Utilitarianism In Academia
A main reason I started this blog is because I couldn't find a natural home within academia for my ideas on utilitarianism. As far as I've been able to tell, and I've spent many long hours investigating, the theory and implications of utilitarianism as I imagine them have been largely overlooked by the academic community. Here I present a breakdown of academic topics in utilitarianism and relate them to existing academic work (or lack thereof).
It appears that the only community doing the topic of utilitarianism justice is that of philosophy. See for example the work of Peter Singer or utilitarianism on pixnaps. (Pixnaps aka Philosophy, et cetera is a great philosophy blog.) For a thorough, academic argument for utilitarianism including critiques of other ethical systems, I recommend Josh Greene's PhD dissertation (large PDF).
Theoretical discussions of utility exist in economics, but this is work generally assumes a selfish individual; work on a universal utilitarianism is scarce. I originally thought that my utility curves would be thoroughly treated in economics, but I have yet to find such work. (Please tell me if you know of it.) Furthermore, using the given definition of economics ("the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services"), I suspect my treatment of utility curves might fall beyond economics jurisdiction because I am not restricting my analysis to utility affected by external goods and services and am more focused on utility as an internal, physiological phenomenon. (By internal and external I mean with respect to the body of the individual experiencing the utility.)
On the applied side, there is a small but growing body of work called "happiness economics". The central idea here is to use self-reported happiness as a proxy for utility (instead income or other monetary measures as done in the rest of economics). The analysis is of results from surveys which basically ask thousands of people "On a scale from 1-10, how happy are you?". While a 7 might mean something different for me than it does for you, these differences get averaged out when large sample sizes are used and differences based on underlying phenomena (income, marriage, etc) surface. See Happiness Economics: Recommended Reading.
There exists a field called "neuroeconomics". However, this field studies the neural basis of economic decisionmaking, not anything directly related to utility. Thus, while quite interesting in its own right, it's generally not useful to us here. Still, it is a very closely related field. I also mention it because many searches for various aspects of utilitarianism have lead here. These searches include both internet searches and asking experts in related fields.
Neuroscience has done some relevant work, but has a lot more to do. This is mostly because in 2006, our understanding of brains remains very rudimentary. It is also in part because the neuroscience community is not focused on the questions of interest to utilitarianism. Pain is a very well-defined physiological phenomenon. Particularly interesting is the distinction between nociception (pain from stimulus, such as a burn) and psychological pain. There also exists work on pleasure and happiness but these appear less well developed, perhaps because these are more complex phenomena.
Attempts at measuring utility via the underlying physiology appear not to exist. Indeed, many believe it not to be possible, such as the author of this line from wikipedia: "While a person's overall happiness is not objectively measurable this does not mean it does not have a real physiological component." (I updated the page, adding "as of September, 2006" to "not objectively measurable".) From my initial discussions with neuroscience researchers, we appear to be a long way off. This is unfortunate: While self-reported happiness surveys appear to function quite well for humans, having measurements based on the underlying physiology would provide support for the validity of these surveys and, perhaps more importantly, allow us to determine the utility of non-human species or of humans (such as infants) unable to self-report. This would be of particular interest to the animal welfare community. I suspect that the ability to measure utility based on the underlying physiology would also enable measurement of utility on shorter time scales than what is possible using self-reported happiness surveys.
An interesting study to perform would be to have subjects report their happiness while in neuroimaging devices. This would be a first step towards understanding the underlying physiology of happiness as expressed in the surveys used in happiness economics. To my knowledge, such a study has not yet been done.
I am quite disappointed in my failure to find a classification of species by ability to experience utility. Knowing typical (set point) values for all species with nonzero utilities would enable us to incorporate different species into our models with more accuracy than the very crude estimates we must resort to at present. However, it appears that the only area studying the neural aspects of non-humans (other than as test subjects for experimental work, where they are used as a proxy for humans) is neuroethology; this area aims to understand animal behavior, not animal emotion, and thus is of little use to us here.
There exists a very robust branch of mathematics covering optimization. However, I have not found any work trying to apply this to finding optimal solutions to our felicific calculus. This is probably largely because, while the objective function (that which is to be optimized) is easy to state (see Total Lifetime Utility), the underlying system (the whole planet from now until the end of time) is extremely complex and frequently chaotic (unpredictable). Performing such optimization work is further hindered by the difficulties in measuring utility discussed above.
Public health and development economics both do extensive work that appears to be very important from a utilitarian perspective. Engineering does too, although while it is nominally dedicated to improving quality of life, it is generally focused on making proffits, which, as the happiness economics literature suggests, might not be a fair proxy for quality of life. Exceptions exist, such as Engineers Without Borders. Psychology of course discusses happiness a lot, but I am less interested in and knowledgeable of this work beyond what is already described here.
It appears that the only community doing the topic of utilitarianism justice is that of philosophy. See for example the work of Peter Singer or utilitarianism on pixnaps. (Pixnaps aka Philosophy, et cetera is a great philosophy blog.) For a thorough, academic argument for utilitarianism including critiques of other ethical systems, I recommend Josh Greene's PhD dissertation (large PDF).
Theoretical discussions of utility exist in economics, but this is work generally assumes a selfish individual; work on a universal utilitarianism is scarce. I originally thought that my utility curves would be thoroughly treated in economics, but I have yet to find such work. (Please tell me if you know of it.) Furthermore, using the given definition of economics ("the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services"), I suspect my treatment of utility curves might fall beyond economics jurisdiction because I am not restricting my analysis to utility affected by external goods and services and am more focused on utility as an internal, physiological phenomenon. (By internal and external I mean with respect to the body of the individual experiencing the utility.)
On the applied side, there is a small but growing body of work called "happiness economics". The central idea here is to use self-reported happiness as a proxy for utility (instead income or other monetary measures as done in the rest of economics). The analysis is of results from surveys which basically ask thousands of people "On a scale from 1-10, how happy are you?". While a 7 might mean something different for me than it does for you, these differences get averaged out when large sample sizes are used and differences based on underlying phenomena (income, marriage, etc) surface. See Happiness Economics: Recommended Reading.
There exists a field called "neuroeconomics". However, this field studies the neural basis of economic decisionmaking, not anything directly related to utility. Thus, while quite interesting in its own right, it's generally not useful to us here. Still, it is a very closely related field. I also mention it because many searches for various aspects of utilitarianism have lead here. These searches include both internet searches and asking experts in related fields.
Neuroscience has done some relevant work, but has a lot more to do. This is mostly because in 2006, our understanding of brains remains very rudimentary. It is also in part because the neuroscience community is not focused on the questions of interest to utilitarianism. Pain is a very well-defined physiological phenomenon. Particularly interesting is the distinction between nociception (pain from stimulus, such as a burn) and psychological pain. There also exists work on pleasure and happiness but these appear less well developed, perhaps because these are more complex phenomena.
Attempts at measuring utility via the underlying physiology appear not to exist. Indeed, many believe it not to be possible, such as the author of this line from wikipedia: "While a person's overall happiness is not objectively measurable this does not mean it does not have a real physiological component." (I updated the page, adding "as of September, 2006" to "not objectively measurable".) From my initial discussions with neuroscience researchers, we appear to be a long way off. This is unfortunate: While self-reported happiness surveys appear to function quite well for humans, having measurements based on the underlying physiology would provide support for the validity of these surveys and, perhaps more importantly, allow us to determine the utility of non-human species or of humans (such as infants) unable to self-report. This would be of particular interest to the animal welfare community. I suspect that the ability to measure utility based on the underlying physiology would also enable measurement of utility on shorter time scales than what is possible using self-reported happiness surveys.
An interesting study to perform would be to have subjects report their happiness while in neuroimaging devices. This would be a first step towards understanding the underlying physiology of happiness as expressed in the surveys used in happiness economics. To my knowledge, such a study has not yet been done.
I am quite disappointed in my failure to find a classification of species by ability to experience utility. Knowing typical (set point) values for all species with nonzero utilities would enable us to incorporate different species into our models with more accuracy than the very crude estimates we must resort to at present. However, it appears that the only area studying the neural aspects of non-humans (other than as test subjects for experimental work, where they are used as a proxy for humans) is neuroethology; this area aims to understand animal behavior, not animal emotion, and thus is of little use to us here.
There exists a very robust branch of mathematics covering optimization. However, I have not found any work trying to apply this to finding optimal solutions to our felicific calculus. This is probably largely because, while the objective function (that which is to be optimized) is easy to state (see Total Lifetime Utility), the underlying system (the whole planet from now until the end of time) is extremely complex and frequently chaotic (unpredictable). Performing such optimization work is further hindered by the difficulties in measuring utility discussed above.
Public health and development economics both do extensive work that appears to be very important from a utilitarian perspective. Engineering does too, although while it is nominally dedicated to improving quality of life, it is generally focused on making proffits, which, as the happiness economics literature suggests, might not be a fair proxy for quality of life. Exceptions exist, such as Engineers Without Borders. Psychology of course discusses happiness a lot, but I am less interested in and knowledgeable of this work beyond what is already described here.
posted by Seth Baum at 7:28 AM
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