Page 21 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

UTILITARIANISM

which remains even half-committed to any notion of traditional cultural
value such as is typically sustained by the churches, the education
system, and so on. Thus, in practice, the Humean impasse recurs
indefinitely. And it does so, we should note, for reasons that are not
so much logical as sociological.
The logic of a consistently Benthamite position is impeded by a set
of obstructions which are sociological in a double sense: first, by
those practical social necessities which inhibit any respectable, middle-
class intelligentsia from siding with the pornographer against the pulpit;
and second, by the properly theoretical, but not in the philosopher’s
sense of the term strictly logical, objections which the discipline of
sociology itself raises against utilitarianism. The doyen of American
sociology, Talcott Parsons, summarized the central sociological case
against utilitarianism as early as 1937. Parsons observed that
utilitarianism could be considered a type of “action theory”, and
that, like all such theories, its basic units are the actor; the end towards
which the action is oriented; the situation in which the action takes
place; and the “normative orientation” of action, that is, the particular
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mode of relationship between the other elements in the action. The
peculiarity of the utilitarian schema, Parsons continued, is that it
tends, first, to ignore the relation of ends to each other or, when they
are so considered, “to lay emphasis on their diversity and lack of
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integration”; and second, to assume as the normative orientation of
the means—end relationship in the unit act, “an overwhelming stress
upon one particular type, which may be called the ‘rational norm of
efficiency’”. 34
In short, utilitarianism proceeds as if people’s goals were random,
and their ways of knowing the world, and so of identifying those
goals, essentially indistinguishable from those of rational-scientific
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knowledge. But in reality, human goals are not at all random: they
are very clearly structured, or patterned. In reality, human actors
know the world in ways other than that of positive science: their
goals are patterned as much by systems of religious, political, ethical
and aesthetic value as by any kind of cognitive knowledge, scientific
or otherwise. The theory of possessive individualism is thus revealed
as far less obviously grounded in social fact than Macpherson would
later suppose. And in classical European sociology, and more especially
in the work of Vilfredo Pareto and Emile Durkheim (but also in that
of Alfred Marshall, the utilitarian economist), there develops a growing

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