Tag Archives: Utilitarianism

Hiroshima at 75

Ethics, History, Middle Way Philosophy, Video, ,

The 75th anniversary of the first military use of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima has been the prompt for London’s Imperial War Museum to commission a a special example of reflective art. Es Devlin and Machiko Weston were preparing an exhibition, but have now produced a remarkable video called ‘I saw the world end’, so we can access their work online instead. This video is well worth watching and reflecting on, so I will embed it below, and it will be followed by some further reflections from me. Is Hiroshima to be a prompt to further conflict, or for learning? Much depends on finding the Middle Way in relation to it. You can see more about the context of the video on the Imperial War Museum site.

One of the things I find most helpful about the video is the way that it combines two perspectives, above and below the line. These can be seen as Western and Japanese, bomber and victim, but they are much more than that. For the most part they use very different sorts of language. Those above the line are scientific and universal: they think in terms of abstract generalities, either in terms of the science that produced the bomb or the justifications that launched it. Below it, however, there is only immediate overwhelmed experience and emotional response: the response of the right hemisphere of the brain that is desperately trying to respond to new experience, rather than the left hemisphere that marks the language above the line. Above the line, too, the language is often passive (rather like academic language, avoiding personalisation), but below the line, the bomb happens to real people in a real situation.

I have been reflecting on the ways that the helpfulness of our response to Hiroshima depends very much on whether we are prepared to straddle that line. A common response for anyone with a degree of sensitivity and compassion today is just to be enormously shocked by what happened, and to immediately feel the bombing to be a monstrous and inhumane action that must never be repeated. As long as we remain with that human experience of what happened and have sympathy with the immense suffering that occurred, we are likely to go on feeling like this. However, if we instead enter the world of the people above the line, we find a very different experience: one of abstract reasoning in which technologies are developed for what are sincerely believed in as humane ends, for the purposes of resisting Fascist regimes that were capable of even greater calculated cruelty than any that might have contributed to Hiroshima. We are in the world of utilitarian reasoning, in which the end justifies the means, and the lesser evil averts the greater one.

The challenge of practising the Middle Way in relation to this topic, as I see it, is to extend our awareness both above and below the line, not prematurely rejecting one tendency above the other, but rather putting them both into as large a context as we can manage. As a former ethics teacher, I have organised debates about the justification of Hiroshima between students, and am aware from this how quickly the whole issue can become over-abstract, as it becomes merely a matter of proving a moral theory, rather than maintaining our sense of what extreme human suffering is actually like. At times it can seem like an insult to the sufferers to debate their fate in the abstract – yet we necessarily do this all the time, whenever we give a specific situation the wider context of its relationship to other situations. At the point of judgement on medical resources, for instance, the suffering of a patient requiring an enormously expensive treatment can no longer be the only thing we consider. We start having to weigh it up against the further suffering that may result by not spending that money on other needful causes. Getting caught up completely below the line can be just as limiting as being caught entirely above it. We have to try to be amphibious, however difficult that may seem.

The utilitarian reasoning for Hiroshima ran along the lines that greater suffering might well result if the Allies continued to fight the war against Japan by conventional means. Japan was deemed unlikely to surrender before the end of the huge bloodbath that a conventional invasion of Japan would have required. The use of nuclear weapons, however, was intended to force a rapid Japanese surrender without this. Of course, such reasoning depends on the accuracy of our assessment of our actions and their likely effects, but in wartime it is very difficult to avoid such reasoning. Similar thinking had already been employed in the war against the Germans when the decision was taken to conceal the fact that the Enigma Code used by German communications had been cracked. Many Allied lives were thus lost in the short term that could have been saved, but in the cause of an ultimate victory. Remarkably, this strategy worked.

So, in my view, we cannot simply dismiss utilitarian reasoning. Utilitarian reasoning is capable of saving the world, and may have already done so. At the same time, we cannot rely on it exclusively, without constantly renewing our wider experience of both the practical and the emotional impact of our actions. However, helpful utilitarian reasoning depends on honest and accurate assessments of the effects of our actions of a kind that are all too rare in practice, taking into account even unknown unknowns as far as we can. Utilitarian reasoning can also be held responsible for much of our past treatment of the environment, and the insufficiently foreseen rebounding effects this is now having on us. There are no single abstract moral theories that can give us all the right answers in any situation, only a toolbox of different responses, and the potential to cultivate the kind of awareness and provisionality we need to use that toolbox wisely. I do not think that we should now try to answer the question of whether Harry Truman’s judgement was right or wrong, because it is our own judgements now that we need to take responsibility for, not his. However, the practice of trying to understand both sides of the question offers valuable resources to us even today.

Middle Way Thinkers 5: John Stuart Mill

Great Thinkers, Middle Way Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics, , ,

“It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves…unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement….In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions that you were looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”

This is how John Stuart Mill, writing in his autobiography, tells us about the great crisis in his life: what we might now call a nervous breakdown. Mill is one of philosophical history’s great infant prodigies. Urged by his pushy utilitarian father, he was also intended as a living demonstration of the power of a rationally ordered way of life in pursuit of utilitarian objectives. Famously, John Stuart Mill started to learn Ancient Greek at the age of three. By the time of his breakdown at twenty, he had already been through a high pressure education and become a utilitarian campaigner. We can guess, however, that in this pressurised environment a great many other feelings were repressed. As repressed feelings tend to do, they made themselves unexpectedly, distressingly and disruptively manifest.

What makes Mill such an inspiring figure is the way that he dealt with this inner conflict. He neither tried to repress the inconvenient feelings further, nor did he entirely give way to them. Instead he learnt from them and modified his view of the world. He seems, in fact, to have integrated the conflicting desires, meanings and beliefs that lay behind this inner turmoil, by working through them in his philosophy. What had started off as a narrow, puritanical utilitarianism was broadened and modified in an attempt to recognise the importance of emotional and aesthetic experience. Mill became especially known for his essay On Liberty, the key founding text of liberalism and a hugely creative advance in the political thought of the time. In addition, with the collaboration of his wife Harriet, his essay On the subjection of women also became a key early text in the attempt to persuade the repressive male-dominated nineteenth-century world that women should also share men’s liberty as equal partners.

As with any other thinker one might identify as making an important contribution to our understanding of the Middle Way, Mill found a balance in some ways more than others. For example, Mill’s interpretation of Utilitarianism moves beyond the narrowness of his early mentor Jeremy Bentham, it still has the limitations of Utilitarianism in general.  Bentham wanted to reduce moral decision-making to a ‘hedonic calculus’, in which the pleasures and pains likely to result from different possible actions would be quantified and weighed up in a notionally mathematical fashion. In the scales of this calculus, Bentham argued that every pleasure weighed equally, and should be measured only by its intensity, duration and other quantitative features: in his famous phrase “Pushpin is as good as poetry” (pushpin being a fairly mindless game played in pubs at the time). After his breakdown and recovery, Mill began to argue that some pleasures were better than others. However, he did not really have a convincing account of why poetry was better than pushpin that went beyond the weight of social consensus. That poetry might have benefits in terms of the meanings it offers us is too intangible an idea to fit easily into a utilitarian framework.john mill

It is in  On Liberty that I find Mill at his best and closest to the Middle Way. The utilitarianism is nominally there, but fades into the background beside Mill’s passionate argument for the freedom of expression and action. If you allow people to express unorthodox views and behave in unconventional ways, Mill argues, society as a whole will benefit, because these people will be able to develop and test out new and better ways of thinking and acting. Adults should thus be allowed to act as they wish provided they did not harm others in the process. Mill challenged those who thought they knew the truth as to whether they thought themselves (and the socially accepted view) infallible: if not, he argued, the possibility of error needed to be tested out in a free discussion in which better justified views would become evident. Mill here gives a very practical expression to the Middle Way in the recognition of basic uncertainty, and draws out its implication of tolerance that allows people to reach their own autonomous, but justified, conclusions.

Mill goes on “Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it be suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but…the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason and personal experience.”

Mill here puts his finger on some of the key features of metaphysical dogma. By repressing alternative views, it not only prevents debate and experiment that might help us address conditions more effectively, it also represses emotions and creates conflicting psychological states that inhibit creativity and well-being. Personal experience may give rise to new ideas and beliefs, but these potential innovations must be crushed at source in order to ensure social conformity with the dominant beliefs. Unhappy individuals and rigid, fragile societies are the result. So much of nineteenth century literature is about this: the struggles of individuals to find sustenance and fulfil their vision in a stiflingly conventional society. But before the nineteenth century society was no less dogmatic and conformist. It was due to people like John Stuart Mill that awareness of the possibility of an alternative began to spread in a way it had not existed before.

Perhaps many people in the twenty-first century take this as old hat. We take tolerance of harmless individual differences for granted, at least in theory. Mill’s liberalism in its turn has now become the basis of a kind of social orthodoxy, which sometimes just goes through the motions of supporting creative individual freedom, but sometimes also genuinely does support that freedom to great positive effect. The Middle Way has now become much more a question for individuals, because dogmas can be carried around with us inside as well as laid on us from outside. But the fact remains, that without that basic degree of liberalism, our ability to find a Middle Way is severely curtailed by social pressure and control. That, perhaps, is why modernity is a much better context to practice the Middle Way than the traditional and hierarchical societies of the Buddhist East, even though these societies transmitted the Buddha’s idea of the Middle Way for many centuries.

 

Link to index of other posts in the Middle Way Thinkers series