lot that's pretty similar to what we've already got, so let's move to Official Soviet Moral Policy. This policy was not utilitarian. A critic could argue that of course Stalin or whoever wasn't going to tell other people to be utilitarian, because that would interfere with his utilitarian program - but the fact is that the morality that the government promulgated upon the Soviet populace was a vague set of platitudes about class struggle, patriotism, and class belongingness which didn't resemble utilitarianism in any way. My favorite is this essay on "The Moral Code Of The Builders of Communism", which begins "We are on the threshold of communism. Communism!" with what in retrospect seems to be slightly misplaced enthusiasm. Anyway, it all looks very virtue ethicist, and here's a paper that argues that's exactly what it was.

So the gist of this part is that the Communists did not consider themselves utilitarian. In fact, they condemned utilitarianism as Christian and capitalist with the same vehemence that the Christians and capitalists condemn it as being Communist. It was basically as much a bogeyman for them as it was for everyone else.

This leaves the second question - even if the commies were not explicitly utilitarianism, might they have been implicitly acting according to utilitarian principles? This has some superficial plausibility. Although Mao never said anything like "Yes, my policies will kill millions of people - but it's for the grand goal of creating a utopian communist society so it's okay", if he had been more self-conscious about justifying his policies, it would seem he certainly could have tried that approach.

Let's divide this second question into two subquestions. First, does utilitarianism actually justify the Communists' actions? Second, could a reasonable person erring through ignorance rather than through malice have believed utilitarianism justified the Communists' actions?

The answer to the first question is a pretty resounding "no". The Communists' mass murder sprees didn't end up creating a utopian society. They just left a lot of people dead, and ended in post-Soviet kleptocracy and modern Chinese neo-authoritarianism. Even if the end did justify the means, the ends of the Communists' actions ended up too sucky to justify anything. If modern day Russia was a paradise of free and happy people living in an idyllic post-scarcity society, then we could have an interesting debate on whether the victory was worth the cost. Since that didn't happen, there's not much to debate about.

But the answer to the second question is just as obviously "yes". A well-intentioned (but insufficiently smart) person could have believed that Communist atrocities would be worth it in the end. So if you launch into utilitarianism gung-ho without any precautions, then insufficiently smart people will cause a catastrophe. This is a valid critique of utilitarianism. It's also a valid critique of chemistry and of driving a car.

I would also add that it's a fully general critique. Yes, we can counterfactually imagine Stalin as being a well-intentioned but not-so-smart utilitarian who screwed up. But we could also counterfactually imagine Martin Luther King or George Washington as being well-intentioned but not-so-smart utilitarians who lucked out. If we're going to play the "pretend historical figures were utilitarian" game, it's unfair to only apply it to the historical figures whose policies ended in disaster.

In conclusion, the communists were not utilitarians and hated utilitarians more than you do. Although one can imagine a counterfactual world in which well-meaning but foolish utilitarians could have implemented Communist policies, one can imagine a counterfactual world in which well-meaning but foolish utilitarians implement any policy whatsoever, so this doesn't prove much.

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From:

mindstalk
2012-07-12 03:25 am (UTC)

Side note: while reading Pinker I was amused to realize that market libertarians (esp. anarcho-capitalists) and utilitarians share a high level similarity, despite seeming like opposites in many ways. They're both universalist and highly 'rational' in putting numbers on everything, and seeing everything as tradeable-off. For one the numbers are market prices, for the other they're utility estimates.

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