Income Support

RICHARD B. BRANDT

Utilitarianism is a theory about what people morally ought to do and, hence, is at least indirectly about which laws and institutions (since people can affect them) are morally acceptable. I wish to focus on the implications of this theory for legislation on income distribution, primarily with respect to legislation to improve the lot of the economically deprived segments of society.

It may seem quixotic to suppose that reflection on utilitarianism can throw any light on how to resolve the baffling practical dilemmas which legislators and administrators face in trying to devise welfare programs which will meet diverse and seemingly conflicting objectives. But there is some theoretical interest in seeing how tax-welfare legislation fits into a utilitarian philosophy of government and society. And taking a broad view could have the practical effect of suggesting options which otherwise would not have been thought of, or of making the dilemmas seem less serious by placing them in perspective.

The heart of utilitarianism has been its thesis about which acts are morally right: that the moral rightness of actions is fixed, somehow or other, by optimality of consequences. It has also been a theory about the conditions under which institutions are morally acceptable: Epicurus considered a law just if and only if it is a beneficial law; Jeremy Bentham made optimal consequences the standard for an acceptable system of criminal justice; and recent proposals of the American Law Institute are, similarly, very utilitarian in spirit. (The utilitarian need not say that an institution is morally unacceptable just because it is short of optimal; but he must say that it is morally unacceptable if, by utilitarian standards, it can be improved and if there is an unsatisfied moral obligation on those who can improve it to do so.)

Utilitarianism as a theory of right action—which seems to have appeared first in the work of Richard Cumberland around 1672—must be divided into two types. Some utilitarians, now called “act-utilitarians,” think an act is right only if its net actual benefit or its expectable benefit1, is as great as that of any other act the agent might perform. Other, historically earlier utilitarians, now called “rule-utilitarians,” have argued that an act is right roughly if and only if it is of a kind which would have the best or best expectable consequences for a moral code to permit. For instance, rule-utilitarians think it is right to keep a certain kind of promise, even when it does more harm than good in the case at hand, because it would be required by the moral code it would have best consequences to have in force in the society. Some utilitarians saw the Ten Commandments or the requirements of conscience in this light, as laws laid down by God because he wanted the happiness of mankind and saw that promulgation of these laws would best achieve it.