In his own words – David Braybrooke’s reflections on his major academic contributions
(2012).
[In June and October of 2012, David Braybrooke sent out a couple of emails in which he
reflects on key aspects of his academic achievements. These messages went to his
children and a few colleagues and friends. Because they provide such an excellent
summary of his significant accomplishments, I believe they should be shared more
widely. I have edited them lightly to remove redundancy and, occasionally, to add clarity.
When my own voice intrudes, it does so in italics. Othewise, the words are David’s own.
– Susan Sherwin]
A lucky person who has had an intellectual career will be given time at the end of it to
reflect on what it has accomplished. I think I could claim contributions to the
understanding among other things of rules, rights, needs, work, Marxism as well as
utilitarianism, but in this little piece I concentrate on what I have achieved in my
contribution to utilitarianism.
A month or so ago [May 2012], Paul Woodruff, a colleague in the University of Texas at
Austin philosophy department, arranged for me to discuss my views on utilitarianism at
lunch with him and four graduate students in philosophy. On this return to the subject, I
came closer than ever before to understanding the full significance and importance of my
contribution, which in principle brought to an end the centuries old scandal, of treating
utilitarianism on the wrong track (the felicific calculus), ignoring the right track (the
census-notion) and in doing these things brought into being a clear triumph for the
ordinary-language approach to philosophy. It is too late for me to mount a professional
campaign to establish these facts, but I would like my children and some of my most
cherished students and colleagues to know and appreciate them. I give a broad-brushed
account.
My contribution here is an elaboration of what the Principle of Utility demands, namely,
that policies should promote both having the greatest number happy and having them as
happy as could be, and what this means as a criterion for choosing policies. I have,
distinctively among philosophers, shown that the notion of a comparative census is both a
remedy for the standard objections to utilitarianism (which generally assume a calculus
rather than the census) and a guide to a basic form of resolving disputes about choosing
policies. Both applications entail repeatedly using the census-notion to make the relevant
comparisons.
I first began studying the census-notion in 1952-53, while I was at Oxford writing my
doctoral dissertation for Cornell. A third of the dissertation was devoted to the censusnotion and the comparisons that it invites. Something like a third of my published work
over the ensuing 60 years has treated the census-notion one way or another. Each time
that I have returned, I have found something new to notice and say. If what I have said
has been taken up and appreciated less and less widely than I might have expected, and I
think the notion deserves, I would confess that it has taken me myself 60 years, indeed,
until the last several weeks, to understand – to appreciate fully - the power of the idea.
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Utilitarianism has been at least until very lately a prominent theme in anglophone ethical
theory – one would say “a paramount theme” were it not accompanied by so many
objections – a crippled theme committed to a hopeless criterion, supplied by the felicific
calculus. The objections have got most of the attention, generally under the assumption
that one is going to use some sort of calculus and (an unnoticed implication) leave out of
account the census-notion and the comparisons that it invites.
There always was an alternative to the calculus, neglected by Bentham and his successors
because they never asked the ordinary language philosophy question, “What is the form
for settling issues about group happiness?” The answer for happiness as it is for health,
housing, citizenship, all sorts of issues, is the form of a comparative census.
Impasse or Guide to Debate? An illustration of the census-notion.
Happy
A
30
B
50
In-between
50
20
Unhappy
20
30
[I understand this brief, rather cryptic, illustration of the census-notion, to be read as
follows:
Imagine a society of 100 people facing a choice between two policy options. Option A
would result in 30 happy people, 50 in-between, and 20 unhappy; option B would result
in 50 happy people, 20 in-between and 30 unhappy. The felicific calculus would have us
choose the second option since it results in more happy people but the census notion
would be concerned about larger number of people in the unhappy category under this
option. David has us focus on the number of people in the lowest categories, not their
aggegate levels of utility, and he reminds us that there will be further opportunities to
raise people even higher.]
Is the group happier in the second instance? Should the census results be taken as final?
That is what people who disregard the census-notion once they have been brought to
confront it tend to do. But what they are looking for, inappropriately in general, is a once
for all solution. Instead of a stationary tableau, they might look for momentary guidance
in a transformational process. Then they might see that the census-notion is a guide to the
standard form of debate over policies, a guide even though in application the form as well
as content is variable.
It seems to me that one of the biggest scandals in modern philosophy is that for over two
centuries the discussion of utilitarianism has been on the wrong track, asking what is to
be made of a utilitarianism associated with a calculus of pleasure and pain, a calculus
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formulated as a suggestion by Bentham, but never established in an acceptable form, and
in any case never used in real applications..
The right track, with the census-notion, has to deal with the all too frequent possibility of
mixed results, where a promising policy will both benefit some people and take away
benefits from others. This should not be regarded as an embarrassment (as for a long time
I did myself), but as a sign that the census approach rests on an ubiquitous pattern of
dispute over policies. It makes fundamental points about how one moves from one social
policy to an improved one. Society must keep going to reach policies that transcend
objections.
Along the way to appreciating this fundamental and scandalously ignored role, the
census-notion can be used to dissolve commonplace objections to utilitarianism.
I cite as a leading example the objection that accords some conclusiveness to Edgeworth's
observation that the greatest happiness can on some occasions pull away from the
happiness of the greatest number. (Francis Y. Edgeworth was a leading economist at
Oxford at the end of the 19th C.)
This is not conclusive at all: It shows how the criterion of the greatest happiness of the
greatest number exhibits the basic form of public discussion of policies affecting any
selected group. For it invites correction in a way that vindicates the criterion. Given the
supersession of the standard received static (stationary tableau) perspective, it makes
dynamic (transformational) sense of evaluating rival policies. Thus, if the dynamic view
is taken into account, the slogan turns out to be subtler and more powerful than is
commonly realized. One changes policies to move a greater proportion of people into
higher categories from lower ones and keeps going while there is still a chance of
increasing proportions. The greatest happiness is obtained by moving upward; but this
also moves toward the greatest number as the proportion of happy people increases.
I would amplify, pointing out that if you asked anyone who had not been overtaken by
the felicific calculus how he or she would compare two groups in respect to their
happiness, health, adequate housing, educational achievement, they would surely begin
by counting heads and comparing the proportional numbers that resulted. They would not
resort to the calculus; nor could they, since it has never worked out in a convincing way,
producing reliable interpersonally comparable scores that are also congenially intelligible
to ordinary voters. Even if it had been, it would not take precedence in the answer to your
question. Austin's rule, find out what ordinary-language says before you turn to anything
more elaborate and precious, couldn't be more strongly vindicated.
[That is why] The shift to the census-notion, away from scandal, is a triumph for the
approach of ordinary-language philosophy.
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PHILOSOPHICAL WORK NOT FOCUSED ON UTILITARIANISM
My work on the concept of needs is easily allied with the work on utilitarianism, but it is
independent to the extent that utilitarianism could rest on other concepts (happiness,
personal preferences) and the concept of needs calls for attention and analysis regardless
of affiliation with utilitarianism. My work, I would claim, clarifies the relation between
basic needs (what I call “course-of-life needs”) and the multiplicity of adventitious needs.
My work, with this clarification, also makes clear the way in which some needs take
moral precedence over mere preferences (commonly distinguished as “wants”).
Rules: Contemporary analytical philosophy has continually invoked the concept of rules,
but until I turned my attention to it has rarely if ever considered what the concept
amounts to. One philosopher of my acquaintance raised the question with me “Why
should we want to have a non-circular definition of rules?” I have never encountered a
more paradoxical objection. It is true, as the example of St Thomas shows, that
illuminating work can be done with a definition of rules that is circular. (St Thomas says
that a rule is an ordinance with certain special features, but that leaves a kernel of the
concept untreated.) My own work culminates finally in the book jointly authored by me
with Peter Schotch and Bryson Brown (Logic on the Track of Social Change), where a
logic of rules specially designed by Peter Schotch elaborates a non-circular definition,
which rests on the notion of blocking an action, which can be defined and illustrated
without referring to rules. The book also ranks as my central contribution to the
philosophy of history.
My work on social contract theory consists mainly of critical commentary on David
Gauthier's work, though technically one could add my commentary on the work of
Rawls, whom I don't think of in my personal and spontaneous view of him as a social
contract theorist, though he is prominently and correctly cited as one. However, apart
from the commentary on Gauthier, Rawls, and others, I do in the article on ants and
grasshoppers, show how an approach to a contract through unequal agents, with different
bases for commitment, can work to convincing results.
The book Logic on the Track of Social Change, I say, is the culmination of my work on
the philosophy of history, which is also illustrated by my work on Marxist theory. I take
Marx to be concerned with social systems defined by systems of rules, and changes from
one system to another. I follow Marx in this approach, though with a more studied
concept of rules; and follow Marx, too, in my treatment of ideology (to be found in
definitive form in my article with that title in the first edition of the Encyclopedia of
Philosophy). My contributions – additions – to Marxist theory, as distinguished from
expositions however insightful lie in the article on the alienation of labor and in the
position (to be found in later writings) that Marx's chief teaching lies in the theory that
capitalism has the effect of accelerating economic growth but that in respect to
employment the effect is only temporary, realized in boom periods that are becoming
shorter and shorter, with stagnation in-between. If this is right then both Republicans and
Democrats are mistaken in their faith that the great capitalist economies have full
regenerative power. Instead of going back to Keynes, we need to go back to Marx.
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Besides writing on Marx and writing inspired by his work, I have done some other things
that fit into what was the orthodox view when I began my career of what political
philosophers were expected to be doing, namely, write comments on and interpretations
of standard authors in the history of political philosophy. Marx was not in the orthodox
view a fully standard author, but there are grounds for treating him as such comparable to
the grounds for writing as I have also done on the teachings of Hobbes, Rousseau, and
Hume, most originally on the first two of these three. I treat them all as rigorous thinkers,
with things to say that fit into or enlarge the social choice theory of our own day.
What I have done in the philosophy of social science is maintain that it has a
characteristic branch occupied with the empirical study of social rules, of systems of such
rules, and of changes from system to system. These all fit into a three-branch view of
social science in which I elaborate a view based on a seminal article by Donald Moon and
Brian Fay. One branch conforms to the precepts of natural science; the second branch has
to do with rules, which are there regarded or should be regarded as empirical phenomena
open to empirical observation and systematizion. This was for a time a controversial
position, some writers wanting to treat social science as wholly different from natural
science. The third branch is critical social science (again treated by some writers as
wholly different from natural science) in some cases inspired by the natural science
approach and in some cases by the preoccupation with rules, in some cases (as with
Marx) inspired by a combination of the two.
In the philosophy of history I take a similar view, assuming that history when it tries to be
scientific at all is a three-branched social science.
Throughout an extraordinarily long career, I have written at least briefly on many other
topics including meta-ethics (the study of distinctive features of moral discourse), the
philosophy of law, causation. I think I have had something illuminating and useful to say
on all these things, but I don't regard them as the subjects of major contributions by me.
Still, taking them as a collection, they justify my claims to being a professional
philosopher, were there nothing else to consider. They also justify my university
appointments, in which keeping active in the field is crucial regardless of the originality
or importance of the contributions. It is not the results, but the activity above all in
teaching that ensures that a university appointment is valuable from the point of view of
social policy.
“Disjointed incrementalism:” Because this idea is the main theme of the book, A Strategy
of Decision, that I wrote jointly with C E (Ed) Lindblom, it has been assigned to me as
well as to Lindblom. I helped fill it out and bring it into relation with philosophical
doctrine, specifically utilitarianism, but the credit for it belongs wholly to Lindblom. In a
critical notice (published in the journal Ethics), I amplify in some respects Lindblom's
characterization of disjointed incrementalism and strengthen the defence of the view.
Philosophers have not taken it up as a contribution to philosophy and for nonphilosophers its view of policy discussion and policy-making has overshadowed its
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philosophical significance. Yet it mitigates the tendency in philosophy to make too much
of systematic completeness in the treatment of alternative policies.
[More information about David Braybrooke’s life, career, and research can be found the
book Engaged Philosophy: Essays in Honour of David Braybrooke, edited by Susan
Sherwin and Peter K. Schotch (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). See,
especially Chapter 1, Introduction: About David Braybrooke, by Susan Sherwin.]
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