I. In The Metaphysics of Morals ("The Metaphysical Elements of the Theory of Right"), Kant lays out the conditions under which a society is in a state of 'right', a state which, if you care about being in a society (which we all almost always do), he thinks you must accept as the society towards which we ought to strive. He describes it as following:
'Every action which by itself or by its maxim enables the freedom of each individual's will to co-exist with the freedom of everyone else in accordance with a universal law is right.'
Thus if my action or my situation in general can co-exist with the freedom of everyone in accordance with a universal law, anyone who hinders me in either does me an injustice for this hindrance or resistance cannot co-exist with freedom in accordance with universal laws.
The basic idea of this is that: as long as your free actions or your acting on the principles underlying them (the premises from which you reasoned to undertake them) do not interfere with my free actions or my acting on the principles underlying them, then we stand in a relation of right to one another. For example, if I decide to spend the day at the beach, this does not hinder you from doing the same, or from anything else. But if I decide to burn your house down, this would clearly hinder you in both your actions, and situation in general. In the former situation we stand in a relation of right, in the latter we do not. A whole society is in a state of right if all people stand in the former relation, where their free actions, whatever they happen to be, do not impede on the free actions of others, whatever they happen to be. This is the state towards which we ought to strive.
But surely, if a whole society of people freely chose to act in whatever they wanted, without limit, then their actions would inevitably hinder the freedom of others in both intended and unintended ways. For example, if someone chose to steal your money or burn plastic emitting toxic fumes into your home, your freedom would be hindered by others' actions. However, according to Kant, any hindrance to such action—action that hinders others' freedom—is not itself a hindrance of freedom, but is ultimately consonant with it. So, if thieves and those producing toxic fumes were forcibly stopped from engaging in these activities at the time in which they engage in them, by punishment, and in the future, by laws and the threat of punishment, then there would be no 'loss' of freedom in society overall.
This is because a person is free, according to Kant, as long as the their actions are not hindered by others actions not because they can do whatever they want whenever they want. Call a situation where someone is not hindered by others actions rightfully free and call a situation where someone can do whatever they want unlimitedly free. Forcibly stopping someone from stealing or from producing toxic fumes, from actions that hinder others' freedom, does not mean they are not still rightfully free to engage in any other activities that do not hinder the freedom of others. Their choice of rightful activities is completely open to them. However, it does mean that they are not unlimitedly free. But this is fine, because having laws in place that forcibly prevent oneself and others from engaging in actions that hinder others' freedom means that one's own freedom, both rightful and unlimited, is not hindered. Coercion therefore brings about the conditions under which freedom can be secured at all. Thus, coercion, in the form of forcible prevention and the threat thereof (law), is compatible with, and enhancing of, the total freedom in society.
Of course, some laws and forms of coercion will be better than others at securing and encouraging the conditions for rightful freedom, as well as its continual actualisation. This means that a given arrangement of society can be closer or further away from securing the total state of right, a state where all persons stand in a relation of right to one another. Indeed, we know from experience that achieving such a state, given the complexity of things, would be impossible, or extremely unlikely to come into be being. Kant recognises this, and argues that it can stand as an ideal and criterion for any given arrangement of society:
A state (civitas) is a union of an aggregate of men under rightful laws. In so far as these laws are necessary a priori and follow automatically from concepts of external right in general (and are not just set up by statute), the form of the state will be that of a state in the absolute sense, i.e. as the idea of what a state ought to be according to pure principles of right. This idea can serve as an internal guide (norma) for every actual case where men unite to form a commonwealth.
We can therefore say without distortion that for Kant: the extent to which we live in a society where people actually act in ways that do not impede on others freedom, and to the extent that society is arranged in a way that tends to promote such actions is the extent to which we live in a good society. This is his criterion of right for the worth of society. Note that this differs from the decision procedure for how to bring about such a society, which may or may not involve actually aiming at the ideal society.
II. In On Liberty, Mill writes, in explicit contrast to this, that utility is the only stick against which we should measure the worth of a society. The more utility, the better. In explicit contrast to the Kantian (and post-Kantian) view of right, he writes:
It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of a man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people.
But what is "utility" and the "permanent interests of a man as a progressive being"? There is some controversy about what he means by this, due to a framing that errs between classical hedonistic utilitarianism and a romantic kind of perfectionism. However, in Utilitarianism, he writes that "happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct", and "By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure". For the purposes of this essay, I will therefore treat him as a hedonic utilitarian, one who thinks that the only good things are pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and that the some act or situation is good to the extent that it maximises pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
Given this, and the above quote, we can therefore say that, for Mill: the extent to which we live in a society that has brought about the greatest net pleasure, and to the extent that society is arranged in a way that tends to perpetuate it is the extent to which we live in a good society. This is his criterion of right for the worth of society. (It is a (wide) open question among utilitarians what the decision procedure for bringing about such a society would be.)
III. One consequence of Mill's view is that, despite the pretence of his book, if some society were to be incredibly paternalistic, and explicitly promote actions through laws that constantly contravene the freedom of individuals, but tend to produce more pleasure than one that did not, then we should consider it to be better than a society which lacks these arrangements. The world sketched out by Huxley in Brave New World comes to mind as one that greatly compromises on individual freedoms, but greatly enhances on individual pleasures. Nonetheless, this would be a feature, not a bug of a utilitarian society. After all, according to Mill, pleasure is the only thing that is ultimately relevant in evaluating the worth of a society. And this one would, by stipulation, be one that facilitates more pleasure, despite our massively compromising on freedoms. All the better for us, or so he must think.
Kant would take great issue with such an arrangement. For while a state can legitimately coerce individuals that act or might act so as to hinder the freedom of others, it cannot legitimately impose its conception of happiness on individuals, even if that imposition would in fact make them happier than they otherwise would have been left to their own devices. Individuals are rational, autonomous beings that have the right to make their own choices, free of the choices of the state, just as they have the right to be free of the choices of other individuals (except, as before, insofar as their choices interfere with others' right to be free of your choices). For this reason, for Kant, any society that would be happy but not (rightfully) free, is worse than any society that is unhappy but (rightfully) free, it being the only relevant consideration in assessing the value of a particular arrangement of society.
But of course, this leads to a parallel problem for Kant, just as it did for Mill. It means that even if bringing about a state of right made people immensely unhappy, and even if they were perpetually unhappy once they arrive, they still would be in a state of right and thus we should still prefer it to a much, much happier state, sans right. To my mind, this is probably even more troubling than Mill's Brave New World. At least there things were easy for people. Here, people could be constantly struggling against pains, they could be destitute, and even free only to pursue ends that merely allow them to keep living. Like Mill, Kant could simply argue that, by stipulation, this would be a case in which a state of right is secured, despite our compromising on some happiness, and if so, all the better for us, and for autonomous, rational agents.
In both cases, it is open to these views to double down on their view in the face of troubling implications. However, we should find this, well, troubling. After all, their criterion for a right society seems to sanction and order arrangements in a way that seems not to be right at all. This can be demonstrated. Both a society that is completely (rightfully) free but deeply unhappy and a society that is utterly unfree but always pleased seem a lot worse than a society that is both rightfully free and always pleased. Yet both views, in virtue of their narrow criterion for evaluating different arrangements of society would have us be agnostic between them, their both having the same quantity of the one thing that makes them good. But I would think that agnosticism is clearly the wrong response here, we should choose the society that is both happy and free. These implications give us good reason to reject the criterion of right that got us here. But then what are we supposed to do now, instead?
IV. To my mind, the answer is obvious. The lesson of this is that: it matters whether and to what extent the individuals in society are free and it matters whether and to what extent the individuals in society are happy. At some times in some regions of political decision making we should give more weight to the former, and in other times in other regions of political life we should give more weight to the former. But we need not stop there, for there are other things beyond freedom and pleasure that matter too: knowledge, justice, equality, aesthetics, friendship, love, and perhaps other things too. They can all figure in our criterion of right for a good arrangement of society.
There is nothing in this view that is untoward, contradictory, or naïve, despite the philosophical (and pre-philosophical) impulse present in some to subsume everything under a single, uniform principle of evaluation. Indeed, it seems to be to be the obvious and sensible view, one we arguably already see enacted in our everyday political reality, both by those directly involved and in those of us who think about its issues, which is in terms of tradeoffs between competing values. For example, we often see debates about the relative value of freedom versus overall well-being, or between infrastructure and aesthetics, each of which are things that make our lives better in different ways. In other words, the choice, between a society that pursues freedom versus a society that pursues pleasure, is a false one. This is because we can accept a plurality of values—inclusive of, or even limited just to, freedom and happiness—as relevant to our assessment of the worth of a particular arrangement of society.
Why should we ever have thought otherwise? Perhaps we are worried that a criterion for the right arrangement of society that accepts a plurality of values is hopelessly messy. For one thing, how do we choose the values we are to pursue? I listed a few possibilities above, but what is the full and exhaustive list, and how are we supposed to figure it out? Even if we could choose the values, how are we supposed to adjudicate between them, given they are both fundamentally different kinds of value? Given this, how can they intelligibly share a single quantitative measure? How can we possibly compare the good of fighting against the Nazis versus the good of looking after one's mother? Perhaps there is a fundamental weighting we are supposed to give them that informs how we should reason about them. Maybe pleasure, freedom, knowledge, friendship, and love each get 20% weighting? Are not these questions hopeless messy, and therefore doomed from the beginning as unanswerable? And if unanswerable, then is not this pluralism ultimately fruitless as a principle for evaluating different arrangements of society?
I am not so pessimistic as this about value pluralism, views that accept as foundational a plurality of values, as opposed to value monism, views that accept as foundational only a single value, such as the views of Kant and Mill. I think that compelling answers can be put forward for some of these questions by the pluralist. However, I also think that there is an even more compelling monistic view (a species of which G.E. Moore advocated) that largely gets to ignore them.
This view combines value monism, the acceptance of a single foundational value, goodness, with the acceptance of a plurality of things that might be the bearer of that value, such as instances of pleasure, freedom, knowledge, justice, equality, friendship, love, aesthetics, and so on. Each of these different things in different situations will, to different degrees, be good things in society. It is the very same goodness of these many different things things that we recognize, then try to bring about and perpetuate. It is in virtue of the fact that they share, to different degrees in different situations, this value that they are able to be compared and reasoned about. The relative weight to be assigned to a given bearer of goodness in a given situation, i.e. whether and to what extent society should prioritise pleasure, freedom, knowledge, etc., in a given situation, will depend on the amount of goodness we expect this weighting would bring about. The particular weighting we pursue is therefore not something we can decide in advance of all decisions. Rather it is something we must constantly re-evaluate as new situations bring about new challenges, technologies, tragedies, cultures, and economies that shift the distribution of possible arrangements of society, and their respective expected quantities of goodness. Different views will accept different decision procedures for figuring out the weighting we should expect to get us to the society with the most good. Conservatives will often look to the robustness of old institutions, while progressives will look to technology and rationality. Nevertheless, the criterion of right remains the same.
This is currently my own view of the matter. Thus, contra Kant and contra Mill, the extent to which we live in a society that has brought about the greatest net goodness, understood as the overall best combination of good things possible at the time, and to the extent that society is arranged in a way that tends to perpetuate this goodness, is the extent to which we live in a good society.
(Hopefully more on the topic of value to come in the next couple of months. In the meantime, you can read
this for a view connected with the one espoused here.)
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