"Today" in Justice (Moral Reasoning 22), it was both a lecture and the first section! In the big lecture, the focus was on critiquing Bentham's utilitarianism, from the outside and the inside. I remember Professor Sandel's funny thing about how a research attempting to measure comparative utilities by survey found that living in Kansas was less desirable than having a tooth pulled. So obviously, practical issues with applying the principles of Bentham. Even John Stuart Mill, whose father attempted to apply Bentham to his education, ended up claiming that certain pleasures should factor higher in the utilitarian calculations.
JSM's bigger revision was to base individual rights on utility, a bold move that seems to go against the principle of aggregation. In the lecture it was also noted that Bentham was a penal reformer, on the basis (so say my notes) of the excessive pain inflicted on prisoners. My notes say something about liberty being taken into account, but I have no idea what I actually heard. I am surprised that more of a point wasn't made to compare the imputed social "gains" from incarceration to this pain factor. It doesn't seem a slam dunk that Bentham would support penal reform, but that's his major public policy contribution I think.
Professor Sandel chose utilitarianism as the starting point for the dialectic of the class, rather than starting chronologically with Aristotle. No question he wanted to feature the critiques, which go in so many directions (come from so many directions). At the same time, he wanted to give the broad consequentialist intuition its due. Over time, it's been clear to me just how tenacious utilitarianism remains as a metaphor, if not a method. I mean I still think all the time about whether I am doing enough good, in some kind of measurable way. That's the positive part. The negative of course being the treatment everywhere of people as commodities. Which I think I only started to get the language in this class.
The section, with (now Professor) Benor, had such a different feel. He talked about wanting us to learn how to read philosophical texts. It looks like he had two methodological points. One being to track certain concepts and the debates over them through different texts, being careful to identify each thinker's take on a term that might seem common among philosophers. So Bentham did not hold by the concept of "community" as something other than the aggregate of its members. (Benor asked the clarifying question: If there is no community, how is the idea of "general utility" even relevant?) Benor also instructed us to read a philosopher as though their picture of the world is true, rather than critique as we go along. Later on, I learned from my co-teacher Leslie Bazer to call this "the believing game", from Peter Elbow. I forgot that I had heard it long before.
This move is incredibly hard. It's gotten easier for me, I think because I have the time to do it when I am preparing to teach, and because I know there will be a time for the believing game and a time for critical reading. My students, even adults, have much more trouble doing this. It's really hard to hold a picture of someone else's thought when they seem wrong. And even more so when you feel strongly about a problem and the new idea you're being asked to consider seems not helpful or relevant even, and you want to talk to the merits of the issue. Just today in Torah class, we were talking about the idea of malchut, and my whole point was what are various approaches to making anything out of a problematic metaphor for the Divine. But a lot of the conversation was: Here's my solution, or here's why I don't even consider that metaphor worth considering.
Back to substance -- I don't know if I had thought much about what a "community" is before this discussion. I still wrestle with the concept, and even last week and this week have been back and forth with some people about it. Eager to see what I learned and thought later in the course. Bentham's position that you can't say the community is prior to the individual -- I don't like it at all as a normative proposition. I would like to believe it's not even descriptively correct. Do I have a refutation, at this point in my life? Not a universal one. I am working long-term on this idea of a podcast series called "I in We", which is about how the individual emerges as a distinct, sacred (if you will) entity out of prior groups and possibly communities.
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