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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2009
Utilitarianism has frequently been criticized for lacking psychological realism, but what this means and why it is thought to matter varies. This article distinguishes and examines three main relevant kinds of appeals to psychological realism: (a) A minimalist, self-avowedly metaethically neutral and empirically based ‘ought implies can’ approach, exemplified by Owen Flanagan. (b) Arguments from psychological costs and flourishing, exemplified by Michael Stocker and Bernard Williams. (c) ‘Thick’ psychological realism, exemplified by Elizabeth Anscombe, where a conception of human nature does not simply provide constraints on value theory, but forms the substantive basis on which it builds. The main challenge raised for utilitarianism turns out to be metaethical, not a matter of empirical psychology. The question is not so much whether utilitarianism can accommodate (putative) descriptive facts of human psychology as such, but what normative weight these facts should be given and why.
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13 This point is particularly emphasized by Michael Stocker – see ‘Agent and Other: Against Ethical Universalism’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 54 (1976), pp. 206–20, and ‘Emotional Identification, Closeness and Size: Some Contributions to Virtue Ethics’, Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader, ed. Daniel Statman (Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 118–28. Self–other asymmetry as an issue for moral theory is also discussed, with significantly less emphatic conclusions than Stocker's, in Slote, Michael, ‘Morality and Self–Other Asymmetry’, The Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984), pp. 179–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Splawn, Clay, ‘The Self–Other Asymmetry and Act-Utilitarianism’, Utilitas 13 (2001), pp. 323–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the prospects of incorporating the distinction within a utilitarian ethical system.
14 Flanagan, Varieties, p. 33.
15 Flanagan, Varieties, p. 51.
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17 Williams, Bernard, ‘Morality, the Peculiar Institution’, from Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London, 1985), pp. 174–96Google Scholar.
18 See especially Williams, Morality.
19 Slote, ‘Morality’.
20 ‘Agent and Other’.
21 ‘Defending Options’.
22 A commonly raised possibility, also considered by Stocker (‘Schizophrenia’, ‘Emotional Identification’), is that impartialist ethics that abstract from the ‘thicker’ psychology may be more suited to institutional contexts and decision-making for large populations, while more thickly psychologically realistic approaches might be suited to a level of personal interaction and individual life-choices. But this in turn raises a problem about how cleanly the levels can be kept distinct in practice.
23 This article builds on a presentation originally made to a panel on consequentialism for the Canadian Philosophical Association. Thanks are due to the panel members, the organizer and to the audience members for feedback and comments.