David Fincher, director of the film Gone Girl, complains about the ‘whole f**ing likeability thing’ affecting how audiences receive his films. Characters he argues must be good or bad, not a saint with a serious flaw or weakness which makes him or her morally ambiguous.. The blurring of good and bad is morally ‘unsatisfying’ to the modern audience. The real world, however, is full of morally ambiguous characters like you and me, and moral complexity like Palestine and Syria. To head in the opposite direction – towards satisfying people – is yet another strand of a bigger argument about the slow strange death of economic man.

Economic man is a new creation. Adam Smith, the father of Economics (and also a moral philosopher) wrote his great book, The Wealth of Nations in 1776. It was only as the industrial revolution gathered momentum in the nineteenth century that economic man was born – that is humankind largely seen as satisfaction-maximisers and profit-maximisers, where we live to consume and have happiness measured in desires articulated and then satisfied.  Workers change labour for wages and then pay for goods and services which they determine by their choice votes in a great big economic democracy. Or at least, so the theory goes.

Of course, this idea is a fiction: workers are exploited by capitalists; governments control some resource allocation in all societies, even our so called free market economy; the rich have more wealth votes than the poor and human beings are by their very nature not best served by utilitarian philosophy. This is because we don’t rest our biggest life decisions on utilitarian assumptions – I don’t maximises pleasure and minimise pain when I visit my dying mother, I don’t eat Mars Bars up to the point where I start to feel slightly sick and I don’t simply consume to satisfy my desires. I consider the interests of others, I operate by ideas of duty for duty’s sake (visiting my mum), I recognise that the experience of pain may be a good and necessary thing (ask the athlete competing in the Olympics) and most significant of all, I know deep down that my own welfare rests upon often costly co-operation with my neighbour and fellow citizen. Click below to read more…

So why do I call it ‘the slow strange death” of economic man? Because utilitarian ethics is slowly killing us. The death comes in a number of dimensions – here are a few.

International relations. Our failure to press harder for a solution to the Palestinian issue or the Iragi issue above self-interest means these sources of festering grievance remain a sore which could in principle destroy our own much-valued stability. Sick ideologies such as that peddled by ISIS in northern Iraq rise to fill a moral vacuum at the heart of our own policy. This vacuum is fuelled by a utilitarian mindset which says ‘intervene if the benefits to you outweigh the costs’ and then ‘don’t intervene if the costs outweigh the benefits’. Appeal to interest again exposes the inadequacy of the utilitarian mindset.

Medical practice. Our failure to recognise that taking antibiotics for a common cold is killing antibiotics as an idea (it is useless as a practice anyway – antibiotics don’t treat viruses), means that within fifty or so years we may revert to the era of the 1920s when a scratch from a rusty nail could prove fatal. This is probably an irreversible fact because we cannot think outside our own immediate satisfaction. the doctor prescribes for a quiet life and the medical consumer demands for a (supposedly) immediate cure.

Democratic choices,. If we only vote according to my own self-interest we will continue to divide along partisan lines. For example, the so-called ‘cost of living crisis’ criticism appeals to what a particular policy has cost me in terms of a loss of living standards. It fails to address the question: is it necessary in the short term to have a loss of living standards so that in the longer term living standards might rise for everyone? Utilitarianism fail again to balance the short term against the longer term – it cannot assess the difference.

Social relations. Utilitarian ethics fails to recognise the implications of satisfying behaviour on my nearest companion. In some ways it is an infantile idea and demonstrates the problem of emotional immaturity which affects many of us of whatever chronological age. The problem is this: if my needs and desires are not met now, I throw a tantrum, engage in manipulative behaviour or find some other way of getting the desires satisfied. To paraphrase GE Moore, they may be my desires, but are they ‘good’? Cue marital breakdown, growth of distrust and the proliferation of wealthy lawyers.

The environmental question. Environmental ethics remains stuck with a philosophical problem. How do I attribute intrinsic goodness to the environment? In the meantime, we continue to pay lip service to environmentalism – we flock to Glastonbury for  music festival proclaiming peace, love and environmentalism and leave abandoned tents and a hundred tons of rubbish for someone else to clear up. Utilitarianism can only think in terms of extrinsic goodness – it is good if it benefits me and picking up my tent at the end of the festival is just too much effort.

Peter Baron

* I realise that I am failing to use inclusive language here, but maybe this is because the slow strange death is driven by continued male domination of the world of ideas for reasons I will discuss in a later blog.