When it comes to addressing trade offs, utilitarianism is typically considered to be the normative theory par excellence. Utilitarians are maximising consequentialists, meaning that they believe whether an act is right or wrong depends solely on its consequences and that we should choose to perform the acts that lead to the best consequences. They also believe that the only thing that is good in itself, and not just good for instrumental reasons, is well-being. When we tie this all together, utilitarianism is the view that some outcome is better than another if and only if it promotes the greatest improvement in overall well-being.
Utilitarianism conceptually simplifies a policy maker’s job: just figure out which policies maximise well-being. As Ben Eggleston puts it, “any policy you choose is going to have some harm and some benefit, you've just got to try to pick the best one”. Alternative normative theories that appeal to a collection of fundamental rights or otherwise reject the commensurability of different values like liberty and security can be criticised on the grounds that they don’t take these trade offs seriously.
But if you want to take trade offs seriously, then I don’t necessarily think you should be a utilitarian. To explain why, I need to talk about Isaiah Berlin’s essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. In the essay, Berlin distinguished two different ways of thinking about liberty: negative liberty and positive liberty. Negative liberty is something like legal freedom from government interference. You are free, in the negative sense, to obtain groceries from a supermarket if the state doesn’t prevent you from doing so.
Berlin defines positive liberty in a few different ways. One kind of positive liberty can be thought of as real, effective liberty as opposed to merely formal liberty. You might have the negative freedom to buy groceries, but that’s no good to you if you can’t afford them. If you can’t legally obtain your groceries because you can’t afford to pay for them, then in some sense you don’t genuinely have the freedom to get groceries.
Another notion of positive liberty that Berlin discusses can be described as self-mastery or the capacity to determine one’s own destiny unencumbered by irrational desires. Liberty isn’t about getting whatever you think you want, it’s about getting what your ideal self, your true self would want. Berlin felt that both notions of positive liberty were dangerous, because he believed that identifying these things with liberty makes it easy to paper over genuine trade offs between liberty and other values.
During the Covid pandemic, many states imposed lockdowns and other restrictions on people’s freedom of movement. Someone like Berlin might say that this involves trade offs between liberty and public health, whereas someone inclined towards a positive conception of liberty might say that these restrictions were liberty-enhancing. Berlin believed that the latter description would be susceptible to abuse by authoritarian leaders. Restricting liberty in the name of safety is fine, but it is dangerous to claim that it is actually liberty-enhancing because the government is giving you what your true self would want.
Berlin’s broader point is that it’s a mistake to conflate all valuable things. Liberty, equality, security and self-actualisation might all be good, but they are not the same thing. One should take trade offs between these things seriously, rather than thinking that such trade offs do not exist. But it may also be prudent to avoid subsuming all of these values under a single banner as the utilitarian does with well-being.
While utilitarians believe that all value is ultimately reducible to well-being, value pluralists believe that there exist many intrinsically valuable properties like justice, knowledge, beauty, liberty and ecological diversity. These values are not viewed as reducible to each other or to one ultimate value. When we think about housing, for example, we don’t evaluate different policy ideas purely on whether they maximise well-being. Obviously well-being is of utmost importance, but we also consider things like sustainability, fairness and community too.
Pluralism can also explain how one might rationally regret making the right moral choice. Some of the trade offs that we make involve genuine value conflicts and so we can feel bad about losing or diminishing one thing to obtain another, even if we’re making the right choice. Whereas if we’re only making instrumental trade offs, as the utilitarian suggests, it is harder to see how such regret could be rational.
One might worry that we can’t make trade offs without reference to one ultimate, fundamental value. The utilitarian knows that we should trade some freedom for more security specifically when it maximises well-being, whereas the pluralist does not have the same yardstick available to them. But this does not mean that plural values must be incommensurable. As James Griffin notes, “it does not follow from there being no super value that there is no super scale". An intuitive super scale for those involved in policy discussions would be Brian Hedden and Daniel Muñoz’s modified Pareto principle: “If A is better than B along some dimension [of value] and at least as good along all others, then A is overall better than B.”. One could also consider a less stringent principle like the Kaldor-Hicks criterion.
There are ways out for the utilitarian, like adopting an ‘objective-list’ account of well-being or using Pareto to give a ‘neutral’ account of well-being. But at the very least, I think we have good reasons to acknowledge trade offs between plural values instead of treating all trade offs as purely instrumental.