Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is both everyone's political philosophy and nobody's. It is everybody's because everybody is in favor of making people happy, and everybody is willing to make tradeoffs to do so. I may not be willing to execute an innocent man to prevent a riot that will kill one hundred innocent men, but I am at least willing to spend limited highway funds on making safe the road that will save 100 lives instead of the road that will save just one life. Even if we add moral constraints, even if we add goals other than pleasure, even if we add goals other than happiness, the lessons of how to maximize utility retain some usefulness.
On the other hand, utilitarianism by itself has a fatal flaw: why should I want to maximize the happiness of other people? If happiness is all there is in life, and happiness is just feelings of pleasure and contentment, then I should maximize my own happiness, but why should I care about other people?
We must go back to why we are interested in political philosophy at all. How should I choose what is the best way to organize a country? I might do it for practical reasons--- if I were hired to do so, for example. Or I might choose the polity that would benefit me selfishly. That is not going to be important as a philosopher, though, or, usually, as a citizen. If I am purely selfish, I shouldn't bother with politics, unless I want to be a professional politician and make that my vocation, or unless it is useful to my career somehow otherwise. This could the case if I am a real estate developer for example-- I then will make more money, create more glorious projects, or achieve whatever my goal is better if I can influence the political process. Whether I am a builder or a politician, I will choose my political stance instrumentally. My goal will be self-benefit, but my stance is instrumental, so I will compromise and push for policies that not only will help me but which I can persuade other people to accept. Or, if I am a politician, I will be selling Policy as a product, and I will choose my stance so as to attract enough support to win office or to win promotion and appointment to a better job in government.
Or, it might be that I am choosing my political stance so as to impress other people whom I tell about it. I might want them to think I am tough, or kind, or imaginative, or conformist, or nonconformist.
But let's suppose you're philosophizing as a matter of theory. In fact, even the politician or builder may do this, if he finds it entertaining. What is your goal then?
It would not, I submit, be to maximize people's pleasure, as Bentham proposed. Rather, it would be to create a Best Society from your own point of view. You don't need to compromise and pay attention to other people--we're being theoretical here. You don't need to impress anybody. Think of it as if nobody will know what your political desires are, and that when the world sees them anonymously, it will adopt them instantly. You are the Founder, but you get no credit or blame for it. We might or might not want you to actually live in the society. If you do, you can't make yourself King--- taht is not interesting enough for the rest of us. But you can make the society good for your kind of person if you want, as a class.
What you choose will depend completely on your underlying beliefs. You need a Philosophy before you can do Political Philosophy on this grand scale. So if you believe in God, that is going to be important, though not, I think, decisive. If you believe in some some foreign god, that will matter too, and might even be decisive. If you believe in Allah, for example, you will want to live in a state in which Islam is the state religion.
Well, could you not have as your underlying Philosophy that you want to help make everybody happy? Or, more specifically, that you want to be a Benthamite, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain? No, I argue. If you believe that people are no better than animals, then you have no grounds for maximizing pleasure. Animals can feel pleasure too. A possum can feel pleasure. Presumably a worm can too. Should we really care about possums? We do--- if I saw a possum tortured, I'm sure I would feel bad--- but that is because we feel Sympathy, an innate attribute of Man that makes us imagine ourselves in the position of others-- even a possum under Communist torture. Rationally, I would want to just look the other way--- except, too, that if it were a person doing the torturing, I would feel unhappy at his sadistic pleasure, and apprehensive about whether it would lead to torturing humans.
No-- if pleasure is all that matters, then I should care very little about other people. They are just like animals. There is nothing of value about their pleasure. I should not rationally sacrifice any of my own for them. And, in practice, I don't a utilitarian would. He would not act on his principles, if nobody was watching.
Thus, utilitarianism is not enough in itself.
What of other possibilities? Christian principles are one way to start. The Christian wants what God wants. Why? Because he has made a choice to serve God. Why he has made that choice is the harder question. The orthodox answer is that God has made him love God, by leading him to believe in God (though even Satan believes) and further leading him to love God. This is not irrational, but it is not purely rational either, because given the evidence we have available, a rational man can be an atheist, and someone can still believe in God and still hate Him.
Does the Christian have nothing to say to an atheist about politics, then? No. Just as the utilitarian can be helpful to the Christian in his advice despite the underlying problem of his objective, so can the Christian be helpful to the atheist. In both cases it is because there is Natural Law, by which I mean If-then statements will apply regardless of one's goals.
The Christian cannot simply read the Bible and know what political regime is best for a country. He must think about what pleases God, and must think hard. It is not obvious, when we are talking about writing a constitution. Sure, God is displeased if I murder or wear women's clothes or shout at my children when I'm really angry at myself. But that doesn't tell us whether rule by Tech Lords is better than the U.S. Constitution. The Christian, like anyone else, has to think about the underlying purposes of government, and that means thinking about what a good regime looks like, in view of the constraints imposed by human nature. He has reason to value Happiness and Human Dignity, because the Christian believes that Man is made in God's image and all men have value--- something the atheist utilitarian cannot justify believing. But he also has reason to value beautiful music and acts of heroism and everyday virtue and human accomplishment and the giant redwoods. Trading off all these things is difficult, and the Christian and the atheist can talk about how to do it.
But what does the atheist use as his Philosophy? Here, Political Philosophy is easier for him than daily life. In daily life, he needs to think about how to make himself happy, which is easy in some ways (don't smoke meth) and hard in others (is having children worth it?). In Political Philosophy, he just has to think about what kind of regime he likes given his own personal tastes. He is the Founder. He is the potter making the pot. He just has to decide what make a pot beautiful. We are not even requiring him to be able to sell the pot to somebody else, or for it to be practical for his own use. It is just a matter of aesthetics.
For the Christian, too, aesthetics matters. God and Beauty are intimately connected; God is the source of beauty, and of making Man think certain things are beautiful and certain are ugly. But the Christian must be less selfish. He must look not just inside himself, but into what Man more generally thinks is good. Ultimately, the question is what God thinks is good, but we learn about that from how he has made Man. To be sure, we learn from the Bible also, but only a limited amount. The Bible does not tell us how to choose our vocations. It does not say, in any specific way, what is a good life. It says quite a bit about what makes for a bad life, but it does not tell you whether you should be a truck driver or a salesman.
Stop here for now.
