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incentive and assurance effects, which are so collectively valuable for
predominantly self-interested persons. If circumstances make it generally
advantageous for someone to deviate from the code and violate others rights,
for example, act utilitarianism per se must recommend the deviation.2
The external signs of all liberal rights and duties might conceivably vanish,
of course, if everybody developed the liberal character associated with the
implementation of an optimal code. More importantly, many familiar liberal
rights might be recognized as suboptimal, and thus vanish from the code of
conscience altogether, if everybody educated themselves to become rigidly fair
and impartial rather than biased, as they now tend to be, in favour of their own
particular interests. If a highly developed person would work hard and invest
wisely for the general advantage, with no assurance of anything beyond an
equal share of whatever fruits he and his fellows jointly produced, for example,
private ownership of productive resources would not need to be recognized by
an ideal utilitarian code.
But, whatever the nature of the other rights in an ideal utilitarian society,
one right must remain optimal from Mill s perspective, namely, the right to
liberty of purely self-regarding conduct. As he makes clear in the Liberty (II.26
7, III.6, 11, pp. 247 8, 265, 267), highly developed humans, unlike gods or
saints, will need at least that core of liberty to maintain (as well as to develop)
their admirable capacities, including their capacities to remain rigidly impartial
when framing and complying with rules of other-regarding conduct (where
harm to others is implicated). It is wrong to think that the need for complete
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GENERAL I SSUES
liberty of discussion and personal lifestyle will disappear as progress unfolds
(II.31 3, III.18 19, pp. 250 2, 274 5; see, also, Chapter 8 below, second
section). Thus, an ideal Millian utilitarian code will continue to distribute and
sanction such rights to liberty, even if private property and other familiar
liberal rights tied to our particularistic inclinations vanish from the code. Those
who develop the characters required to act invariably in accord with the code
will develop a due balance between the moral disposition to follow reasonable
and impartial rules of other-regarding behaviour, and the Pagan drive to choose
as one pleases among purely self-regarding acts that pose no (risk of) harm to
others.
Against the pluralistic objection
Turning to the pluralistic objection to liberal utilitarianism, it is doubtless true
that we cannot conceive of an ideal morality, if by an ideal morality we mean
one in which all bad luck has been eradicated and each and every human virtue
flourishes to its fullest extent, never coming into conflict with the others. But
it remains an open question whether we can conceive of an ideal utilitarian
morality, in which the need to make reasonable compensation for bad luck is
recognized and, more generally, a compromise or balance is struck between
competing virtues and goods (such as security, subsistence, abundance, equality,
liberty and individuality) to maximize the general happiness. In this regard,
given that rights to absolute liberty of self-regarding conduct are indispensable
means to, as well as constituent elements of, an ideal liberal utilitarian morality,
it is palpably absurd to associate Mill s doctrine with the danger of authoritarian
repression.
As for the rich information about personal welfares required for
utilitarianism to work, modern utilitarians have proposed methods of measuring
cardinal welfare (i.e., how much welfare a person gains or loses between any
options) and of making interpersonal comparisons of welfare (see, e.g., Harsanyi,
1992). Even if those particular methods are not flawless, more argument is
required to explain why they are not sufficient for practical purposes, given the
alternatives. The naked assertion that such rich information is inconceivable in
principle has little if anything to recommend it.
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LI BERAL UTI LI TARI ANI SM
Yet it is worth recalling that Mill, like Bentham, makes no reference to a
mechanical procedure for inferring the general happiness from any given set of
personal happinesses. Unlike moderns, he apparently conceives of the public
good in terms of an ideal liberal code of rules, discernable independently of
aggregation procedures even if it can never gain widespread acceptance until
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