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Show Chapter III. The Utility-Maximizing Model of Rationality: Informal Interpretations In Chapter II I examined the motivational model of the Humean conception of the self, the belief-desire model. In this and the following chapter, I examine its structural model, the utility-maximizing model of rationality, and try to make good on the promissory note issued in Chapter II. There I suggested that the revisionist view of desire as a theoretically ubiquitous explanatory entity rendered it vacuous - and, along with it, the utility-maximizing model of rationality within which desire is embedded as its sole conative element. Here and in Chapter IV I contend that in order to retain its status as a bona fide explanatory theory, utility theory also must abdicate its claim to universality. This conclusion follows, I claim, upon the Humean refusal to impose substantive constraints upon the final ends - or intrinsic preferences - the attainment of which constitute maximizing utility. Without such constraints, any behavior can be interpreted as utilitymaximizing because any final end can be understood as a source of utility, and hence any behavior can be rationalized through the ascription of such a final end to it. This makes the theory universal in its explanatory reach, all right, but also vacuous. Only by imposing such constraints can some ends - and therefore some behavior - be identified as irrational in its terms, i.e. not susceptible to interpretation as a case of maximizing utility. These constraints thus protect the theory from vacuity, but only by sacrificing its claim to universality. Some economists would question the need to demonstrate this. They take it to be obvious that this model of rationality is intended to ground a specifically economic theory of consumer behavior under free market conditions. They take it to be equally obvious that human beings do not act as free-market commodity consumers in all areas of their lives; and that the utility-maximization model therefore has a restricted scope of application. I agree with this view. But we have already seen in Chapter I how philosophy generally tends to seek outside the boundaries of its own discipline for scientific models that can be imported back into it and pressed into foundational service. In this regard, metaethics - particularly Humean metaethics - is no different. In subsequent chapters I scrutinize Nagel's, Gewirth's, Rawls's and Brandt's success at this; but they are only a few of the contemporary metaethicists who look to the Humean model of rationality for a scientifically validated foundation on which to erect a well-justified 1 normative moral theory. So in the present and the next chapter, I develop at 1 Among the many late twentieth century moral philosophers who have promoted this view are Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974); and |
