WEBVTT NOTE 2. Jeremy Bentham: The Utilitarian as Big Brother 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.500 Chapter 2. Jeremy Bentham, The Utilitarian as Big Brother 2 00:00:06.500 --> 00:00:11.500 1. From Laissez-Faire to Statism 3 00:00:11.500 --> 00:00:22.500 Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832, began as a devoted Smithian, but more consistently attached to laissez-faire. 4 00:00:22.500 --> 00:00:29.500 During his relatively brief span of interest in economics, he became more and more statist. 5 00:00:29.500 --> 00:00:41.500 His intensified statism was merely one aspect of his major and highly unfortunate contribution to economics, his consistent philosophical utilitarianism. 6 00:00:41.500 --> 00:00:53.500 This contribution, which opens a broad sluice gate for state despotism, still remains as Bentham's legacy to contemporary neoclassical economics. 7 00:00:53.500 --> 00:00:57.000 Bentham was born in London, the son of a wealthy lawyer, 8 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:03.000 wild away his youth at Oxford and was admitted to the bar in 1772. 9 00:01:03.000 --> 00:01:08.500 But it soon became clear that Bentham was not interested in a career as an attorney. 10 00:01:08.500 --> 00:01:15.000 Rather, he settled down for life with his inherited wealth to become a cloistered philosopher, 11 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:21.880 philosopher, legal theorist and projector or crank, eternally grinding out schemes for 12 00:01:21.880 --> 00:01:28.440 legal and political reform which he urged upon the great and powerful. 13 00:01:28.440 --> 00:01:34.040 Bentham's first and enduring interest was in utilitarianism, which we shall examine further 14 00:01:34.040 --> 00:01:40.200 below, and which he launched with his first published work at the age of 28, The Fragment 15 00:01:40.200 --> 00:01:44.560 on Government, 1776. 16 00:01:44.560 --> 00:01:50.620 Most of his life, Bentham functioned as the great man, scribbling chaotically on endless 17 00:01:50.620 --> 00:01:57.600 and prolix manuscripts, elaborating on his projected reforms and law codes. 18 00:01:57.600 --> 00:02:02.680 Most of the manuscripts remained unpublished until long after his death. 19 00:02:02.680 --> 00:02:08.360 The affluent Bentham lived in a capacious house, surrounded by flunkies and disciples, 20 00:02:08.360 --> 00:02:16.000 who copied revision after revision of his eligible prose to get ready for eventual publication. 21 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:21.000 He conversed with his disciples in the same made-up jargon with which he peppered his 22 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:22.400 writings. 23 00:02:22.400 --> 00:02:28.600 While a cheery conversationalist, Bentham brooked no argument from his aides and disciples. 24 00:02:28.600 --> 00:02:35.160 As his precocious young disciple, John Stuart Mill, later recalled with kindly understatement, 25 00:02:35.160 --> 00:02:40.000 Bentham failed in deriving light from other minds. 26 00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:45.640 Because of this trait, Bentham was surrounded not by alert and knowledgeable disciples, 27 00:02:45.640 --> 00:02:51.320 but by largely uncomprehending aides, who, in the perceptive words of Professor William 28 00:02:51.320 --> 00:02:57.200 Thomas, looked on his work with a certain resigned skepticism as if its faults were 29 00:02:57.200 --> 00:03:03.840 the result of eccentricities beyond the reach of criticism or remonstrance. 30 00:03:03.840 --> 00:03:10.440 As Thomas continues, the idea that he was surrounded by a band of eager disciples who drew from 31 00:03:10.440 --> 00:03:17.200 his system a searching critique of every aspect of contemporary society, which they were later 32 00:03:17.200 --> 00:03:25.480 to apply to various institutions in need of reform, is the product of later liberal myth-making. 33 00:03:25.480 --> 00:03:31.880 So far as I know, Bentham's circle is quite unlike that of any other great political thinker. 34 00:03:31.880 --> 00:03:37.560 It consisted not so much of men who found in his work a compelling explanation of the 35 00:03:37.560 --> 00:03:43.640 social world around them, and gathered about him to learn more of his thoughts, as of men 36 00:03:43.640 --> 00:03:49.040 caught in a sort of expectant bafflement at the progress of a work which they would have 37 00:03:49.040 --> 00:03:56.380 liked to help on to completion, but which remained maddeningly elusive and obscure. 38 00:03:56.380 --> 00:04:03.140 What Bentham needed desperately were sympathetic and candid editors of his work, but his relationship 39 00:04:03.140 --> 00:04:06.980 with his followers precluded that from happening. 40 00:04:06.980 --> 00:04:12.600 For this reason, adds Thomas, the steadily accumulating mass of manuscripts remained 41 00:04:12.600 --> 00:04:18.780 largely a terra incognita even to the intimate members of our circle. 42 00:04:18.780 --> 00:04:25.400 As a result, for example, such a major work in manuscript, of laws in general, astonishingly 43 00:04:25.400 --> 00:04:31.440 They remained unedited, let alone unpublished, until our own day. 44 00:04:31.440 --> 00:04:37.000 If anyone could have played this role, it was Bentham's outstanding follower, James 45 00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:42.220 Mill, whom we will deal with more fully below, chapter 3. 46 00:04:42.220 --> 00:04:47.880 In many ways, Mill had the capacity and personality to perform the task. 47 00:04:47.880 --> 00:04:50.200 But there were two fatal problems. 48 00:04:50.200 --> 00:04:57.560 First, Mill refused to abandon his own intellectual work in order to subordinate himself exclusively 49 00:04:57.560 --> 00:05:00.000 to aiding the master. 50 00:05:00.000 --> 00:05:06.560 As Thomas writes, sooner or later all Bentham's disciples faced the choice of absorption or 51 00:05:06.560 --> 00:05:08.360 independence. 52 00:05:08.360 --> 00:05:14.200 Though he was a devoted follower of Benthamite utilitarianism, Mill's personality was such 53 00:05:14.200 --> 00:05:18.560 that absorption for him was out of the question. 54 00:05:18.560 --> 00:05:25.800 Second, the slipshod and volatile Bentham desperately needed shaping up, and the brisk, 55 00:05:25.800 --> 00:05:32.200 systematic, didactic and hectoring James Mill was just the man to do the shaping. 56 00:05:32.200 --> 00:05:39.260 But unsurprisingly, Bentham, the great man, was not about to be shaped up by anyone. 57 00:05:39.260 --> 00:05:45.080 The personality clash was too great for their relationship to be anything but arm's length, 58 00:05:45.080 --> 00:05:50.800 at the height of Mill's discipleship before Mill achieved economic independence from his 59 00:05:50.800 --> 00:05:52.200 wealthy patron. 60 00:05:52.200 --> 00:05:59.940 Thus, in exasperation, Mill wrote to a close mutual friend about Bentham, the pain he seems 61 00:05:59.940 --> 00:06:05.600 to feel at the very thought of being called upon to give his mind to the subject you can 62 00:06:05.600 --> 00:06:08.080 have but little conception of. 63 00:06:08.080 --> 00:06:14.160 At the same time, Bentham, even long afterwards, confided his lingering resentment of Mill 64 00:06:14.160 --> 00:06:18.080 to his last disciple, John Boehring. 65 00:06:18.080 --> 00:06:21.720 He will never willingly enter into discourse with me. 66 00:06:21.720 --> 00:06:23.700 When he differs, he is silent. 67 00:06:23.700 --> 00:06:31.260 He expects to subdue everybody by his domineering tone, to convince everybody by his positiveness. 68 00:06:31.260 --> 00:06:35.160 His manner of speaking is oppressive and overbearing. 69 00:06:35.160 --> 00:06:41.120 There is no better way to summarize the personality clash between them. 70 00:06:41.120 --> 00:06:47.380 Bentham's first published work, The Fragment on Government, 1776, gained young Bentham 71 00:06:47.380 --> 00:06:53.840 an entrée into leading political circles, particularly the friends of Lord Shelburne. 72 00:06:53.840 --> 00:06:59.580 These included Whig politicians like Lord Camden and William Pitt the Younger, and two 73 00:06:59.580 --> 00:07:05.420 men who were quickly to become Bentham's close friends and earliest disciples, the 74 00:07:05.420 --> 00:07:10.180 and even Etienne Dumont and Sir Samuel Romilly. 75 00:07:10.180 --> 00:07:16.620 Dumont was to be the main carrier of Benthamite doctrine to the continent of Europe. 76 00:07:16.620 --> 00:07:22.180 While utilitarian political and legal reform continued to be his main interest throughout 77 00:07:22.180 --> 00:07:30.460 his life, Bentham read and absorbed the wealth of nations in the late 1770s or early 1780s, 78 00:07:30.460 --> 00:07:33.860 quickly becoming a devoted disciple. 79 00:07:33.860 --> 00:07:39.700 Although Bentham praised practically no other author, he habitually referred to Adam Smith 80 00:07:39.700 --> 00:07:47.660 as the father of political economy, a great master, and a writer of consummate genius. 81 00:07:47.660 --> 00:07:54.260 In the early 1780s, Bentham's brother Samuel, a wealthy engineer, was engaged by the Empress 82 00:07:54.260 --> 00:08:01.500 Catherine the Great to organize various industrial projects. Samuel invited Jeremy to stay with 83 00:08:01.500 --> 00:08:08.280 with him in Russia, which he did from the mid-1780s to the end of 1787, with a view 84 00:08:08.280 --> 00:08:14.900 to presenting an all-comprehensive legal code to enable that despot to govern her realm 85 00:08:14.900 --> 00:08:21.820 more efficiently. Bentham characteristically never completed the code for Catherine, but 86 00:08:21.820 --> 00:08:28.820 while in Russia he learned, falsely as it turned out, that William Pitt, now Prime Minister, 87 00:08:28.820 --> 00:08:36.020 is preparing to urge a reduction in the legal maximum rate of interest from 5 to 4 percent. 88 00:08:36.020 --> 00:08:43.380 Agitated, Bentham wrote and soon published in 1787 his first and only well-known work 89 00:08:43.380 --> 00:08:49.620 on economics, the scintillating and hard-hitting defense of usury. 90 00:08:49.620 --> 00:08:55.940 Trying to bring more consistency into Smithian laissez-faire, Bentham argued against all usury 91 00:08:55.940 --> 00:08:57.940 laws whatever. 92 00:08:57.940 --> 00:09:03.420 He grounded his views squarely on the concept of freedom of contract, declaring that no 93 00:09:03.420 --> 00:09:09.740 man of ripe ears and of sound mind, acting freely and with his eyes open, ought to be 94 00:09:09.740 --> 00:09:16.100 hindered from making such a bargain in the way of obtaining money as he thinks fit. 95 00:09:16.100 --> 00:09:20.960 The presumption in any situation is for freedom of contract. 96 00:09:20.960 --> 00:09:27.900 You who fetter contracts, you who lay restraints on the liberty of man, it is for you to assume 97 00:09:27.900 --> 00:09:39.140 How can usury be a crime when it is exchanged by mutual consent of lender and borrower? 98 00:09:39.140 --> 00:09:47.020 Usury, Bentham concludes, if it must be an offense, is an offense committed with consent, 99 00:09:47.020 --> 00:09:53.220 that is, with the consent of the party supposed to be injured, cannot merit a place in the 100 00:09:53.220 --> 00:10:00.220 catalog of offenses, unless the consent were either unfairly obtained or unfreely. 101 00:10:00.220 --> 00:10:06.740 In the first case it coincides with defraudment, in the other with extortion. 102 00:10:06.740 --> 00:10:13.860 In his appendix to the defense of usury, Bentham restates and sharpens the Torgot-Smith defense 103 00:10:13.860 --> 00:10:16.220 of savings. 104 00:10:16.220 --> 00:10:19.780 Savings results in capital accumulation. 105 00:10:19.780 --> 00:10:26.680 Whatever saves money, as the phrase is, adds proportionately to the general mass of capital. 106 00:10:26.680 --> 00:10:33.660 The world can augment its capital in only one way, that is, by parsimony. 107 00:10:33.660 --> 00:10:39.980 This insight leads to the principle that capital limits trade, that the extent of trade or 108 00:10:39.980 --> 00:10:45.460 production is limited by the amount of capital that has been accumulated. 109 00:10:45.460 --> 00:10:52.260 In short, the trade of every nation is limited by the quantity of capital. 110 00:10:52.260 --> 00:10:59.060 The laissez-faire implication, as Bentham saw, is that government action or spending cannot 111 00:10:59.060 --> 00:11:03.260 increase the total amount of capital in society. 112 00:11:03.260 --> 00:11:09.220 It can only divert capital from free market to less productive uses. 113 00:11:09.220 --> 00:11:29.220 As a result, no regulations nor any efforts whatsoever, either on the part of subjects or governors, can raise the quantity of wealth produced during a given period to an amount beyond what the productive powers of the quantity of capital in hand are capable of producing. 114 00:11:29.220 --> 00:11:46.220 Defense of usury had a great impact in Britain and elsewhere. Dr. Thomas Reid, the distinguished Scottish common-sense philosopher who succeeded Adam Smith to the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, strongly endorsed the book. 115 00:11:46.220 --> 00:11:52.980 Book, the great Comte de Mirabeau, the leading force in the early stages of the French Revolution, 116 00:11:52.980 --> 00:11:55.860 had the work translated into French. 117 00:11:55.860 --> 00:12:00.840 And in the United States, the tract went into several editions, and it inspired several 118 00:12:00.840 --> 00:12:05.220 states to repeal their laws against usury. 119 00:12:05.220 --> 00:12:10.460 In the course of the defense, there are hints of valuable analysis. 120 00:12:10.460 --> 00:12:16.620 Banking is defined as exchanging present money for future, and other intimations of the time 121 00:12:16.620 --> 00:12:24.200 preference or waiting as a key to saving include such phrases as the saver having the resolution 122 00:12:24.200 --> 00:12:28.400 to sacrifice the present to the future. 123 00:12:28.400 --> 00:12:34.240 Bentham also intimates that part of interest charged includes a risk premium, a kind of 124 00:12:34.240 --> 00:12:39.940 insurance premium for the risk of loss incurred by the lender. 125 00:12:39.940 --> 00:12:46.440 During the 1780s, Bentham was also writing his Essay on Reward, published only a half 126 00:12:46.440 --> 00:12:50.880 century later as The Rationale of Reward. 127 00:12:50.880 --> 00:12:58.040 In it, Bentham expounded enthusiastically on competition as rewards and hailed the advantages 128 00:12:58.040 --> 00:13:02.680 resulting from the most unlimited freedom of competition. 129 00:13:02.680 --> 00:13:08.380 It was on this principle of free competition and opposition to governmental monopolies 130 00:13:08.380 --> 00:13:14.800 that the father of political economy had, in Bentham's overenthusiastic words, created 131 00:13:14.800 --> 00:13:17.440 a new science. 132 00:13:17.440 --> 00:13:25.020 In his next economic work, the unpublished Manual of Political Economy, 1795, Bentham 133 00:13:25.020 --> 00:13:30.720 continued the laissez-faire theme of no more trade than capital. 134 00:13:30.720 --> 00:13:37.060 The government, he emphasized, can only divert investment funds from the private sector. 135 00:13:37.060 --> 00:13:43.860 cannot raise the total level of investment. Whatever is given to any one branch is so 136 00:13:43.860 --> 00:13:50.360 much taken from the rest. Every statesman who thinks by regulation to increase the sum 137 00:13:50.360 --> 00:13:57.340 of trade is the child whose eye is bigger than his belly. Towards the end of the same 138 00:13:57.340 --> 00:14:03.860 work, however, a cloud no bigger than a man's hand appeared that would eventually take charge 139 00:14:03.860 --> 00:14:07.060 of Bentham's Economic Analysis. 140 00:14:07.060 --> 00:14:12.500 For Bentham began his rapid slide down the inflationist chute. 141 00:14:12.500 --> 00:14:17.980 In a kind of appendix to the work, he states that government paper money could increase 142 00:14:17.980 --> 00:14:22.980 capital if resources were not fully employed. 143 00:14:22.980 --> 00:14:29.060 There is no analysis, as of course there never is in the inflationist canon, of why these 144 00:14:29.060 --> 00:14:32.820 resources were unemployed in the first place. 145 00:14:32.820 --> 00:14:36.980 That is, why their owners withheld them from use. 146 00:14:36.980 --> 00:14:45.260 The answer must be because the resource owner demanded an excessively high price or wage. 147 00:14:45.260 --> 00:14:52.760 Inflation is therefore a means of fooling resource owners into lowering their real demands. 148 00:14:52.760 --> 00:14:58.940 It did not take long for Jeremy Bentham to slide down the slippery slope from Adam Smith 149 00:14:58.940 --> 00:15:04.940 and what would be Say's law, back to mercantilism and inflationism. 150 00:15:04.940 --> 00:15:10.860 Shortly afterwards, in an unpublished proposal for the circulation of a new species of paper 151 00:15:10.860 --> 00:15:19.380 currency, 1796, Bentham happily wedded his projecting and constructivist spirit to his 152 00:15:19.380 --> 00:15:22.100 newfound inflationism. 153 00:15:22.100 --> 00:15:27.540 Instead of floating bonds and paying interest on them, the government, he proposed, should 154 00:15:27.540 --> 00:15:32.420 would simply monopolize all issue of paper notes in the kingdom. 155 00:15:32.420 --> 00:15:38.860 It could then issue the notes, preferably non-interest bearing ad libitum, and save itself 156 00:15:38.860 --> 00:15:41.100 the interest. 157 00:15:41.100 --> 00:15:46.260 Bentham was scarcely at his best answering the question of what limit there might be 158 00:15:46.260 --> 00:15:48.980 to this government paper issue. 159 00:15:48.980 --> 00:15:54.980 The limit, he answered, would obviously be the amount of paper currency in the country. 160 00:15:54.980 --> 00:16:00.180 Bentham's modern editor is properly scornful of this patent claptrap. 161 00:16:00.180 --> 00:16:07.220 It is like saying, the sky's the limit, when we do not know how high the sky may be. 162 00:16:07.220 --> 00:16:12.820 In his later writings on the subject, Bentham searched for some limits to paper issue, if 163 00:16:12.820 --> 00:16:19.800 unsuccessfully, but his commitment to a broadly inflationist course deepened further. 164 00:16:19.800 --> 00:16:26.960 In his unfinished Circulating Annuities, 1800, he developed his government paper scheme further 165 00:16:26.960 --> 00:16:31.040 and hailed the serviceability of inflation in wartime. 166 00:16:31.040 --> 00:16:38.080 Indeed, Bentham makes an all-out assault on the Turgot-Smith-Say insights and actually 167 00:16:38.080 --> 00:16:44.560 declares that employment of labor is directly proportional to the quantity of money. 168 00:16:44.560 --> 00:16:50.260 No addition is ever made to the quantity of labor in any place, but by an addition made 169 00:16:50.260 --> 00:16:53.620 to the quantity of money in that place. 170 00:16:53.620 --> 00:17:00.300 In this point of view, then, money, it should seem, is the cause, and the cause sine qua 171 00:17:00.300 --> 00:17:04.540 non, of labor and general wealth. 172 00:17:04.540 --> 00:17:06.940 Quantity of money is all. 173 00:17:06.940 --> 00:17:09.560 So much for Smithian doctrine. 174 00:17:09.560 --> 00:17:16.280 In fact, Bentham went further in circulating annuities, heaping scorn on his alleged mentor 175 00:17:16.280 --> 00:17:22.560 for denouncing the mercantilist preoccupation with the states piling up of gold and silver 176 00:17:22.560 --> 00:17:25.800 and with a favorable balance of trade. 177 00:17:25.800 --> 00:17:32.040 There is no absurdity, averred Bentham, in the exaltation testified by public men at 178 00:17:32.040 --> 00:17:39.440 observing how great a degree of what is called the balance of trade is in favor of this country. 179 00:17:39.440 --> 00:17:45.980 Seduced by the pride of discovery, Adam Smith, by taking his words from the kitchen, has 180 00:17:45.980 --> 00:17:53.600 attempted to throw an ill-grounded ridicule on the preference given to gold and silver. 181 00:17:53.600 --> 00:17:58.600 After once again calling for the elimination of bank paper for the benefit of a government 182 00:17:58.600 --> 00:18:06.900 monopoly of paper issue in the fragmentary Paper Mischief Exposed, 1801, Bentham reached 183 00:18:06.900 --> 00:18:13.460 The Acme of Inflationism in his The True Alarm, 1801. 184 00:18:13.460 --> 00:18:19.500 In this unpublished work, Bentham not only continued the full employment motif, but also 185 00:18:19.500 --> 00:18:25.820 grumbled about the allegedly dire effects of hoarding, of money saved from consumption 186 00:18:25.820 --> 00:18:29.420 that went into hoards instead of investment. 187 00:18:29.420 --> 00:18:35.460 In that case, disaster, a fall in prices, profits and production. 188 00:18:35.460 --> 00:18:41.660 Nowhere does Bentham recognize that hoarding and a general fall in prices also means a 189 00:18:41.660 --> 00:18:49.500 fall in costs, and no necessary reduction in investment or production. Indeed, Bentham 190 00:18:49.500 --> 00:18:55.700 worked around to the Mandeville fallacy about the beneficial and uniquely energizing effects 191 00:18:55.700 --> 00:19:02.740 of luxurious spending. In the mercantilist and proto-Keynesian manner, saving is evil 192 00:19:02.740 --> 00:19:07.740 Capital hoarding, while luxury consumption animates production. 193 00:19:07.740 --> 00:19:15.460 How capital can be maintained, much less increased, without saving, is not explained in this bizarre 194 00:19:15.460 --> 00:19:17.500 model. 195 00:19:17.500 --> 00:19:24.560 James Mill and David Ricardo have been considered loyal Benthamites, and this they were in utilitarian 196 00:19:24.560 --> 00:19:28.900 philosophy and in a belief in political democracy. 197 00:19:28.900 --> 00:19:35.140 In economics, however, it was a far different story, and Mill and Ricardo, sound as a rock 198 00:19:35.140 --> 00:19:41.540 on Say's law and the Turgot-Smith analysis, were firm in successfully discouraging the 199 00:19:41.540 --> 00:19:45.200 publication of the true alarm. 200 00:19:45.200 --> 00:19:51.980 Ricardo scoffed at almost all of later Benthamite economics, and in the case of money and production, 201 00:19:51.980 --> 00:19:54.120 asked the proper questions. 202 00:19:54.120 --> 00:20:00.000 Why should the mere increase of money have any other effect than to lower its value? 203 00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:04.520 How would it cause any increase in the production of commodities? 204 00:20:04.520 --> 00:20:10.880 Money cannot call forth goods, but goods can call forth money. 205 00:20:10.880 --> 00:20:18.900 Bentham's major theme, that money is the cause of riches, Ricardo rejected firmly and flatly. 206 00:20:18.900 --> 00:20:25.740 In his penultimate work of importance on economics, Jeremy Bentham came full circle. He had launched 207 00:20:25.740 --> 00:20:32.900 the economic part of his career with a hard-hitting attack on usury laws. He ended it by defending 208 00:20:32.900 --> 00:20:41.180 maximum price control on bread. Why? Because the mass of the public would favor cheap bread, 209 00:20:41.180 --> 00:20:47.220 assuredly so, and so there would then be a rational and determinate standard for the 210 00:20:47.220 --> 00:20:53.620 The Good and Moral Price of Bread, a standard which, apparently, free contract and free 211 00:20:53.620 --> 00:20:56.500 markets cannot set. 212 00:20:56.500 --> 00:20:59.340 What would such a standard be? 213 00:20:59.340 --> 00:21:06.100 Showing that for Bentham, his ad hoc utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis had totally driven 214 00:21:06.100 --> 00:21:11.740 any sound economics out of his purview, he answered that it would have to be empirical 215 00:21:11.740 --> 00:21:13.980 and ad hoc. 216 00:21:13.980 --> 00:21:19.460 Directing economic logic to the wins, Bentham maintained that the authorities should set 217 00:21:19.460 --> 00:21:25.500 a moderate maximum price, which would weigh the costs and benefits, the advantages and 218 00:21:25.500 --> 00:21:29.540 disadvantages of each possible price. 219 00:21:29.540 --> 00:21:33.060 And Bentham assured his readers of his moderation. 220 00:21:33.060 --> 00:21:38.880 He did not mean it, his proposal, as a whip or scorpion for the punishment of the growers 221 00:21:38.880 --> 00:21:41.380 or vendors of corn. 222 00:21:41.380 --> 00:21:45.660 But that would be the inevitable result. 223 00:21:45.660 --> 00:21:49.900 Ad hoc empiricism was now rampant in Bentham. 224 00:21:49.900 --> 00:21:55.660 Admitting that all previous attempts at maximum price control were disasters, like any later 225 00:21:55.660 --> 00:22:02.500 institutionalist or historicist, Bentham denied any relevance, since the circumstances of 226 00:22:02.500 --> 00:22:07.400 each particular time and place are necessarily different. 227 00:22:07.400 --> 00:22:15.480 In short, Bentham denied economics altogether, that is, denied the possibility of laws abstracting 228 00:22:15.480 --> 00:22:23.160 from particular circumstances and applying to all exchanges or actions everywhere. 229 00:22:23.160 --> 00:22:28.480 In arguing against the opponents of price control, Bentham often used reasoning that 230 00:22:28.480 --> 00:22:31.240 was tortuous and even absurd. 231 00:22:31.240 --> 00:22:37.120 For example, to the charge that maximum price control would lead to attempted consumption 232 00:22:37.120 --> 00:22:43.680 exceeding supply, one of the greatest problems with price control, Bentham insisted that 233 00:22:43.680 --> 00:22:49.720 this could not happen in Britain, where the Poor Law ensured welfare payment to the poor 234 00:22:49.720 --> 00:22:56.720 with an increase in the price of bread. The opinion that, at some time or other, the demand 235 00:22:56.720 --> 00:23:03.680 The curve can be vertical and not falling is in every century the hallmark of an economic 236 00:23:03.680 --> 00:23:08.240 ignoramus, and Bentham now passed that test. 237 00:23:08.240 --> 00:23:15.160 For centuries, writers and theorists knew that demand increased as price fell, and Bentham 238 00:23:15.160 --> 00:23:22.040 was now writing as if economics had never existed and could never exist. 239 00:23:22.040 --> 00:23:28.720 Since consistency was the realm of despised deductive logic, Bentham denied that his opposition 240 00:23:28.720 --> 00:23:35.400 to usury laws had any relation to his defense of price control on bread. 241 00:23:35.400 --> 00:23:41.320 But while he still maintained that his earlier analysis had been correct, he now offered 242 00:23:41.320 --> 00:23:43.380 a crucial revision. 243 00:23:43.380 --> 00:23:48.560 He had overlooked that a notable advantage of a usury law is that the government can 244 00:23:48.560 --> 00:23:56.080 and then borrow more cheaply, at the expense, of course, of squeezing out marginal private borrowers. 245 00:23:56.080 --> 00:24:02.080 And he went on to admit that he now found this advantage decisive, so that now he would 246 00:24:02.080 --> 00:24:05.920 place usury laws on the governmental agenda. 247 00:24:05.920 --> 00:24:12.200 I should expect to find the advantages of it in this respect predominant over its disadvantages 248 00:24:12.200 --> 00:24:14.400 in all others. 249 00:24:14.400 --> 00:24:20.720 In short, Bentham, the alleged individualist and exponent of laissez-faire, finds that 250 00:24:20.720 --> 00:24:27.240 advantage to government outweighs all private disadvantage. 251 00:24:27.240 --> 00:24:32.700 Again treating his earlier views on usury, Bentham denied that he had ever believed in 252 00:24:32.700 --> 00:24:39.260 any self-adjusting and equilibrating tendencies of the market, or that interest rates properly 253 00:24:39.260 --> 00:24:42.340 adjust saving and investment. 254 00:24:42.340 --> 00:24:48.620 He went on in a revealing diatribe against laissez-faire and natural rights to demonstrate 255 00:24:48.620 --> 00:24:56.060 to one and all the incompatibility between utilitarianism on the one hand and laissez-faire 256 00:24:56.060 --> 00:24:59.380 or property rights on the other. 257 00:24:59.380 --> 00:25:07.340 I have not, I never had nor shall have, any horror, sentimental or anarchical of the hand 258 00:25:07.340 --> 00:25:08.780 of government. 259 00:25:08.780 --> 00:25:14.140 I leave it to Adam Smith and the champions of the rights of man to talk of invasions 260 00:25:14.140 --> 00:25:20.540 of natural liberty and to give as a special argument against this or that law an argument 261 00:25:20.540 --> 00:25:25.780 the effect of which would be to put a negative upon all laws. 262 00:25:25.780 --> 00:25:31.620 The interference of government, as often as in my jumbled view of the matter the smallest 263 00:25:31.620 --> 00:25:37.820 balance on the side of advantage is the result, is an event I witness with altogether as much 264 00:25:37.820 --> 00:25:52.460 One wonders by what mystical standard the scientific Bentham managed to weigh the advantages 265 00:25:52.460 --> 00:25:57.740 and disadvantages of every particular law. 266 00:25:57.740 --> 00:26:04.180 Three years later, in 1804, Jeremy Bentham lost interest in economics, a fact for which 267 00:26:04.180 --> 00:26:06.980 we must be forever grateful. 268 00:26:06.980 --> 00:26:12.980 It is only unfortunate that this waning of zeal had not occurred a half decade before. 269 00:26:12.980 --> 00:26:18.820 The case of Jeremy Bentham, however, should be instructive to that host of economists that 270 00:26:18.820 --> 00:26:25.180 attempt to weld utilitarian philosophy with free market economics. 271 00:26:25.180 --> 00:26:31.080 One would think that the master of utilitarianism would have contributed to utility analysis 272 00:26:31.080 --> 00:26:32.900 in Economics. 273 00:26:32.900 --> 00:26:40.260 But oddly enough, Bentham proved to be interested only in the macro-realms of economic thought. 274 00:26:40.260 --> 00:26:47.800 The only exception came in the largely unfortunate True Alarm, 1801, in which Bentham not only 275 00:26:47.800 --> 00:26:54.840 declared that all value is founded on utility, but also enters into a cogent critique of 276 00:26:54.840 --> 00:26:58.080 Adam Smith's alleged value paradox. 277 00:26:58.080 --> 00:27:10.080 Water, Bentham noted, can and does have economic value, while diamonds do have value in use as a foundation of their economic value. 278 00:27:10.080 --> 00:27:17.080 Continuing on, Bentham approaches the marginalist refutation of the value paradox. 279 00:27:17.080 --> 00:27:27.080 The reason why water is not found to have any value with a view to exchange is that it is equally devoid of value with a view to use. 280 00:27:27.080 --> 00:27:34.040 If the whole quantity required is available, the surplus has no kind of value. 281 00:27:34.040 --> 00:27:38.680 It would be the same in the case of wine, grain and everything else. 282 00:27:38.680 --> 00:27:45.240 Water, furnished as it is by nature without any human exertion, is more likely to be found 283 00:27:45.240 --> 00:27:49.040 in that abundance which renders it superfluous. 284 00:27:49.040 --> 00:27:54.640 But there are many circumstances in which it has a value in exchange superior to that 285 00:27:54.640 --> 00:28:02.560 of Wine 2. Personal Utilitarianism 286 00:28:02.560 --> 00:28:08.320 As we have seen, Jeremy Bentham's strictly economic views, especially when he slid back 287 00:28:08.320 --> 00:28:15.360 to mercantilism, had no impact on economic thought, even upon his own philosophic disciples 288 00:28:15.360 --> 00:28:22.560 such as James Mill and Ricardo. But his philosophic views, introduced into economics by these 289 00:28:22.560 --> 00:28:28.560 by these same disciples left an unfortunate and permanent impact on economic thought. 290 00:28:28.560 --> 00:28:33.560 They provided economics with its underlying and dominant social philosophy, 291 00:28:33.560 --> 00:28:40.560 and that dominance would be no less powerful for being generally implicit and unexamined. 292 00:28:40.560 --> 00:28:46.560 Utilitarianism provided economists with the ability to square the circle, 293 00:28:46.560 --> 00:28:51.560 to allow them to make pronouncements and take firm positions on public policy, 294 00:28:51.560 --> 00:28:59.520 History, while still pretending to be hard-headed, scientific and therefore value-free. 295 00:28:59.520 --> 00:29:05.860 As the nineteenth century proceeded and economics began to become a separate profession, a guild 296 00:29:05.860 --> 00:29:11.960 with its own code and practices, it became possessed of an overwhelming desire to ape 297 00:29:11.960 --> 00:29:17.460 the success and the prestige of the hard physical sciences. 298 00:29:17.460 --> 00:29:23.620 But scientists are supposed to be objective, disinterested, unbiased in their scientific 299 00:29:23.620 --> 00:29:24.960 work. 300 00:29:24.960 --> 00:29:31.580 It was therefore assumed that for economists to espouse moral principles or political philosophy 301 00:29:31.580 --> 00:29:38.940 was somehow introducing the virus of bias, prejudice and an unscientific attitude into 302 00:29:38.940 --> 00:29:41.880 the discipline of economics. 303 00:29:41.880 --> 00:29:47.820 This attitude of crude imitation of the physical sciences ignored the fact that people and 304 00:29:47.820 --> 00:29:51.840 inanimate objects are crucially different. 305 00:29:51.840 --> 00:29:58.240 Stones or atoms don't have values or make choices, whereas people inherently evaluate 306 00:29:58.240 --> 00:29:59.680 and choose. 307 00:29:59.680 --> 00:30:05.760 Still, it would be perfectly possible for economists to confine themselves to analyzing 308 00:30:05.760 --> 00:30:14.040 and the consequences of such values and choices, provided they took no stand on public policy. 309 00:30:14.040 --> 00:30:17.480 But economists burn to take such stands. 310 00:30:17.480 --> 00:30:23.000 In fact, interest in policy is generally the main motivation for embarking on a study of 311 00:30:23.000 --> 00:30:25.600 economics in the first place. 312 00:30:25.600 --> 00:30:33.600 And advocating policy, saying that the government should or should not do A, B or C, is ipso 313 00:30:33.600 --> 00:30:40.560 So facto, taking a value position and an implicitly ethical one to boot. 314 00:30:40.560 --> 00:30:46.080 There is no way of getting around this fact, and the best that can be done is to make such 315 00:30:46.080 --> 00:30:52.800 ethics a rational inquiry of what is best for man in accordance with his nature. 316 00:30:52.800 --> 00:31:01.680 But the pursuit of value-free science precluded that path, and so economists, by adopting utilitarianism, 317 00:31:01.680 --> 00:31:08.120 were able to pretend or to delude themselves that they were being strictly scientific while 318 00:31:08.120 --> 00:31:14.600 smuggling unanalyzed and shaky ethical notions into economics. 319 00:31:14.600 --> 00:31:21.400 In that way, economics embraced the worst of both worlds, implicitly smuggling in fallacy 320 00:31:21.400 --> 00:31:26.080 and bias in the name of hard-nosed value freedom. 321 00:31:26.080 --> 00:31:31.660 The Benthamite infection of economics with the bacillus of utilitarianism has never been 322 00:31:31.660 --> 00:31:37.660 have been cured, and remains as rampant and as predominant as ever. 323 00:31:37.660 --> 00:31:46.660 Utilitarianism consists in two fundamental parts, personal utilitarianism and social utilitarianism, 324 00:31:46.660 --> 00:31:49.660 the latter being built upon the former. 325 00:31:49.660 --> 00:31:56.660 Each is fallacious and pernicious, but social utilitarianism, which we are more interested in here, 326 00:31:56.660 --> 00:32:03.860 adds many fallacies and would be unsound even if personal utilitarianism were to be upheld. 327 00:32:05.460 --> 00:32:11.220 Personal utilitarianism, as launched by David Hume in the mid-18th century, 328 00:32:11.220 --> 00:32:18.820 assumes that each individual is governed only by the desire to satisfy his emotions, his passions, 329 00:32:18.820 --> 00:32:25.060 and that these emotions of happiness or unhappiness are primary and unanalyzable 330 00:32:25.060 --> 00:32:33.540 The only function of man's reason is use as a means to show someone how to arrive at his 331 00:32:33.540 --> 00:32:42.100 goals. There is no function for reason in setting man's goals themselves. Reason, for Hume and for 332 00:32:42.100 --> 00:32:50.300 later utilitarians, is only a handmaiden, a slave to the passions. There is no room then for natural 333 00:32:50.300 --> 00:32:54.860 law to establish any ethic for mankind. 334 00:32:54.860 --> 00:33:00.380 But what then is to be done about the fact that most people decide about their ends by 335 00:33:00.380 --> 00:33:07.860 ethical principles, which cannot be considered reducible to an original personal emotion? 336 00:33:07.860 --> 00:33:13.820 Still more embarrassing for utilitarianism is the obvious fact that emotion is often 337 00:33:13.820 --> 00:33:21.200 a handmaiden of such principles, and is patently not an ultimate given, but rather determined 338 00:33:21.200 --> 00:33:24.100 by what happens to such principles. 339 00:33:24.100 --> 00:33:30.380 Thus, someone who fervently adopts a certain ethical or political philosophy will feel 340 00:33:30.380 --> 00:33:38.740 happy whenever such philosophy succeeds in the world, and unhappy when it meets a setback. 341 00:33:38.740 --> 00:33:44.980 are then a handmaiden to principles instead of the other way round. 342 00:33:44.980 --> 00:33:51.900 In grappling with such anomalies, utilitarianism, priding itself on being anti-mystical and 343 00:33:51.900 --> 00:33:58.860 scientific, has to go against the facts and introduce mystification of its own. 344 00:33:58.860 --> 00:34:05.080 For it then has to say either that people only think they have adopted governing ethical 345 00:34:05.080 --> 00:34:12.680 Principles, and or that they should abandon such principles and cleave only to unanalyzed 346 00:34:12.680 --> 00:34:14.400 feelings. 347 00:34:14.400 --> 00:34:21.120 In short, utilitarianism has either to fly in the face of facts obvious to everyone, 348 00:34:21.120 --> 00:34:29.280 a methodology that is surely blatantly unscientific, and or to adopt an unanalyzed ethical view 349 00:34:29.280 --> 00:34:34.640 of its own in denunciation of all other ethical views. 350 00:34:34.640 --> 00:34:42.440 But this is mystical, value-laden and self-refuting of its own anti-ethical doctrine, or rather 351 00:34:42.440 --> 00:34:48.400 of any ethical doctrine that is not a slave to unanalyzed passions. 352 00:34:48.400 --> 00:34:56.120 In either case, utilitarianism is self-refuting in violating its own axiom of not going beyond 353 00:34:56.120 --> 00:34:59.160 given emotions and valuations. 354 00:34:59.160 --> 00:35:05.680 Furthermore, it is common human experience, once again, that subjective desires are not 355 00:35:05.680 --> 00:35:09.440 absolute, given, and unchanging. 356 00:35:09.440 --> 00:35:16.200 They are not hermetically sealed off from persuasion, whether rational or otherwise. 357 00:35:16.200 --> 00:35:21.760 One's own experience and the arguments of others can and do persuade people to change 358 00:35:21.760 --> 00:35:23.560 their values. 359 00:35:23.560 --> 00:35:31.040 But how could that be if all individual desires and valuations are pure givens, and therefore 360 00:35:31.040 --> 00:35:37.040 not subject to alteration by the intersubjective persuasion of others? 361 00:35:37.040 --> 00:35:44.160 But if these desires are not givens, and are changeable by the persuasion of moral argument, 362 00:35:44.160 --> 00:35:50.520 it would then follow that, contrary to the assumptions of utilitarianism, supra-subjective 363 00:35:50.520 --> 00:35:58.560 ethical principles do exist that can be argued and can have an impact on others and on their 364 00:35:58.560 --> 00:36:01.840 valuations and goals. 365 00:36:01.840 --> 00:36:07.300 Jeremy Bentham added a further fallacy to the utilitarianism that had grown fashionable 366 00:36:07.300 --> 00:36:11.080 in Great Britain since the days of David Hume. 367 00:36:11.080 --> 00:36:17.720 More brutally, Bentham sought to reduce all human desires and values from the qualitative 368 00:36:17.720 --> 00:36:19.880 to the quantitative. 369 00:36:19.880 --> 00:36:26.720 All goals are to be reduced to quantity, and all seemingly different values, for example 370 00:36:26.720 --> 00:36:34.140 push-pin and poetry, are to be reduced to mere differences of quantity and degree. 371 00:36:34.140 --> 00:36:40.760 The drive to reduce quality drastically to quantity again appealed to the scientistic 372 00:36:40.760 --> 00:36:43.880 passion among economists. 373 00:36:43.880 --> 00:36:50.040 Quantity is uniformly the object of investigation in the hard physical sciences. 374 00:36:50.040 --> 00:36:56.800 So doesn't concern for quality in the study of human action connote mysticism and a sloppy 375 00:36:56.800 --> 00:36:59.640 unscientific attitude? 376 00:36:59.640 --> 00:37:06.400 But once again, economists forgot that quantity is precisely the proper concept for dealing 377 00:37:06.400 --> 00:37:13.120 with stones or atoms, for these entities do not possess consciousness, do not value and 378 00:37:13.120 --> 00:37:19.660 do not choose, therefore their movements can be and should be charted with quantitative 379 00:37:19.660 --> 00:37:21.380 precision. 380 00:37:21.380 --> 00:37:28.400 But individual human beings, on the contrary, are conscious and do adopt values and act 381 00:37:28.400 --> 00:37:29.880 on them. 382 00:37:29.880 --> 00:37:36.200 People are not unmotivated objects always describing a quantitative path. 383 00:37:36.200 --> 00:37:42.700 People are qualitative, that is, they respond to qualitative differences and they value 384 00:37:42.700 --> 00:37:45.740 You and Choose on that basis. 385 00:37:45.740 --> 00:37:52.180 To reduce quality to quantity, therefore, gravely distorts the actual nature of human 386 00:37:52.180 --> 00:37:59.740 beings and of human action, and by distorting reality, proves to be the reverse of the truly 387 00:37:59.740 --> 00:38:01.620 scientific. 388 00:38:01.620 --> 00:38:07.300 Jeremy Bentham's dubious contribution to personal utilitarian doctrine, in addition 389 00:38:07.300 --> 00:38:14.980 to being its best known propagator and popularizer, was to quantify and crudely reduce it still 390 00:38:14.980 --> 00:38:16.580 further. 391 00:38:16.580 --> 00:38:23.220 Trying to make the doctrine still more scientific, Bentham attempted to provide a scientific 392 00:38:23.220 --> 00:38:31.300 standard for such emotions as happiness and unhappiness, quantities of pleasure and pain. 393 00:38:31.300 --> 00:38:37.400 All vague notions of happiness and desire for Bentham could be reduced to quantities 394 00:38:37.400 --> 00:38:39.980 of pleasure and pain. 395 00:38:39.980 --> 00:38:43.100 Pleasure good, pain bad. 396 00:38:43.100 --> 00:38:48.820 Man therefore simply attempts to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. 397 00:38:48.820 --> 00:38:55.460 In that case, the individual and the scientist observing him can engage in a replicable calculus 398 00:38:55.460 --> 00:39:01.700 Analysis of Pleasure and Pain, what Bentham termed the philosophic calculus, that can 399 00:39:01.700 --> 00:39:07.980 be churned out to yield the proper result in counseling action or non-action in any 400 00:39:07.980 --> 00:39:10.660 given situation. 401 00:39:10.660 --> 00:39:19.180 Every man, then, can engage in what neo-Benthamite economists nowadays call a cost-benefit analysis. 402 00:39:19.180 --> 00:39:26.640 In whatever situation, he can gauge the benefits, units of pleasure, weigh it against the costs, 403 00:39:26.640 --> 00:39:31.620 units of pain, and see which outweighs the other. 404 00:39:31.620 --> 00:39:38.280 In a discussion which Professor John Plaminatz aptly says parodies reason, Bentham tries 405 00:39:38.280 --> 00:39:45.140 to give objective dimensions to pleasure and pain, so as to establish the scientific soundness 406 00:39:45.140 --> 00:39:48.660 of his philosophic calculus. 407 00:39:48.660 --> 00:39:57.660 These dimensions, Bentham asserts, are sevenfold—intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, 408 00:39:57.660 --> 00:40:00.660 purity and extent. 409 00:40:00.660 --> 00:40:06.600 Bentham claims that, at least conceptually, all these qualities can be measured and then 410 00:40:06.600 --> 00:40:14.780 multiplied together to yield the net resultant of pain or pleasure from any action. 411 00:40:14.780 --> 00:40:19.860 The theory to state Bentham's theory of seven dimensions should be enough to demonstrate 412 00:40:19.860 --> 00:40:21.860 its sheer folly. 413 00:40:21.860 --> 00:40:28.760 These emotions or sensations are qualitative and not quantitative, and none of these dimensions 414 00:40:28.760 --> 00:40:32.300 can be multiplied or weighted together. 415 00:40:32.300 --> 00:40:39.100 Again, Bentham raised an unfortunate scientistic analogy with physical objects. 416 00:40:39.100 --> 00:40:45.020 A three-dimensional object is one where each object is linear, and therefore where all 417 00:40:45.020 --> 00:40:51.580 these linear units can be multiplied together to yield units of volume. 418 00:40:51.580 --> 00:40:58.780 In human valuation, even with pleasure and pain, there is no unit common to each of their 419 00:40:58.780 --> 00:41:04.280 dimensions, and therefore there is no way to multiply such units. 420 00:41:04.280 --> 00:41:10.180 As Professor Plamenatz trenchantly points out, the truth is that even an omniscient 421 00:41:10.180 --> 00:41:16.680 god could not make such calculations, for the very notion of them is impossible. 422 00:41:16.680 --> 00:41:23.300 The intensity of a pleasure cannot be measured against its duration, nor its duration against 423 00:41:23.300 --> 00:41:31.560 its certainty or uncertainty, nor this latter property against its propinquity or remoteness. 424 00:41:31.560 --> 00:41:37.300 Claminatz adds that it is true, as Bentham states, that people often compare courses 425 00:41:37.300 --> 00:41:41.680 of action and choose those they find most desirable. 426 00:41:41.680 --> 00:41:48.300 But this simply means that they decide between alternatives and not that they engage in quantitative 427 00:41:48.300 --> 00:41:53.260 calculations of units of pleasure and pain. 428 00:41:53.260 --> 00:41:57.700 But one thing can be said for Bentham's grotesque doctrine. 429 00:41:57.700 --> 00:42:04.840 At least Bentham attempted, no matter how fallaciously, to ground his cost-benefit analysis on an 430 00:42:04.840 --> 00:42:09.140 objective standard of benefit and cost. 431 00:42:09.140 --> 00:42:14.940 Later utilitarian theorists, along with the body of economics, eventually abandoned the 432 00:42:14.940 --> 00:42:17.340 pleasure-paying calculus. 433 00:42:17.340 --> 00:42:24.760 But in doing so, they also abandoned any attempt to provide a standard to ground ad hoc costs 434 00:42:24.760 --> 00:42:31.600 and Benefits on some sort of intelligible basis. Since then, the appeal to cost and 435 00:42:31.600 --> 00:42:39.080 benefit, even on a personal level, has necessarily been vague, unsupported and arbitrary. 436 00:42:39.080 --> 00:42:46.040 Moreover, John Wilde eloquently contrasts utilitarian personal ethics with the ethics 437 00:42:46.040 --> 00:42:53.560 of natural law. Utilitarian ethics makes no clear distinction between raw appetite or 438 00:42:53.560 --> 00:43:01.680 for Interest, and that deliberate or voluntary desire which is fused with practical reason. 439 00:43:01.680 --> 00:43:08.120 Value or pleasure or satisfaction is the object of any interest, no matter how incidental 440 00:43:08.120 --> 00:43:11.320 or distorted it may be. 441 00:43:11.320 --> 00:43:16.920 Qualitative distinctions are simply ignored, and the good is conceived in a purely quantitative 442 00:43:16.920 --> 00:43:22.000 manner as the maximum of pleasure or satisfaction. 443 00:43:22.000 --> 00:43:26.180 Reason has nothing to do with the eliciting of sound appetite. 444 00:43:26.180 --> 00:43:29.800 One desire is no more legitimate than another. 445 00:43:29.800 --> 00:43:32.380 Reason is the slave of passion. 446 00:43:32.380 --> 00:43:38.460 Its whole function is exhausted in working out schemes for the maximizing of such interests 447 00:43:38.460 --> 00:43:44.180 as happen to arise through chance or other irrational causes. 448 00:43:44.180 --> 00:43:49.680 As against this, the theory of natural law maintains that there is a sharp distinction 449 00:43:49.680 --> 00:43:56.480 between raw appetites and deliberate desires elicited with the cooperation of practical 450 00:43:56.480 --> 00:43:57.960 reason. 451 00:43:57.960 --> 00:44:04.620 The good cannot be adequately conceived in a purely quantitative manner. 452 00:44:04.620 --> 00:44:11.200 Random interests which obstruct the full realization of essential common tendencies are condemned 453 00:44:11.200 --> 00:44:13.680 as anti-natural. 454 00:44:13.680 --> 00:44:21.360 When reason becomes the slave of passion, human freedom is lost, and human nature thwarted. 455 00:44:21.360 --> 00:44:27.520 The ethics of natural law sharply separates essential needs and rights from incidental 456 00:44:27.520 --> 00:44:28.860 rights. 457 00:44:28.860 --> 00:44:34.880 The good is not adequately understood as a mere maximizing of qualitatively indifferent 458 00:44:34.880 --> 00:44:41.320 purposes, but a maximizing of those tendencies which qualitatively conform to the nature 459 00:44:41.320 --> 00:44:48.120 of Man, and which arise through rational deliberation and free choice. 460 00:44:48.120 --> 00:44:54.040 There is a stable universal standard resting on something firmer than the shifting sands 461 00:44:54.040 --> 00:45:00.600 of appetite to which an appeal can be made even from the maximal agreements of a corrupt 462 00:45:00.600 --> 00:45:02.260 society. 463 00:45:02.260 --> 00:45:09.760 This standard is the law of nature which persists as long as man persists, which is therefore 464 00:45:09.760 --> 00:45:15.400 incorruptible and inalienable, and which justifies the right to revolution against 465 00:45:15.400 --> 00:45:18.820 a corrupt and tyrannical social order. 466 00:45:18.820 --> 00:45:25.660 Finally, in addition to the problems of the pleasure-pain calculus, personal utilitarianism 467 00:45:25.660 --> 00:45:32.720 counsels that actions be judged not on their nature, but on their consequences. 468 00:45:32.720 --> 00:45:40.480 In the non-Benthamite mere cost benefit rather than objective pleasure pain analysis, how 469 00:45:40.480 --> 00:45:45.080 is anyone to gauge the consequences of any action? 470 00:45:45.080 --> 00:45:51.440 And why is it considered easier, let alone more scientific, to judge consequences than 471 00:45:51.440 --> 00:45:55.200 to judge an act itself by its nature? 472 00:45:55.200 --> 00:46:01.640 Furthermore, it is often very difficult to figure out what the consequences of any contemplated 473 00:46:01.640 --> 00:46:09.760 Action will be. How are we to find the secondary, tertiary, etc. consequences, let alone the 474 00:46:09.760 --> 00:46:16.000 more immediate ones? We suspect that Herbert Spencer in his critique of utilitarianism 475 00:46:16.000 --> 00:46:22.440 was correct. It is often easier to know what is right than what is expedient.