Comprobación de la hipótesis

But Plato simultaneously thought that achieving this sort of psychological coordination is as much a collective as an individual project. For several reasons, Plato thought that individual well-being has deep social precondi- tions. He denied, for example, that agents are self-sufficient when it comes to the cultivation of the traits and dispositions necessary for the sort of well-adjusted character we have just described. He insisted, rather, that the cultivation of these virtues depends crucially on the proper intervention of outside agencies in the formation of individuals’ characters.

One reason for this is that, in contrast to our appetitive capacities and needs, those associated with the ‘‘spirited’’ and ‘‘rational’’ elements of our self are not pre-programmed instincts, naturally well adapted to pursue certain self-evident interests like the need for food or shelter. The efficient deployment of these capacities is a potentiality that requires education, training, and practice to perfect. Others must be involved in this educative process; we need them to provide sound guidance and role-models, and sometimes to impose on us various forms of discipline. Obviously we cannot supply these for ourselves, and when others intervene in the wrong way, they can profoundly damage our prospects for well-being.

More controversially, while Plato believed that our three basic interests, and their relative importance, are the same for everyone, he denied that the corresponding three capacities for realizing them are evenly distributed across human populations. When it comes to their skills and natural capacities, individuals are not all appetitive, spirited, and rational in the same proportion. Some individuals are more naturally suited to activities that engage specifically physical, emotional, and intellectual capacities. The most infamous implication Plato drew from this claim was the suggestion that only intellectually gifted individuals should hold positions of political power. Plato’s ideal state is governed by a caste of philosopher rulers who must survive a rigorously meritocratic educational curriculum intended to weed out those unqualified to assume public responsibilities. For Plato, only those who prove themselves competent in this academic venue have the expertise to govern society in a way that will benefit everyone.

On Plato’s account, then, being ruled by reason and wisdom is not necessarily the same as being ruled by one’s own rational judgments. Rather, in many cases it requires a settled disposition to defer to the rational judgments of better-qualified others. So, even as it enhances the quality of individuals’ lives by inducing the required psychological dispositions, being properly ‘‘ruled by’’ reason is for Plato an inherently social achievement. In this way, Plato held that individuals’ chances of realizing their most basic interests are heavily dependent on the particular ways in which social responsibilities are allocated in their society. For Plato, therefore, individuals are socially dependent in a strong sense. The achievement of their well-being depends crucially on the pattern of social forms surrounding them and the terms on which they are encouraged to

participate in them. Properly understood, justice describes the conditions under which those terms will tend to promote, rather than hinder, everyone’s well-being. It is in this sense a common good.

Perfectionism

Clearly, there is much in this elaborate theory with which one might quarrel. The Platonic objection to democratic conceptions of justice invites several obvious replies. For example, while we may agree with Plato that individuals require guidance and self-discipline to live successfully, we may think that trusting the state, or public officials, to impart these qualities is a terrible idea: these responsibilities are better left to families, churches, and other private institutions. And perhaps, contrary to Plato’s claims, we do have an important interest in being exposed to the risk of personal failure. As John Stuart Mill suggested, errors and mistakes may be necessary conditions for individual and collective progress: we often learn from them.3

Plato’s own pupil Aristotle took a similar line. He was concerned that, in his haste to insure individuals against their own mistakes, Plato left so little to individual initiative and discretion as to transform the citizens of his ideal state into programmed automatons, hardly a satisfactory model for human well-being.4 Plato’s disconcerting claim that only a small minority of individuals in any community is intelligent enough to participate in political decision-making obviously also deserves close scrutiny. More broadly, Plato’s suggestions about the specific effects on individuals’ characters of different configurations of social responsibilities and the governing norms of justice that keep them in place are speculative and often unconvincing.

These all point toward serious difficulties in Plato’s view. What is of more immediate interest here, however, is the general idea of the common good that Plato launched in making this argument. This general idea, and the research agenda it defines, has often struck Plato’s readers as more promising than his particular recommendations. Indeed, the two critics just mentioned, Aristotle and Mill, took roughly this line. Both embraced

3 _{Mill (1972), p. 152.} 4

the general research program Plato opened up, but disagreed, often quite strongly, with the particular way in which he developed it.

Two general aspects of this research program deserve stress. First, Plato’s argument is perfectionist. His position is built around a depiction of a per- fectly rational agent directed intelligently and effectively toward the fulfillment of her deepest interests, making the best of her life. Having laid out this perfectionist ideal of human flourishing, Plato sought to describe the social and political circumstances likely to promote its realization in as many lives as possible. The resulting research agenda assumes that Plato’s ideal of a well-lived life is the ultimate end for the sake of which social and political arrangements exist and relative to which they ought finally to be evaluated.

In effect, then, Plato’s argument takes his perfectionist ideal as the ultimate touchstone of rational justification in politics. Since, on his view, everyone’s well-being is (allegedly) equally at stake in the design and effects of our political arrangements, that ideal affords an impartial standpoint from which to evaluate them. If Plato is right, individuals have a reason to support those arrangements necessary for realizing this ideal in their own lives, and to oppose or resist those that would hinder them in this endeavor. On this basis, the skeptical puzzles surrounding the possibil- ity of rational justification in politics that we extensively discussed in chapter 1 can be dissolved. Even if we reject Plato’s particular specifica- tion of human flourishing and his ideas about how to achieve it, we can still acknowledge that in principle this is a promising way to approach rational justification in politics.5

The second general feature of the research program that Plato inaugu- rated concerns the notion of a ‘‘common good’’ to which it gives rise. As we have seen, Plato insisted that individual well-being is fully attainable only in concert with others. When properly interpreted, the flourishing of political society and the flourishing of the individuals who comprise it are not opposed, but merely aspects of each other. This implies that insofar as we see an opposition between them, we lack a proper understanding of both. From this Platonic, and also Aristotelian, perspective, Auden’s description of the public and private realms as two separate, disconnected atlases exemplifies a deep misunderstanding, plausible only to people

5

unfortunate enough to be socialized into degenerate forms of political community like democracy.

In contrast, Plato and Aristotle thought of the terms on which we cooperate in political community as a potential common good in the following dual sense. On the one hand, each of us stands to gain or lose in very fundamental ways from this political environment being ordered in different ways. When the terms of human association are organized propitiously, each participant can obtain fundamentally important goods that would have eluded him or her otherwise. Conversely, when wrongly configured, the fulfillment of basic individual interests is threatened, and our common good unrealized. Individuals’ well-being is in this way dependent on their political environment, and its realization as much a collective as an individual responsibility.

On the other hand, this is not to say that for Plato and Aristotle we are dependent on something other than ourselves, for in the end we are our political environment. The various different principles for allocating social roles and responsibilities which form the major subject of Plato’s research program simply represent different possible forms of collective self-organization. So to say with Plato and Aristotle that individuals depend on their political environment for their well-being is not to say that they depend on some alien agency beyond themselves. Rather, it is to say that they depend on themselves and their own collective resources and assets. The task for the theorist of the common good is to investigate how these internal resources should be disposed so as to promote the flourishing of everyone sharing in political community.

Conclusion

Plato and Aristotle developed this project against the backdrop of a very particular model of political community the classical Greek city-state. These were largely self-sufficient, culturally homogenous political commu- nities whose territory comprised the immediate environs of individual cities, like Athens, Sparta, Miletus, Corinth, and Argos. By modern stan- dards, these city-states were extremely small. The payroll of some multi- national corporations today significantly exceeds the total population of Athens in the time of Plato and Aristotle. Because their speculations about how to realize the common good tend to presuppose this now extinct

political form, many modern critics have charged that this Platonic and Aristotelian project, inspiring as it is, is of historical interest only. They argue that the research program they initiated has been rendered irrelevant by the subsequent development of political organization on an incomparably larger scale. The size, cultural diversity, and complexity of modern nation-states make it implausible to suppose that its citizens could ever share in the sort of rich common good Plato and Aristotle hoped to promote by political means.

But the common-good approach did not simply die out with the Greek city-states. One of the most influential paradigms in recent political philo- sophy utilitarianism can be thought of as an attempt to revive that research program and to adapt it to the transformed conditions of modern political life. Before we consider some objections to the common-good approach as a whole, it is therefore important to have before us this modern variant of genus. These tasks form the topic of the next chapter.

Utilitarianism as a philosophical movement got going towards the end of the eighteenth century in Europe and really took off in Britain in the nineteenth. Its pioneers were Helvetius, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, and James and John Stuart Mill. Later utilitarians include Henry Sidgwick, R. M. Hare, and Peter Singer.1 For reasons considered below, utilitarianism as a philosophical doctrine is today on the defensive. But utilitarian ideas are fundamental to modern economic theory, and partly for this reason they remain firmly ensconced in contemporary intellectual life.

In its simplest formulation, utilitarianism asserts a basic principle of justification: actions and practices should be considered justified to the extent that they promote the greatest overall happiness. Actions and practices are said to have ‘‘utility’’ to the extent that they bring about overall happiness, and ‘‘disutility’’ to the extent that they produce overall suffering. The overriding utilitarian goal is therefore to seek actions and social practices likely to maximize utility.

Like the Platonic and Aristotelian views discussed earlier, utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory. For utilitarians, we decide whether something is justified by considering its consequences for the welfare of those it affects. Influenced by the Enlightenment enthusiasm for science and mathematics, however, the classical utilitarians (especially Bentham) aimed to make consequentialist ethics more scientific and precise. Their hope was that ethical justification might eventually become a matter of scrupulous mathematical calculation, like mechanics and engineering.

1

Sidgwick (1981); Hare (1981); Singer (1993).

The basic idea for this sort of utilitarian calculus is extremely simple. We first assess the likely effects of some action or institution A on each of the individuals who stand to be affected by it. On this basis, we deter- mine the costs and benefits (i.e. the utility and disutility) of A for each of these individuals. Assigning equal arithmetical weight to each of these individual utility scores, we next add them up and determine the total amount of utility that would result from A. We then follow the same procedure for each of the available alternatives (B, C, D) and select the option with the highest aggregate utility.

The utilitarian focus on aggregate welfare represents an important departure from the classical conception of the common good, which in contrast favors mutual advantage. On a mutual-advantage view, in order for something to be justified as a common good, each person involved must be shown to derive some benefit from it. On an aggregate-advantage view, what matters is the overall total of welfare, regardless of whether the position of every individual is improved. Utilitarians’ embrace of the latter view opens them to the charge that they could allow the imposition of unreasonable sacrifices on the few in order to promote the welfare of the many, a criticism to which we will return. Whatever the merits of this objection, however, utilitarians can still represent themselves as offering an interpretation of the common good. They can argue that, for the pur- poses of political justification, giving each person’s utility scores equal weight in calculations of overall utility is all that is necessary to provide an adequately impartial account of the social good.