Who's Looking Out for You?

So Bill O'Reilly says a lot of things, many of them stupid. Some people take him seriously, but for the most part you know what you're getting: the over-confident assertions of a blowhard.

The problem is that some idiots, though they have smaller audiences, are taken way more seriously. The example that motivated this post is Francis Fukuyama, who wrote The End of History and the Last Man. I haven't read that book, but its title should give you an idea what a clown this guy is. Still, you might say, his point surely wasn't that history has realy ended. That would be too stupid. He must have a more subtle point.

Don't be so sure. Consider this gem of a paragraph, from a dialogue on Slate in which Fukuyama participated (note that this was a written dialogue, so this was not off the cuff):

You say that you are a utilitarian, which generally means that the good amounts to maximizing happiness, health, economic well-being, or some other readily measurable good desired by human beings. But human beings pursue incommensurable forms of happiness: Some, like the CEOs recently in the news, seek to do it by making hundreds of millions at the expense of shareholders and employees, while others, like the firemen who ran up the stairs of the World Trade Center—or Mother Teresa, for that matter—do it out of service to others. I presume you wouldn't say that you were indifferent to the virtue displayed by the fireman or Mother Teresa, even if the CEO had a "happier" life. But if you aren't indifferent, it means that you believe that there are moral goods in some way divorced from the subjectively experienced sense of happiness.

Where to start. The problem is that Fukuyama could mean many things, none of which makes any sense.

1. He could be confusing utilitarianism with hedonism. Utilitarians want to maximize overall happiness, hedonists want to maximize their own happiness. His example demonstrates this confusion, because he doesn't see why a utilitarian would praise Mother Theresa but not a greedy CEO. Aren't they both maximizing their own happiness? Mightn't the CEO actually be happier? Needless to say, it's deeply disturbing if Fukuyama doesn't know what utilitarianism is.

2. He could be asking what utilitarians seek to maximize. This is a fair point, and this is where I thought he was going at the beginning of his paragraph. His example only obscures his point, though. Properly speaking his question is whether, other things being equal, we should value happiness from wealth the same as happiness from service to others. He goes out of his way, though, to make other things not equal. It's like asking, "Which do you prefer, short doctors or tall rapists?" Whatever your answer, it won't say much about your height preferences.

Now consider the way he ends the paragraph: " if you aren't indifferent, it means that you believe that there are moral goods in some way divorced from the subjectively experienced sense of happiness." This is flatly wrong; I might prefer Mother Theresa's virtue to the CEO's treachery because on balance her life created more happiness than the CEO's. This could be true even though the CEO experienced more happiness than Mother Theresa.

So there are really only two possibilities. One is that Fukuyama doesn't understand the difference between utilitarianism and hedonism. The other is that he hopes his readers don't know the difference, and he thinks he can confuse them with a tendentious example. Francis Fukuyama doesn't have a show on Fox News, but he does have a seat on the President's Council on Bioethics. The question is why.