• 1 MacAskill, William, ‘The Definition of Effective Altruism,’ in Effective Altruism: Philosophical Is (...)

1Utilitarianism today is often associated with Effective Altruism (EA). In general, utilitarianism can be understood as comprising 2 claims: (1) that happiness is the only intrinsic good and (2) that we should always try to do the thing that produces the most happiness. William MacAskill gives the following definition of EA: ‘Effective Altruism is: (i) the use of evidence and careful reasoning to work out how to maximize the good with a given unit of resources, tentatively understanding ‘the good’ in impartial welfarist terms, and (ii) the use of findings from (i) to try to improve the world.’1 It should be clear from the above definitions that utilitarianism is distinct from EA; one can subscribe to EA without thinking that happiness is the only intrinsic good or that we should always try to maximize happiness (given that ‘happiness’ need not be all that characterizes ‘the good’ in impartial welfarist terms). A more interesting question is whether the reverse is true; can one be a committed utilitarian and yet not subscribe to (or perhaps, even be critical of) EA? This question is one I will tackle in the course of this paper. This paper is divided into 3 parts. In part 1, I discuss Bentham’s view of pleasure, and explain how his utilitarianism is built on this view. In part 2, I consider a version of utilitarianism that bears a superficial resemblance to Bentham’s but diverges from his theory in crucial ways. I show that it is with this second version, rather than Bentham’s, that EA shares more in common. In part 3, I sketch out a Benthamite critique of EA.

• 2 Katz, Leonard D., ‘Pleasure,’ Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2016), https://plato.stanford.e (...)
• 3 Ryle, Gilbert, Dilemmas (Cambridge University Press, 1964), p. 58
• 4 Ryle, Gilbert, The Concept of Mind (Routledge, 2009), p. 93
• 5 Wallis, Wilson D., ‘What is Real Pleasure?,’ The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific (...)
• 6 Feldman, Fred, ‘The Good Life: A Defense of Attitudinal Hedonism,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological (...)

2Popular theories about pleasure can be broadly divided into 3 groups.2 First, theories that say pleasure is a quality some of our experiences have. According to these theories, for some experience to be pleasurable is simply for it to be accompanied by a certain feeling or sensation. Second, theories that say pleasure is a complex of dispositions. Gilbert Ryle, who pioneered this view, argues that ‘pleasure is not a sensation at all,’3 and that when we say a certain activity is pleasurable, we’re not saying that there is some feeling or sensation that this activity produces. Rather, what we mean is that the activity fulfils a certain propensity; that by engaging in said activity we are doing something we want to do.4 Wilson D. Wallis offers a related definition of ‘objective pleasure’ as ‘the doing of a thing for its own sake, or more accurately, that which, all things considered, should be done for its own sake.’5 Third, theories that say pleasure is a propositional attitude, like belief. In this vein, Fred Feldman characterizes pleasure as an attitude that ‘takes propositional entities (or states of affairs) as its object,’ ‘a mode of consciousness [that] takes its place among such attitudes as hope and fear, belief and doubt.’6 I shall refer to the first group of theories as the Simple View of pleasure (SV), the second group as the Dispositional View of pleasure (DV), and the third group as the Propositional View of pleasure (PV).

• 8 Shanafelt, Carrie, Uncommon Sense: Jeremy Bentham, Queer Aesthetics, and the Politics of Taste (Uni (...)

4Here, Bentham claims that pleasure is essentially subjective, and argues that we should not extrapolate from personal judgments about what we find pleasurable to judgments about what other people find (or should find) pleasurable. As Carrie Shanafelt writes, ‘In the case of physical pleasure…there is no common sense of what is private to one’s own body, and no common sense of private physical pleasure.’8 Combine this with his further claim that pleasure is the only thing that is intrinsically good, and we can see why Bentham might be wary of DV and PV. Conceiving of pleasure as either a complex of dispositions or a propositional attitude raises the obvious question ‘which dispositions/attitudes are good or best to have?’ The same question doesn’t arise for Bentham’s view, according to which pleasure itself is the only good. If pleasure is understood dispositionally, then there would need to be some way to say that ‘pleasure A is better than pleasure B’ if A and B represent mutually exclusive sets of dispositions that come into conflict. Much the same can be said for PV; if pleasure is a propositional attitude like belief, then some pleasures would be more appropriate than others, in the same way that some beliefs are more rational to have than other beliefs. Under DV and PV then, pleasure becomes something which is no longer essentially subjective or good-in-itself, but measurable against some extrinsic objective standard.

• 9 Bentham, Jeremy, Deontology, Together with A Table of the Springs of Action and Article on Utilitar (...)

5It is also important to note here that while Bentham most likely thought that pleasure always involved some sort of pleasant feeling, his talk of pleasure is not limited to sensory pleasure, as is often alleged, but also includes intellectual, emotional, social, and other pleasures. Indeed, his Table of the Springs of Action⁹ lists a total of fourteen classes of pleasures and pain.

• 10 Bentham, Jeremy, A Fragment on Government (Clarendon Press: 1891), p. 93
• 11 Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, eds. J.H Burns and H. (...)

6In A Fragment on Government, Bentham gives what is commonly regarded as the fundamental axiom of his utilitarian theory, stating that ‘it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’10 But why not just ‘the greatest happiness’ ? Taking ‘the greatest number’ as an additional factor in moral evaluation seems to conflict with statements made in his other works; for example, in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (IPML) Bentham writes that ‘it is for [pain and pleasure] alone to point out what we ought to do’ and that the ‘standard of right and wrong’ are ‘fastened to their throne.’11 Ben Eggleston’s discussion (and rejection) of ‘the greatest number’ as a utilitarian criterion for right action is representative of the way many moral philosophers today think of the phrase, and is worth quoting in full:

• 13 Bentham, J, IMPL, p. 38
• 14 Bentham, J, IPML, p. 39

8In Chapter 4 of IPML, Bentham tells us how to go about measuring pleasure and pain: for an individual, ‘the value of a pleasure or pain (considered by itself) will be greater or lesser according to (1) its intensity. (2) its duration. (3) its certainty or uncertainty. (4) its nearness or remoteness.’13 To determine the value of an act for a community, Bentham tells us to take one person from those ‘whose interests seem to be most immediately affected by the act’ and ‘sum up the values of all the pleasures [that the act is likely to produce] on one side and of all the pains on the other. If the balance is on the side of pleasure, that is the over-all good tendency of the act to the interests of that person; if on the side of pain, its over-all bad tendency.’14 Then :

• 16 Bentham, J, IPML, p. 39

9Bentham is also careful to acknowledge that applying this calculus is impractical and necessarily inexact, presenting it as an ideal model of calculation that ‘can always be kept in view’16 rather than strictly followed. If happiness is, as Bentham has it, an aggregate of pleasures and pains, and pleasures and pains are inherently subjective, then the only way for us to sensibly estimate total happiness or well-being for any group of people would be to start with an individual subject (rather than an impersonal abstract unit of happiness) and work our way up from there.

• 17 Bentham, J, Deontology, pp. 309-310

10We can see that some kind of democracy is clearly implied by Bentham’s utilitarianism; if the happiness of the state is the happiness of all its members, then the interests of each member should be considered, and each member’s interests should be represented in the relevant processes of democratic deliberation. Whether it implies egalitarianism is perhaps less clear. Some might think that given Bentham’s calculus, the misery of some minority population, even if democratically represented, could possibly be justified by promoting the happiness of the majority. Bentham anticipated this worry,17 and responds with an argument that can be summarized as follows:

• 18 Mckie, John; Richardson, Jeff; Singer, Peter, and Kuhse, Helga, The Allocation of Health Care Resou (...)

12What I will refer to as abstract utilitarianism is by far the dominant version of utilitarianism today. It is characterized by its commitment to cost-benefit analysis and tendency to frame utility (i.e. happiness) in terms of countable units (usually economic ones) that are abstract, fungible, and detached from subjective experience. A prime example of abstract utilitarianism in action is the use of Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) to evaluate the (moral) value of medical interventions. One QUALY is equal to one year of life in perfect health. QUALYs are calculated by weighting each year of life with a quality-of-life score, on a scale of 0 to 1. For example, if a certain medical procedure is estimated to give a patient 5 more years of life, with each year having a 0.5 quality of life score, then this medical procedure is expected to produce 2.5 QUALYs. In The Allocation of Health Care Resources, John McKie, Jeff Richardson, Peter Singer, and Helga Kuhse embrace the view that according to utilitarianism, we should discriminate against the disabled in the allocation of health care resources.18 McKie et al. argue that since disabled people have, on average, lower quality-of-life scores and since health care resources are scarce, health care resources that are allocated to a nondisabled person would yield greater utility (i.e. more QUALYs) than they would if they were allocated to a disabled person. Under this reasoning, it is not only right and rational to discriminate against the disabled in the distribution of health care resources, but it would also be wrong and wasteful not to.

• 19 Quinn, Michael, ‘Jeremy Bentham on Physical Disability: A Problem for Whom?,’ Review of Disability (...)
• 20 Quinn, M, ‘Jeremy Bentham on Physical Disability,’ p. 1

13Bentham’s own views on disability were problematic and fraught with tension. As Michael Quinn explains, on the one hand, Bentham anticipated ‘the central insight of the social model of disability, in seeing that the life prospects of people with impairments could be enhanced or diminished by the way in which society reacted to their impairment.’19 On the other, ‘Bentham’s commitment to a deficit understanding of impairment was allied to his conviction of the central role of individual responsibility for individual subsistence in the creation of wealth. This prevented him from recognizing the full implications of his ‘social model’ insight for the individualised and medical model to which he, for the most part, subscribed.’20 That said, there is some reason to think that Bentham would have rejected the discrimination endorsed by McKie et al. As discussed, Bentham’s arguments can be interpreted as going against the idea that happiness can be abstracted and measured on an objective scale. Furthermore, given the subjectivity of pleasure, Bentham would warn us to be wary of narrow and rigid definitions of happiness (or quality-of-life in this case) that centralise the experiences of certain groups of people, especially when these definitions recommend discriminatory practices.

• 21 Shanafelt, Carrie D., ‘Jeremy Bentham and the Aesthetics of Sexual Difference,’ The Eighteenth Cent (...)
• 22 Bentham, Jeremy, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Of Sexual Irregularities, and Other Writing (...)

14Bentham’s writings on sexual nonconformity reveal an alternative to abstract utilitarianism; instead of framing utility in terms of abstract units, in these writings, Bentham formulates a discourse grounded in the bodily pleasure of individuals, that recognizes (and is supportive of) the many ways in which pleasure might be experienced, and the variety of things that make different people happy.21 This discourse is grounded in Bentham’s definition of the ‘taste for any object’ as an ‘aptitude or disposition to derive pleasure [from] that object,’22 and his argument against the classical distinction between good and bad tastes. As he writes in The Rationale of Reward:

• 24 Singer, Peter, The Most Good You Can Do (Yale University Press: 2015)
• 25 Alexander, Scott, ‘Effective Charity—Do Unto Others,’ Effective Altruism (2013), https://www.effect (...)
• 26 GiveWell, Cost-Effectiveness, Last Updated: July 2023, https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-cri (...)

17In The Most Good You Can Do, a key introductory text for EA, Peter Singer argues that in choosing a charity or cause to donate to, it is not enough that your donation will do some good.24 Instead, you should only donate to the most cost-effective charities that ‘help[] the most people the greatest amount per dollar.’25 For EA, cost-effectiveness is calculated by looking at the expected marginal rates of return per additional dollar donated to a charity. According to GiveWell, a non-profit charity assessment and EA focused organisation, such estimates for cost-effectiveness ‘include administrative as well as program costs and generally look at the cost per life or life-year changed (death averted, year of additional income, etc).’26

• 28 Dietz, Alexander, ‘Effective Altruism and Collective Obligations,’ Utilitas, 31:1 (2019)
• 29 Broi, Antonin, ‘Effective Altruism and Systemic Change,’ Utilitas, 31: 1 (2019)
• 30 Syme, Timothy, ‘Charity vs. Revolution: Effective Altruism and the Systemic Change Objection,’ Ethi (...)

21The institutional critique is best thought of as a family of arguments directed at EA, with different arguments from this family focusing on different aspects of EA. What these arguments have in common is the claim that EA doesn’t pay sufficient attention to the importance of reforming economic and political institutions. In this section, I quickly summarize 3 examples of the institutional critique. The first is given by Alexander Dietz,28 the second by Antonin Broi,29 and the third by Timothy Syme.30 Taken together, these 3 examples give us a good idea of what the institutional critique is about. This is relevant as I mean for the Benthamite critique I sketch out in the next section to be understood as an institutional critique of EA.

• 31 Dietz, A, ‘Effective Altruism and Collective Obligations,’ p. 113
• 32 Dietz, A, ‘Effective Altruism and Collective Obligations,’ p. 113

22Dietz’s version of the critique is based in the importance of collective obligations. He argues that rather than focusing on what individuals should do, EA needs ‘to think more about what they collectively should do.’31 That is to say, rather than only thinking of itself as being made up of individuals each of which are obligated to do the most good they personally can, EA should also think of itself as a ‘collective subject of action’ with a collective obligation to do the most good it can as an organization.32 Dietz explains that by not recognizing its collective obligations, EA is able to easily justify its neglect of institutional change, since it is almost always the case that an individual can do more good (at least according to how EA quantifies ‘good’) by donating to an effective charity than by donating to, or participating in, efforts aimed at reforming institutions that cause a lot of suffering. In other words, even if it’s true that as an individual, one does the most good by donating to effective charities, the same doesn’t necessarily hold true at the group level. Dietz’s charge is thus not that EA is mistaken in any of its core commitments, but that it is incomplete insofar as it does not give enough thought to its collective obligation to do the most good.

• 33 Broi, A, ‘Effective Altruism and Systemic Change,’ p. 271
• 34 Broi, A, ‘Effective Altruism and Systemic Change,’ p. 272
• 35 Broi, A, ‘Effective Altruism and Systemic Change,’ p. 272

23Broi’s version of the critique starts with the question: ‘If there were an effective systemic intervention available, would the EA movement undertake it?’33 Broi argues that the answer to this question is ‘no,’ because of the role played by the law of diminishing marginal returns in cause prioritization for EA. One of EA’s key methodological assumptions is that all interventions have diminishing marginal rates of return, whereby initial resources spent on some intervention would be expected to have a relatively high marginal rate of return, which goes down as more resources are directed towards it. As discussed in the previous section, EA understands ‘effective’ interventions as those which provide the highest expected marginal rate of return. This assumption thus ends with EA focusing its efforts on ‘low-hanging fruits’ i.e., ‘interventions which are initially very effective, but with rapidly diminishing marginal returns.’34 With such interventions, EA can expect the highest marginal rate of return, and move on once these marginal rates are sufficiently diminished such that other interventions can be considered more effective. The problem with this is that systemic interventions are the opposite of low-hanging fruits (i.e. it is unlikely that initial resources directed at reforming the system will yield high marginal returns, and plausible that with more resources directed at such interventions, marginal returns go up rather than down), so even if there were effective systemic interventions available, and even if these interventions would produce the most good in the long run, EA would ignore them in favour of low-hanging fruits.35

• 36 Syme, T, ‘Charity vs. Revolution,’ p. 119
• 37 Syme, T, ‘Charity vs. Revolution,’ p. 100
• 38 Syme, T, ‘Charity vs. Revolution,’ p. 119

24Syme’s version of the critique centres on EA’s empiricist approach to altruism. He argues that since ‘structural change requires qualitative judgements that cannot be easily proved or disproved,’36 EA’s narrow prioritization of ‘quantifiable data and empiricist methods’ that seek to ‘ground inductive conclusions about the effectiveness of available interventions’ using ‘observations and experiments’ (‘with randomized controlled trials as the “gold standard”’) is ‘inadequate for structural analysis and thus for taking systemic change seriously.’37 Accordingly, the dilemma Syme presents for EA is between embracing structural analysis on the one hand (which would mean abandoning in large part the empiricist approach that makes EA distinctive, and making controversial judgments about social systems that are ‘inevitably controversial and largely immune to empirical demonstration and refutation’ thus risking a splintering of EA) and continuing to refrain from making judgments about social systems on the other (which would mean an uncritical acceptance of the status quo in which case EA cannot claim to take systemic change seriously).38

• 39 Bentham, Jeremy, ‘Emancipate Your Colonies!’ C and W. Reymell, Broad Street (1830), https://en.wiki (...)

31Premise 5 is motivated by Bentham’s view that what is needed for the greatest happiness is a system which genuinely values the material happiness of each individual. The importance of such a system to Bentham can be clearly seen throughout his writings for legal reform. For example, in ‘Emancipate Your Colonies!’, first published in 1793 as an address to the National Convention of France, and later reprinted in 1830 for British audiences, Bentham outlines how denying rights to certain groups of people for the sake of power and profit is antithetical to the utilitarian project of promoting the greatest happiness.39 He sums up the essay saying :

• 40 Shanafelt, C, Uncommon Sense, p. 88

33Along similar lines, Bentham observed that the abstract declarations of rights undertaken by wealthy countries like the USA and France did little to lessen the oppression of disenfranchised groups. Indeed, as Carrie Shanafelt explains, Bentham felt that ‘rights discourse threatened to give liberty to the powerful to oppress the victims of their prejudice without limit.’40 This is so as :